77 Choreographic Proposals

PADM 9 (1) pp.
44–51 Intellect Limited 2013
International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media

Volume 9 Number 1
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Artist Pages. English language. doi: 10.1386/padm.9.1.44_1
Jeanine Durning
Independent dance artist
Elizabeth Waterhouse
Independent dance artist
77 choreographic proposals:
Documentation of the
evolving mobilization of the
term choreography
Keywords Abstract
score Emerging from our co-taught workshop, ‘Out-Score/In-Score’, at the Third German
Deborah Hay Dance Education Biennale 2012, this text re-presents our in-workshop, collective
William Forsythe questioning of what choreography is and what more choreography can be – offering
choreography a list of choreographic proposals as possibility. Rather than strive to fix the term
workshop ‘choreography’ or come to a consensus about the definition, in the workshop we
documentation engaged in a daily practice of responding to the question ‘What if choreography
practice is …?’. Over the course of the workshop, the anonymous handwritten responses
(from us and the participants) were collected and posted on the studio wall in an
ever-shifting landscape of the term choreography. This collection, referred to as the
‘wall documentation’, is transcribed and published here with the permission of the
authors.
44
77 choreographic proposals
Introduction 1. Motion Bank is a

four–year project
Derived from our experiences working with choreographers Deborah Hay and (2010–2013) of The
William Forsythe respectively, the ‘Out-Score/In-Score’ workshop engaged Forsythe Company
providing a broad
with how scored proposals (as scripts, maps and props) couple with chore- context for research
ographic direction (spoken, read, real-time and/or remembered) to gener- into choreographic
practice. The main
ate performance. The workshop was initiated by Scott deLahunta, director focus is on the creation
of Motion Bank,1 as a means to reflect upon recent work within the team’s of online digital scores
projects – Jeanine on the current project with Deborah Hay and Liz from in collaboration with
guest choreographers
Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing Reproduced/Dance Engaging Science. It (Deborah Hay, Jonathan
was intended both to look at the pedagogical potential of Motion Bank’s score Burrows and Matteo
work, as well as to support the practical research of choreography on which Fargion, Bebe Miller
and Thomas Hauert)
Motion Bank’s digital projects rests. to be made publicly
The theme of the Third German Dance Education Biennale, which available via the
Motion Bank website.
took place between March 6–12, 2012, at the Hochschule für Musik und
Darstellende Kunst, Frankfurt was cultural heritage in dance, focusing specifi-
cally on how documentation of dance generates forms of dance and body
knowledge. For us, this opened consideration of documentation as a social
practice: the interactive processes through which documentation is produced,
and the interactive processes through which products of documentation gener-
ate transfer of knowledge among people and over time. Central to the Biennale
was an array of six, parallel four-day workshops for students taught by practi-
tioners with previous alignment to concerns of scoring, publishing, oral history,
reinterpretation of historic repertoire and socially/culturally situated choreog-
raphy. Notably these workshops were all co-taught, producing pairings of
individuals that required real-time negotiation of collective teaching content.
Reinforcing the primary Biennale theme, the workshop leaders were encour-
aged to document their workshops. This was supported by a team of students
making parallel research via video documentation of the Biennale, and inter-
views pre-figuring an edited publication in which each workshop would be
reframed as a text, presumably co-authored by the workshop leaders.
The task to plan documentation for a workshop that had yet to come into
existence was a challenge. How could we accurately document this workshop
while reflecting a perpetual mobilization of the process of scoring-practices?
It seemed necessary that the documentation attend to multiple paral-
lel developments: the individual participants’ embodied experiences and the
relevant questions that begin to emerge for them, as well as our own activ-
ity of researching through teaching. The exercise of real-time documentation,
infolding into working methods and the development of choreographic ideas,
is one of Motion Bank’s research interests. We both also have a personal prac-
tice of using writing to process and share our work. Within the context of
the Biennale, our hope was to use real-time/in-workshop writing as potential
documentation, and to distribute as much as possible the evolution of our
documentation in a practice of shared decision-making. We also wished to
underscore the negotiation that is necessary in documentation practice –
balancing factual endings of what we know, with opening up potential for
future thinking/creating.
Workshop
The ‘Out-Score/In-Score’ workshop was structured in the format of a series.
We took turns leading episodes of score-based activities from our respective
lineages and then surrounded this process with shared writing and discussion.
45
Jeanine Durning | Elizabeth Waterhouse
Two specific pieces of repertoire were used as jumping-off points: Deborah

Hay’s score for the solo No Time to Fly and William Forsythe’s Sider. Both are
works that involve written or drawn scores. Both challenge the performers
to entrain specific modes of perception, reflection and attention. They also
present alternative routes to escape normative or habitual actions. The intent
was to facilitate a comparative practice that would allow the students, with
ourselves, to make connections, and perhaps develop questions, strategies
and/or methods based on those connections. Rather than transfer the reper-
toire as fixed material, the hope was to provide an experience to deepen the
students’ sense of the range and possibilities of choreographic and performa-
tive craft, and, in doing so, to support individual manifestations and further
outcomes reacting to these lines of working.
As teachers, we are interested in exposing our own thinking/questioning
processes. Through ongoing dialogue with the participants in this workshop,
we were hopefully reflecting our own critical enquiry as practitioners and
reflecting the creative practices of Bill Forsythe and Deborah Hay’s work: what
more can choreography do, what more can choreography be, what else can
choreography look like? By using questions as tools and developing proce-
dures to challenge physical/intellectual habits, there can hopefully be a paral-
lel process in how choreographic scores are produced and generated.
Initially during our preparation phase, the workshop content was framed
by a set of questions around scoring practice. These questions took different
forms. Some were comparative-questions geared to find differences/similari-
ties between Deborah and Bill’s score material. Others were how-questions
investigating the processes in which scores produce meaningful action and
performance. Also present were what-questions, questioning the methods
and terminology used to share understanding. In comparison, Deborah’s
work appears to open through the question ‘What if…?’, while Bill’s embraces
multiplicity through the questioning exclamation ‘Why not!’.
We found that the concept of scoring seemed inseparable from our under-
standing of performance and choreography. We asked:
When we speak of choreography, what are we speaking of: the process,

the outcome of a process, the score that is performed, the translation of
a score by the performer, or the performative event itself?
Recognizing the importance of developing a shared language between each

other and with the workshop participants, we made a ‘Glossary’ of terms –
an alphabetized list of words that we had been using when speaking about
this workshop. On the first day, we handed this list to the participants and
proposed that in the course of the workshop, we would develop a recurring
practice of investigating some, if not all, of this terminology. Rather than come
to a consensus on fixed definitions, we wished to mobilize them. We asked
ourselves: how can we continue to redefine, translate or mobilize these terms
in relationship to performance, as actions or a set of instructions?
Through the activities of our workshop, we wished to underline that
choreographic direction and language is about mobilizing the mind, mobiliz-
ing choices, mobilizing the body and not about fixing these. The challenge
became how to invent activities that would provide concentrated investiga-
tions of this potential, without reducing the workshop to reinstatement or
reproduction of the works No Time To Fly and Sider. Also important was to
support students within these new practices: to give them strong frames in
46
which to question their certainties in dance, which is to say, to create produc-

tive uncertainty.
Recognizing the value of limits and specificity, on the second day of the
workshop, we chose to focus on a single term on the list. It was on this day
that the students posed the inevitable question: what is choreography? As
opposed to attempting to answer that question, we opened it up into another
question: what else can choreography be?
What if… questions are central to Deborah Hay’s work, and were a
prominent part of the embodied investigation of No Time To Fly. Extending
that practice, we proposed to respond to the question: What if choreography
is…? in writing. In the end, the ‘wall documentation’ of 77 proposals for what
choreography can be were transcribed into a written text and circulated to the
participants via e-mail. The workshop participants have agreed to republish
their writings within the frame of this journal.
Wall Documentation of Choreographic Proposals

Authors: Anja Beier, Da-Soul Chung, Jeanine Durning, Lenah Flaig, Susanne
Grau, Marje-Leena Hirvonen, Stella Höttler, Nastia Ivanova, Sayo Kishinami,
Kim Tassia Kreipe, Yejin Kwon, Raymond Liew, Ellinor Ljungkvist, Sinja
Maucher, Ania Nowak, Roberta Petti, Xenia Plakhotnik, Julia Rodriguez,
Gabrune Sablinskaite, Stefanie Schwimmbeck, Agata Siniarska, Johanne
Timm, Alma Toaspern, Aida Tomazin, Alicia Varela, Sarah Waelchi, Annika
Wanger, Elizabeth Waterhouse.
What if choreography is…?
March 9, 2012
What if choreography is
pragmatic office work?
not starting where it is finally ending?
manipulation of spectator’s imagination of experiences?
a game with spectator’s imagination of experiences?
Reizüberflutung? Autorschaft? Auswahl? Denkanstöße? Vermittlung von
Bildern? Aufgaben? Arbeit von vielen Menschen? Experiment? Erst Kopf
dann Körpersache? Thema? Kampf? Prozess?
a movable picture?
a story?
elaborating possibilities?
emerging in a moment?
one way to train a dance?
just a different term for the word dance?
47
your own interpretation of movement in space and time?
another way of communication?
a way to score interpretation?
connected to the music?
a collection of architectural structures, or a fixed improvisation, or an
invention of rules, or a production with no expectation?
a translation of information?
a procedure, or a choice?
not what you see but what you feel?
repeated? Or changed by the dancer? Or different sides?
Or an interpretation of one self?
a communication practice on various levels and ways of expression?
an experiment between a question/problem and its creative
activation and testing?
the direct confrontation with an audience that frames
the work socially/politically?
sharing responsibility of creating perspectives?
a frame for time and/or space, tools, movements, and, etc.?
a collective framing that ushers action into the actual?
a dialogue between everybody and everything, that is involved (in it)?
a continuous moving space with no place to go?
the synonym of the words we use while working?
a malleable framework that can host the ongoing flow of multiple
perceptions and attentions of the performance?
undefinable?
a practice that one imitates in order to be surprised by the outcome?
March 10, 2012

