Awareness: Making-Present and the Re-Subjectivation of Time in Contemporary Dance
The project examines the epistemic dimension of body practices based on awareness, and their relations to aesthetics, organizational forms, and performance formats of contemporary dance. By inquiring into the intersections between artistic, therapeutic, sociopolitical and economic practices since the 1960s, it seeks to investigate what kind of images of the body dancers produce by specific forms of practices. This practices rely on evidence-production based on making-present.
The investigation departs from the discrepancy between the body as modeled by science, and the body as experienced by the subjects, a split that belongs to the quandaries of modern life. Bodywork based on awareness responds to this quandary with a re-subjectivation of body time. It aims at returning the power over time to the modern subject, allowing for a reappropriation of finite, fugitive life through an enhancement and a differentiation of attention.
Defined as a mode of making-present, which simultaneously channels and is being channeled, awareness becomes an instrument for the reappropriation of body time. In the field of contemporary dance, forms of exercise, training, and practice allow for such experiential explorations. In dance practice, in particular, subjective proper time does not manifest in terms of a primary self-relation, to be attributed to the subject; rather, the subjective property of time emerges from a shared awareness in the studio space. The project therefore analyzes dance performances that have been developed from body practice workshops. It will address the ideological aspects of a re-subjectivation of time, but also its aesthetic, social and political potential. The project thus aims to clarify the notion of the »proper« in »proper times«.