‘Why do you make dances?’: museums and other sites for interdisciplinary dance practice

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to answer the question ‘Why do you make dances?’ in museums and other sites. The study seeks to illuminate how interdisciplinary and sitebased work can constitute dialogical artistic practice. I argue that performances in museums and gallery spaces seek to give audiences particular experiences that can alter their understandings of art and the use and purpose of these sites. Bringing dance out of the black box of a theatre and putting into an environment where visual arts dominate shift its interpretation. Through case studies of work by Trisha Brown, Boris Charmatz, and of my own performance work, I discuss how making dances in non-theatre spaces can initiate dialogues about the purpose and potentiality of dance, by giving not only visual experiences, but corporeal ones that linger within the bodies of audience members. To contextualise this work, I present a brief history of interdisciplinary sitebased art in the twentieth century in the US and Europe, and discuss the potential of such art works for enabling ‘reterritorialization’ of a site proposed by Deleuze and Guattari. I illuminate how such choreographies discussed in this dissertation both ‘deterritorialize’ sites and art forms, challenge concepts about their conventional use and re-inscribe them with various meanings by inviting the audience to engage with participatory performances. I conclude by suggesting that these artists’ purpose in making dance is often motivated by an interest in generating conversations about corporeal experience and art-making, that reaches beyond disciplinary fields.