ABSTRACT
Today's contemporary dancer has inherited a heterogeneous dance world with multiple corporeal perspectives, needing to hybridise in order to successfully participate in its evolutionary progress. The need for current choreographic systems to contemplate the tension between the hereditary gestures of the past and the prominence of the dancer as an individuated and re-subjectified agent invites a necessary theoretical and practical challenge.
Motivated by a need to re-evaluate learned movement habits commonly found in today's contemporary dancing, this chapter proposes an empirical method to make a “new” contemporary dance that focuses on its dynamically evolving dancers as crucial co-negotiators of a dance-making process. The Body Logic Method (BLM), a novel choreographic methodology, encourages deliberate choreographic participation by using an approach to movement research that is cognitively grounded in focused attention. By questioning and challenging dancers' generation of movements borne out of various dance traditions and adapting the choreographic propositions according to the dancer's subjective “Body Logics,” BLM stimulates idiosyncratic creativity and personal responsibility through improvisation and (self-)exploration in a contemporary dance.
This chapter describes this method in the context of a three-week Arts and Sciences encounter of an interdisciplinary team of researchers (neuro-cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and performance studies researchers), three professional dancers, and a dance choreographer, where BLM, a graphic notation of a musical score, and virtual reality were used to elicit alternative choice-making possibilities within a contemporary dance-making research process.
