2023 The Moving Body, Identity, Non-Human Interations

The body is a tool that the dancer uses to perform. The live ‘presence’ of the body is the conventional basic requirement of the performance. However, the last decade of the 20th century saw a varied range of exploration and experimentation in the field of performance, theatre and dance. The main reason for this is the role computer technology has played in this regard. Choreographers and theatre practitioners across globe started to work with this new-found technological aid of “motion capture.” It remained an issue of unresolved debate among artists whether this became useful to the form or not. This essay will try to attempt in traversing the potency of motion capture technology keeping in mind both the acceptance and rejection of it in terms of it being a choreographic tool, the conceptualization of space, the tension and tussle between the choreographer present in the actual space versus the virtual bodies. It will also consider observations by scholars such as Peggy Phelan, Rebecca Schneider, and André Lepecki. This investigation will require two case studies — one, a very celebrated choreographed work by Bill T. Jones titled “Ghostcatching” (1990) and secondly, my own subjective experience of being present at a workshop on motion capture held at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in November 20221 — for exploring all that the technology has got to offer and what it could not.

Dance can be perceived and practiced as a significant tool of education. This paper explores moving body, or rather dancing body not merely as a form of entertainment enhancing the pleasure of the mind, but as a seminal vehicle for the dissemination of art and education connecting the individual to the socio-political and the environment in its pedagogic process. As a case study, it focuses on Tagore’s school in Santiniketan (founded in 1901, later to be part of the Visva- Bharati university) as an experimental space for his larger visions of using dance and creativity as bridging the gap between not only mind and body, verbal and nonverbal, but further translating his larger visions into practice of relating performances to everyday-life-practices, liberal arts to the sciences, the fine arts to the crafts, and India to the rest of the world. It also investigates how dance can restore human life from false rationalizations of the society by reconnecting it with the free-flowing rhythm of nature.

The Klauss Vianna Technique (KVT) is a Brazilian contemporary dance, and somatic education approach largely focused on improvisation. Central to the technique, as an important concept and topic of practice, is the notion of presence. In this paper, I will show how KVT works with presence, and the possible implications for dance practices and studies, as well as for everyday movement. I will do so based on my decades of experience with KVT as an artist, teacher, and scholar, as well as by establishing a conversation about how presence is formulated by different scholars, theories, and fields, such as performance studies, teoria corpomídia, and decolonial studies. KVT’s long gestation, stems from the lifetime work of Klauss Vianna (1928–1992), Angel Vianna (1928–), and their son Rainer Vianna (1958–1995) and reflects their practice that began in the early 1950s, meaning that it is enmeshed in Brazil’s recent history. The practice began by questioning the pedagogical imposition of classical ballet not only as a normative form but also in the ways it made Brazilian movement expression ultimately subservient to European models. As KVT continues to be transmitted and reconceived by diverse artists and educators in a country marked by colonial epistemologies, I argue that it can contribute to decoloniality in ways that go beyond its historical genesis. By understanding presence as an ongoing and collaborative practice that occurs by sharpening and shifting modes of attention, KVT allows a critical praxis. In doing so, by focusing attention on their present movements, they can reorient future ones. This text discusses what presence as praxis can contribute to practices of dissent. It also to contribute to the field of international dance studies by outlining aspects of this technique, which remains largely unknown outside of Brazil.