Abstract

Thought/ Action Improvisations

This practice is an ongoing investigation by European dancer and choreographer Frank van de Ven and Melbourne based performance maker and theorist Peter Snow into improvisation in performance and the embodiment of intercorporeality. For us Thought/ Action consists in articulating the intensities of experience in movement and words. To improvise in this way is to begin by attending in detail – to oneself, to one another, to the working environment, and to the many shifting relations between these interlacing modes of experience. It is for us an imaging of the in-between. Our points of departure have been the training/ performance practice Body Weather and the ideas of Deleuze. In both cases homage is paid to Artaud’s ‘Body Without Organs’. We have been working together since 1999 after meeting in Japan in 1991, and our first performances, Deleuze and 6 Vertebrae, were in the Central Australian Desert. We have since presented our work at FIRT in Amsterdam in 2002, and in performances in Melbourne, Sydney, Alice Springs, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels and Gent. A CD Rom of our latest performance, The City Library Thought/ Action Manual, will be released this year. We have also held professional workshops for artists alongside performances both in Australia and at the European School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. In Leeds we will present a workshop into the spoken and movement strategies of Thought/ Action, and an improvised performance of 20 minutes. We will also contextualise the work with a discussion of the practice. Theoretical issues include the ethics of a performing relation, which draws on the ideas of Levinas, and an aesthetics of improvising. An essay, ‘Performing All Over The Place: Thought/ Action Improvisations from Alice to Amsterdam’, will appear in the forthcoming book Contested Ground, ed. by Gay McAuley.

Dr Peter Snow, Director, Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Frank van de Ven, Body Weather Laboratory, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Frank van de Ven, formerly of Min Tanaka’s Mai Juku 1984-92, runs Body Weather Laboratory, Amsterdam, as a platform for training and performance. Since 1995 he has conducted with Milos Sejn (Academy of Fine Arts Prague) the interdisciplinary Bohemia Rosa Project, connecting body and landscape with art, geology and architecture. He has also worked with other dancers and theorists in extracting concrete strategies for dance from the theories of Deleuze and Guattari arising from the question ‘How to make yourself a Dancing Body Without Organs’.

Peter Snow’s practice as research has issued in new works and directed performances in Europe, Asia and Australia. Recent projects include performing in the Embrace project in Kolkata, and writing and directing a version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for Dresden, Far North Queensland and the Torres Strait. He has written research articles on performance making methodologies in the light of theoretical interests of such as Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead, and a PhD thesis on the training/ performance practice Body Weather.