Jana Unmüssig: Teaching choreography in MA choreography studies or: an attempt of WHAT ELSE HOW?

1.10.2023 0 Like 0 kommenttia

Teaching choreography in MA choreography studies or: an attempt of WHAT ELSE HOW?

Setting not necessarily a ground but an air, for allowing an elusive tonality that (tonality or air?) provides scents rather than clear directions. This is the porous frame I propose for the following minutes that you read this text where I ponder on teaching in MA Choreography, to activate and contribute to an eventual pedagogy of contemporary expanded choreography in the context of higher art education MA studies.

Anna Leon, theory curator at Tanzquartier Vienna and post-doc fellow at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna thinks expanded choreography in the following terms:

“(…), expanded choreography may be seen as an encapsulation of the contemporary choreographic field’s open-ness to re-definitions of choreography – what Bojana Cvejić has called ‘concept ouvert de chorégraphie [open concept of choreography]’ – not only widening already-existing notions but also asking what else choreography can do, what else it can work with, what else it may be. “ (Leon 2022, 23) And, Leon continues with “(…) choreography is better conceptualised as choreographies – not reducible to a singular meaning or practice but, rather, a network of historically-situated ones.” (Leon 2022, 26)

Choreography in the plural. Plurality  – thinking of openness as a crucial vector that describes the mechanisms of meaning making in choreography as a non-centralised network – allows shades that eventually dilute choreography or choreographies into the choreographic “trespassing into the discourses and disciplines of visual-sculptural-audial-philosophic practice” (Joy 2014, 1)

Choreography turns into a transient field, liquidising the idea of choreography as a solid matter. Leon also addresses the possibility of a what else: “what else choreography can do, what else it can work with, what else it may be.” (Leon 2022, 23)

Immanent to choreography as an open concept is a what else bearing potential to discover something not-yet-recognised. For the frame of this text, I propose to think the what else lingering at the edge of recognisability, or readability, at the margin of knowing.Through education artists-student can learn how to identify the edges, the limits of what they know already to enrich their artistic backpack.

MA level students are artists with professional experiences that for a broad range of reasons join a two-year degree program. They come together to explore, re vise, re think, re search their practice. Individually and with the help of the cohort, and teachers, they investigate and test margins, edges and limits of what they know so far.  They dedicate 2 years to the what else in relation to their existing practice.

How to facilitate students to recognise the what else? How to facilitate that students make a discovery? How to enable a research trajectory?

To enable artists-students to engage in a research trajectory they need to be exposed to the way I research in the very moment of teaching: Teaching research skills implicitly, I publish my researcherly mind through the embodied act of teaching practice. Central to that is listening and curiosity. Listening as a “gesture of attention” (LaBelle 2020, 8) reaches out to that which I notice. Listening I recognise and acknowledge that which I attend to and at the same time listening I expand the space of listening (Labelle 2020, 8). Both, listening and curiosity, are practices enmeshed in alterity which leads Tim Ingold to describe curiosity as a practice of care. (Ingold 2018)

The yielding towards the what else, that which is not known in its entirety, this thing other than the thing I have easy access to may be disclosed when practicing listening and being curious because they enable a sharpening and stretching of that which I sense I know;  towards murmurings of insights.

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LaBelle, Brandon. Acoustic Justice, Bloomsbury, 2020.

Leon, Anna. Expanded Choreographies – Choreographic Histories. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022.

Ingold, Tim. Art, Science and Research, https://wiki.aalto.fi/download/attachments/145123907/Ingold_OK.pdf (last accessed 28.9.2023)

Joy, Jenn. The Choreographic. Cambridge MIT 2014.