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PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Stewart: Nigel | UK

the chaining project

Nigel Stewart

Lancaster University, UK

 

Introduction

This 30 minute session includes (i) an expository conference paper, (ii) visual and other forms of documentation which explore alternative forms of writing and choreo-graphy, and (iii) time for discussion and review through chaired responses to (i) and (ii).

Knowledges

The Chaining Project is a PaR scheme which aims to discover a common ground between art, science and ecology literally by exploring a single plot of land through three very different practices in which “chaining” is a key concept:

  • Chain surveying – the practice of plotting an area of land through geometric structures that are measured with chains and tapes.
  • Choreutics – the practice of dancing harmonized spatiotemporal structures, or choreutic chains, as those chains of movement can be plotted through Labanotation.
  • Myofascial Integration – the practice of sensing the structures (meridians, chains, lines) of connective fascial tissue within which the bones float and the body is wrapped.

The project aims to develop new knowledges through the specific ways in which these three disciplines may interact.  By using site specific improvised dance as a preparation for chain surveying, the project sets a premium on the “prescientific” experiential, qualitative and embodied knowledge upon which, argues Husserl (1970), scientific fieldwork depends but seldom acknowledges.  Reciprocally, by transposing the spatiotemporal patterns identified through the geometric procedures of chain surveying to the trace- and shadow-forms of the dancing body, the project makes use of a “scientific” model as a means of returning us to, not obfuscating, the sphere of lived experience, and also shows us one way in which dance work can offer a living account of the world that science discovers.  And by understanding the spatiotemporal forms of the dancing body in terms of the subcutaneous body-wide web of tissue that enables and contains those forms, the project demonstrates how dance can link the invisible and internal biological structures of the body with visible and external visualizations of space and place. 

Meta-Practice

The Chaining Project hopes to illuminate, from a Husserlian and Merleau-Pontyean understanding of science and art, how scientific knowledge can enable dance to reflect on the pre-reflective bond between the ‘I’ who perceives and the world that is perceived, and, equally, how dance can “reactivate”, in “original ‘coincidence’“, that critical moment when geometric structure is first grasped within situated, equivocal, sensible fleshly experience but before a purely abstract and univocal arithmetization of space and time is elaborated.  In thus returning scientific reflection to “the original activity […], i.e. the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of its prescientific materials” (Husserl 1970: 366), The Chaining Project is concerned with and comments on a founding state of interdependency of knowledge and material practice in general.  In this sense, The Chaining Project is meta-practice-in-research. 

Reference

Husserl, Edmund (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern: Northwestern University Press.

Company Affiliation & Address

Nigel Stewart

Department of Theatre Studies

Lancaster University

Lancaster

LA1 4YW

Tel.: 01524 594152 (w)

Fax.: 01524 39021 (w)

E-mail: N.Stewart@Lancaster.ac.uk

Web: www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/theatre/staff/nstewart

 

 

 

 




    
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