Here is where I’m going to pick up our conversation, from Alejandra’s email:
**more on the conceptual side, and possibly related to the previous topic, I’m impressed by Daghdha’s capacity to state views of what dance is or can be. It makes me think and feel my own inability, but also perhaps from an institutional or organizational perspective, to speak in definite terms or commit to language and traditions of thought the same way. This is to me an interesting and vulnerable spot**.
I consider what daghdha is doing in terms of talking about dance and choreography, in creating definitions, extremely important. choreographdotnet is in one regard part of that process of creating thought about dance. But it is key to understand that this thinking about dance, and articulation of that thinking which happens in dance presentations as well as in words, is less for consumption and cycling through the normal digestive organs of the dance world, the world body of dancers choreographers companies etc more importantly, these gestures reach out to other bodies of thought, stiff stagnant sciences or humanisms, thinkers who do not dance, in order to **get the whole system movedancing**, to get the state of excitation that we associate with dance and which promotes fluidity, mobility, grace, and an ability to GO WITH CHANGE
moving from suburban university campus into a beautifully renovated old church, in a graveyard, in the heart of the traditional citycentre of limerick, this is part of that attempt to get things moving, to collapse notions of art, community, thoughtful enquiry, education, and sacred space, onto one surface and one field of wildly differing, but absolutely conceptually related, dance choreographic research activities and initiatives.
what energises this process is a deep frustration within ourselves as artists at having to confine our activities inside the ‘ghetto’ of art, when all around is work that needs to be done on the canvas/dancefloor of REALITY. This is a state for emergency we are living in, these times. There is a major flaw in the way we humans are actually putting together our picture of the world, in the way we organise our perceptions. The mindset that has created the challenges we currently face is not the one that will overcome the challenge. The solution is or at least involves a complete reframing of the problem. We believe that for a start we can begin from the place of movement, change, aesthetics, radical subjectivity and its desire for dynamic interaction with other radical subjectivities ie from the place of **dance**, where mind and body are not separate, and there is an intuitive understanding of and trust in the body’s own ability to think for itself.
And the funny thing is, I’m not a “dancer” or a “choreographer’.. I’m a writer and a theatre experimentalist. An original thinker who got entangled with dance, and it works. Thinking about dance, dancing thought, is the way to start thinking about everything. Choreography as an aesthetics of change, choreography as a negotiation of how we organise our perceptions of reality and thereby reality itself, it makes sense, and I come across more and more writing from philosophers or dance academics that actually articulates a new way of thinking FULL STOP not thinking as categorisation of classes and hierarchies of objects and forces but THINKING AS MOVEMENT
