Choreographic assemblages : an archaeology of movement and space

Abstract

Time and movement always played a vital role in architecture, and it also takes significance in my work. This interest leads me to the investigation of choreography and dance notation in relation to space. By using notation, choreographers develop a general structure to document the accommodation of music, movements and patterns of a dance composition. A dance composition is an aesthetic entity existing in the four dimensions of space-time. Different styles of dance have different degrees of concern for the spatiotemporal symmetry of the body movements and the manipulation of abstract patterns. With Labanotation, choreographers are able to reduce a four-dimensional manifold to two dimensions - compression of the dimensionality by quantization. Notation structures movement in space, and divides the spatial hierarchy in sequences inducing the notion of time. It orchestrates the movement of body and senses through space. In essence, notation establishes a relationship among architecture, space and time as an entity. It becomes a narrative or form of memory that offers "the heterotopic space various past, multiple presents ... diverse future." (Michel Foucault: Heterotopic Space) Henceforth, it leads architecture to the realm of poetry (unconscious imagery). Architecture transfigures itself into the theater of memory, a sheer presence within space. "After the visual recognition of forms (body), one's mind struggles and attempts to reconstruct the vel}' meaning of space." (Maxine Sheets: The Phenomenology of Dance) This fusion of meaningful and meaningless, significant and accidental reinforces one's spatial experience and intimacy with architecture. Architects have always sought ways to express the similar notions. The architecture of kinaesthetic (Labanotation) offers the opportunity to mend the rupture between the theorization of architecture and its actualization. It allows vast latitude of experimentation and makes possible to conceive a more corresponding architecture. This engagement would make architecture more relevant to the bodily movement and the conceptions of space and time. It is possible to understand buildings as a resultant of a discourse possessing a structured system of representation. In its materiality, it is also a means of combining and preserving perceptions arising from within dissimilar ontological conditions. The method of analysis entails an identification of the kinaesthetic order of typological spatial conditions through a built object, using a composite protocol of analysis (e.g. Labanotation). This descriptive order prescribes the very meaning of spatio-temporality, and an insidious investigation allows a critique of conventional unities of spatial representation.