Claire's Project Idea
My final project for this class has drastically shifted in the last 24 hours! I have been thinking about the relationship between tourism and dance, specifically the experience of the dancer’s movement pathways. I am primarily interested in the dynamic between location and movement pathway, and how this informs the dancers relationship to place.
I am equally interested in visual art as I am in dance, especially when the visual is the trace or evidence of previous movement in that space. Often visual art is translated to new locations and the imagined memory of the movement surrounding the piece is also in a way displaced. Graffiti is interesting in this way of visibility in its site-specificity. I have chosen to write this paper on the implied movement of graffiti. I have not decided if I will choose a specific graffiti artist to write about or if I will write about the following project.
1. Go to various locations with graffiti, and with movement trace the graffiti pathways. Use these movements as score to improvise in that space.
2. Not getting arrested… create either stencil or graffiti “markers” in a 2-3 block area. These points of reference created by movement afterwards would suggest movement as others travel through this pathway. This would be a “dancing tour.” The marks on the surface of the wall or ground would be reproductions of the sun’s pathway as it is seen through my closed-eye head movement. The sun’s abstract script would be burned into the retina as I dance at the site. Reproduced on a surface it becomes a map for the orientation of the eyes to the sun. This could either be wild frenetic dancing movement or more spatially aware of the specificity of the immediate surroundings. As I have just learned to make websites(!)- I would want to document the process and offer a map of where to do for the dancing tour. It would be for the discretion of the “touring dancer” to either trace the movement pathways with the body (like in the example #1 above), or use the graffiti as a map to the sun. In this choice there would be an immense amount of variation for many reasons, including season/time of day.
With these ideas I would like to work with place as palimpsest/ the habitual daily movement/ and movement that suggests an alternate orientation or …disorientation.