As the City Limits
“I am looking for the emerging vocabulary that connects ideas within dance-making (choreography) and building/city-making. I wonder if shared significances within dance and city making will offer less-explored approaches to inform the creative process within these practices. I hope by reaching beyond the isolating notion of ‘subject areas’ we might find shared interests of inquiry into the inter-connectedness of Place.”
Adesola Akinleye
Phase One: At the City Limits
I feel there is a great importance to creating spaces for the wordless conversation of dance: a conversation that is between body and environment. Dance offers a process of noticing being shaped by the material world as we interact with floor, air on skin, vibration of music/sound, other dancers and musicians.
As one interacts with environment it is not possible to have only a theoretical view, life becomes conceived of through the practicality of sensation and interaction. Sensation becomes the knowledge of Being-in-Place. This articulating and valuing the significance of where Self begins, or ends or is continuous in environment shares inquiry with colleagues in architecture, engineering, social sciences, and geography.”
Phase Two: Navigations
This second phase of the Fellowship looks more closely at ideas emerging from conversations, workshops and sharing events that took place during Phase One. In the first phase of the fellowship I explored the possible relationships between dance-choreography and different stages of the design and creation of Urban landscapes through conversation and dance exchange with people in architectural and engineering practices. These generated essays, choreography, images of choreography, and poems from which three threads have emerged: Chasing Stillness, Lingering in dwelling/Residing in wandering, and Temporality of Place: tempo reality of Place. (Link to film here) These threads express spheres of inquiry into the inter-connectedness of Being-in-Place.
Galvanized by my ongoing interest exploring the emerging languages for movement that connect to ideas shared across the collaboration of dance-making (choreography), to building/city-making (community) these threads have crystalized in Phase Two to an exploration of:
- The Art of infrastructure
- Stillness and silence (Wheness)
- Choreography as questioning the knowable
- How collaboration nurtures mutual changes in-relationship to subject based foundational knowledges.
The goal of this phase is to create specific works of text and choreography that are manifest explorations of these themes.
with Richard Sennett and Adesola Akinleye