a set of ideas?
48
a combination of choreographic objects?
a choice of different life status?
impossible to realize?
not about finding movement?
value of idea?
an event, which needs an audience to be fulfilled?
the perception of others experimenting in time and space with
what has been given by the work process?
an expression in arts for different points of view based on the same idea?
a body which is moving because of energies around?
trying to include too many elements in something that we’re not quite sure
what it is?
desperate?
an accumulation of conscious and unconscious choices?
time as an image?
a creative tool for transformable ideas?
about recording your habits?
when we don’t know what to do on the stage with our body?
March 11, 2012

existing in every moment in your life?
our interpretation of the realization of the performers’ imagination?
built up out of movement in thoughts?
only about notation and memory?
an inspiration of our own life?
a distribution?
the result of interpretations and decisions into the same time and space?
49
a field of the choreographer’s, dancer’s, and audience’s perceptions?

that, whatever happens to you, while you’re dancing?
What if choreography is destiny! Whatever you do or don’t,
somehow you know it before WHAT you do.
a path between dreamland and reality?
about not knowing, but moving the incertainty?
a state of mind?
me trying to figure out what choreography is and not taking it for granted?
the disorganization/play of embodied thoughts?
not always a special occasion?
your own way to find yourself and understand what is really important in
our dance life!
a choice?
a structure to let the audience enter in the performance?
a process of work?
Suggested citation
Durning, J. and Waterhouse, E. (2013), ‘77 choreographic proposals:
Documentation of the evolving mobilization of the term choreography’,
International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 9: 1, pp. 44–51,
doi: 10.1386/padm.9.1.44_1
Contributor details
Jeanine Durning is a dance artist from New York City. Her choreographies
have been presented throughout the United States and her recent solo
performance inging has been invited to theaters, museums, galleries and
studios in Berlin, Amsterdam, Leuven (BE), Minneapolis (MN) and New York
City. Durning has performed in several ensemble works of Deborah Hay
since 2005 and is currently involved in Hay’s work alongside, ‘Motion Bank’,
a choreographic research project of the Forsythe Company. Durning has a
regular teaching practice and has recently been guest faculty at HZT/Berlin,
SNDO/Amsterdam and Tisch/NYU.
Contact: 367 Union St. Apt 2, Brooklyn, NY 11231, USA.
E-mail: jeaninedurning@gmail.com
Elizabeth Waterhouse is a freelance artist based in Dresden, working

broadly in the fields of movement and performance. After receiving a B.A. in
Physics from Harvard University and an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State
University, Elizabeth was a member of The Forsythe Company from 2005 to
50
2012. In parallel to her research as a performer, Elizabeth was a consultant

to the interdisciplinary projects Synchronous Objects and Motion Bank/Dance
Engaging Science, publishing related texts in books and journals. As a drama-
turg and production assistant she developed Forsythe’s Sider (2011) and the
musiktheater production Josefine (2012) in Krefeld. A consultant to the peda-
gogical research team InnoLernenTanz at the Palucca School in Dresden in
2012, Elizabeth continues to teach regularly in Frankfurt/Dresden and to offer
workshops internationally. Her most recent creation Don’t Play! premiered at
the Schaubühne Lindenfels Leipzig in 2013.
Contact: Rothenburgerstr 33, 01099 Dresden, Germany.
E-mail: liz.waterhouse@gmail.com
Jeanine Durning and Elizabeth Waterhouse have asserted their right under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors
of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
51
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PADM 9 (1) pp.

44–51 Intellect Limited 2013

International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media

Introduction 1. Motion Bank is a

Two specific pieces of repertoire were used as jumping-off points: Deborah

When we speak of choreography, what are we speaking of: the process,

Recognizing the importance of developing a shared language between each

which to question their certainties in dance, which is to say, to create produc-

Wall Documentation of Choreographic Proposals

What if choreography is…?

March 10, 2012

March 11, 2012

a field of the choreographer’s, dancer’s, and audience’s perceptions?

Elizabeth Waterhouse is a freelance artist based in Dresden, working

2012. In parallel to her research as a performer, Elizabeth was a consultant

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