PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Armstrong: Tom | UK

Abstract:  New Beauties

Presenter: Jennifer Jackson, Lecturer in Dance Studies UniS; J.Jackson@surrey.ac.uk

Co-presenter: Dr Tom Armstrong, Lecturer in Music UniS

New Beauties explores problems of creativity and choreography/composition within Western classical dance and music practices.  It assembles mature performers and choreographers/composers with expertise across professional and academic contexts (from University of Surrey and From Here to Maturity Dance Company) who share an interest in employing collaborative practice to develop knowledge within specific disciplines. The model of practice is a creative project, where practitioners use the Narcissus myth as a framework for interrogating situated practices and concepts to develop performance materials.  Their findings are disseminated in a studio presentation combining live performance text and video documentation.  Ways of knowing, embodied in the material developed, as ‘playing’ (performing) and in the methodologies for making work, are informed by practitioner experience and expertise.  Methodological and formal problems explored in the material are: how the expert dancer or musician moves from playing to making work; how mastery of the ‘instrument’ is in play in the creation of new work and what is the place of such expertise in improvisation and in creative practices; what are creative play and creative work/s in a specific context of expertise; what is beauty in Western classical music and dance and how are bodily histories and knowledges brought to its construction.

For the artist, ‘work’ and ‘play’ can signify different, and interrelated, practices. Creative compositional practices engage in ‘play’ to make ‘work’.  Practising dancers and musicians share the concept of ‘work’ to master the ability to ‘play’ the instrument (and in dance – to construct the body as instrument).   In classical disciplines developing expertise as a dancer or musician is often associated with ‘drilling’, seldom with nurturing creativity. However engaging with the rules of disciplined practice does not imply becoming ‘rule-bound’; according to the conscious competence learning model matrix (ii), a practitioner moves through the following stages in the acquisition of skill: unconscious incompetence - conscious incompetence - conscious competence - unconscious competence (www.businessballs.com). The collision of work and play in the context of composition AND performance practices, invites questions about the intersection of the spontaneous/unconscious with expertise/competence. Given a potential freedom of play through mastery of an instrument, what is the creative result of twinning the concepts of spontaneity and expertise when making work within established traditions of practice?

In the context of ballet and the body, beauty evokes an increasingly narrow concept of a lean youthful physique. The choice of beauty as focus by mature ballet based performers problematizes ‘ideals’ of beauty as associated with youth and one kind of body.  The Narcissus myth invites investigation of the relationships between image (surface and depth) and the self (conscious and unconscious) in the experience of creating the form of the dance and the dancer’s instrument – her body.  As a framework for artistic research, it suggests creative exploration of dance and music imagery, both aural and visual echo and a metaphor - for reflection on the process of making work and for playing/performing as a reflection of process.