City Research Online

Abstract

This research proposes ‘translation,’ as opposed to other appropriating strategies, as a theory and practice which invites the possibility of performative postproduction throughout the making, performing and attending of dance. Translation theory is proposed as a model for reading dance works as well as a choreographing tool for making postproduction works which use historical citation and/ or are hybrid choreographic projects between forms and mediums. In this thesis, translation theory is used to discuss Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Noces (1923) as a modernist choreographic work which renews notions of dance and movement through consideration of the project of the Russian avant-garde. Subsequently, translation theory forms the choreographic method through which I am able to translate Les Noces into Exercise: Les Noces (2017). Exercise: Les Noces is not just a historical project, and thus, it is not a reconstruction, revival or reworking of the original ballet. Exercise: Les Noces is not a gallery installation either which adapts a ballet work to a visual art platform. This thesis proposes Exercise: Les Noces as a ‘choreographic site’; as the site where different authorial voices, different temporalities, different mediums and texts are invited to co-exist in the tension between two extremes: their total presence and total absence and as such to negotiate and possibly change their form and meaning. Thus, translation is proposed as a transhistorical and interdisciplinary choreographic theory, method and practice which works towards the expansion of the mediums involved with a view to engaging them in a new cultural and historical milieu.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Departments:	Doctoral Theses

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