Jindeok, Park (2020) Perform/Doc/Dance: a practice as research project on the interplay between live documentation and dance improvisation. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Abstract

This research offers a new way of thinking about the interplay between documentation and dance improvisation for dance artists who are interested in choreographing and performing in an improvisory context. This aims to address documentation as a performance material that facilitates the instant and emergent qualities of dance improvisation. Methodologically, this project is framed by Nelson's Practice as Research model (2013). I problematize scholarship on the liveness of improvised dance performances from the 1960s that focus on the present experience through audience interaction, by applying Gallagher's discussion of Husserl's "temporal structure of consciousness" (2012). I critique this phenomenon, particularly investigating Hamilton's "instant composition" and Hay's "practice consciousness", as a limited way of revealing the significance of the complexities of time in improvised dance performance.¶My praxis charts new territory in documentation performance, extending Auslander's two documentation categories, "documentary" and "theatrical", by using Noe's theory of "present availability" (2012) to create a third category which I call Perform/Doc/Dance. To generate practical strategies for a new performance structure of dance improvisation with live documentation, I investigate the practices of selected dance and non-dance artists including Davies (2014 and 2017), Dimitriou (2016)., Graham (1974), and Campbell (2012-2013). My original contribution to dance improvisation scholarship lies in my use of four practical strategies - displaying visual documents, exposing the reconstruction of the past, transformation through a repetitive structure, and highlighting the act of documenting -, which are articulated through a critical analysis of three different versions of my own performance Trace Composition, which was presented at Collisions in 2014-2016. In doing so, I apply different theoretical frameworks : Franko's "reenactment"(2018) and Schneider's "performative repetition" (2012) to articulate the reconstruction of past, and Deluze's "differential presence" and "becoming" (2002) in order to address transformation as palimpsest.