Through dance, theatre and music we examine the philosophy that an idea or emotion expressed through performance holds a unique power for both audience and performer.
Occasionally, a novel direction of thought begins to blossom into a new academic field. That is happening right now with performance philosophy.
More than just the blunt analysis of theatrical performances using borrowed philosophical principles, this is performance as a new branch of philosophical enquiry in itself.
Dr Laura Cull, senior lecturer and director of postgraduate research in the School of Arts, is a prominent figure in the emergence of this field. She has co-founded a burgeoning performance-philosophy network and is collaborating with colleagues to organise a much-anticipated spring conference to help a research community to form.
The blurring of the lines between philosophy and performance has already happened in film philosophy, through movies such as The Matrix, The Truman Show and even Groundhog Day. Laura is approaching her research through the work of Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher whose thoughts on philosophies of the body, language, time and collaboration have obvious relevance for performance practitioners.
What is particularly exciting about Laura's work is that Deleuze rarely wrote specifically about performance, so she must extract and extrapolate what is relevant and useful. But her new insights are already helping her students to approach their rehearsals and performance from a more challenging and thoughtful angle.
Some themes and topics can be approached through direct and intimate forms of enquiry in order to get straight to the heart of the matter. Through practice-led research and performance, academics in the School of Arts can explore important questions in stimulating and creative ways.
One example of this is Jennifer Jackson's Dancing the Invisible, in which she was able to reflect on ageing and the role of older people in society through choreography, dance and public performance.
Creating a balletic piece on this theme allowed Jennifer to think about the ageing process, both as an individual and as a dancer. What could she and her project partners bring to the creative process as experienced and mature choreographers and dancers? What was Jennifer able to do physically as an older performer, and how could she challenge the limitations of the ageing body? How would the performance compare to preconceptions about older ballet dancers on stage, not least those that Jennifer herself used to have?
Dancing the Invisible was performed at the Ivy Arts Centre at the University of Surrey in 2012.
Dance is a performance art form, but also an avenue of academic research. The movement of a dancing body can be captured and described in video, pictures and words, but what is the best way of exploring and utilising the resulting records?
Founded in 1982, the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD) is one of several archive collections housed in the University of Surrey Library. The NRCD holds unique resources, with collections including those of companies, organisations and individuals (including the prominent movement theorist Rudolf Laban).
As a rich research resource, the collections have contributed to a number of subject-specific and interdisciplinary projects, including the Digital Dance Archives (DDA) website. Funded by the AHRC and developed by dance and computer-vision academics and archive professionals, the site enables users to view visual content from the archives, search across collections using both text and visual similarity searches, and also interact with the content through tagging, annotating videos and photographs, and creating and sharing virtual scrapbooks.
Through projects like these, we are taking the lead in e-developments for dance teaching and learning in the UK.
Movement is a fundamental condition of the human experience. To sense movement, or to feel ourselves in motion, is to connect with the universe's restless state. In one strand of his work, interdisciplinary cultural theorist and performance practitioner Dr Nicolas Salazar Sutil focuses on the inscription of movement in symbolic representation (as mathematics, for example), and also its representation through human bodies. He looks at movement within the cultural context of our technologised society, influenced by the revolutionary use of ‘vision in motion’ in historical avant-gardes such as cubism, futurism, constructivism and Bauhaus.
Using motion-tracking technology and time-lapse video, Nick is able to capture movement in real time to create beautiful, original, figurative visualisations of moving bodies that give extraordinary insight into our dynamic relationship with the space and temporalities in which we move.
Together with Professor Rachel Fensham of the University of Melbourne, Nick founded the MoVe (Movement Visualisation in e-Culture) independent research platform to support the development of novel methods in movement analysis and visualisation, and to experiment with inventive uses of motion-tracking technology in movement research and performance. He is also the founder of C8, a collaborative performance group that focuses on choreographing mathematical objects and spaces.
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