Description
This presentation looks at what happens when dance enters the archaeological museum and asks whether its presence – and the presence of the body of the live female dancer - in this traditionally patrilineal space, might subvert received notions of how we view and understand ancient history and culture. The presentation will examine from an artist-researcher perspective the durational dance work, Likely Terpsichore? (Fragments), created for, and performed at, the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology (UK) in April 2018.This durational dance work emerged as a key part of a wider practice-as-research project probing shifting experiences of temporality when choreography ‘performs’ as museum exhibit. The project asked how we might consider the live dancing body in the archaeological museum as a counter-archive or, to use performance theorist Rebecca Schneider’s reworking of philosopher Michel Foucault’s term, as a site of ‘counter-memory’ (Schneider 2011: 105). How might dance’s presence in the museum allow an alternative visibility, a hyper-visibility, for those ancient female bodies previously rendered invisible - or, only partially visible - by history? Furthermore, how might the presence of the live female dancer in the museum allow certain buried female histories to surface and be ‘re-collected’, becoming - through performance - part of the museum’s collection (at least, temporarily)?
| Period | 19 Nov 2019 → 20 Nov 2019 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Arts and Science International Conference |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Nice, FranceShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |