The Persistence of Dance

Front matter

THE PERSISTENCE

OF DANCE

Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art

Part I. State of the Art

Chapter 1: Unassertive Persistence: Dance beyond Theater 3 1.1 Introduction 3 1.2 Intermedial Methods for Intermedial Practices 5 1.3 Revision and Specificity: Choreography as a Contemporary Art Medium 9 1.4 Scoping the Field: Across Theory and Practice 11

Case Study 1: Sarah Michelson—Choreography as Concept, Dancing as Material 18

Chapter 2: Intermedial Methodologies: Dance Composition and the Work of the Work 25 2.1 Introduction 25 2.2 Poetics as Method 27 2.3 Writing Dancing 29 2.4 The Limit Features of Dance’s Social Condition (Part 1) Mind-Body 32 Singularity/Collectivity 35 Presence/Participation 39 Process 43 Practice 44 Composition 45 Performance 46 2.5 Conclusion 47 viii - CONTENTS

Part Il. Dance and the Museum

Case Study 2: Meg Stuart and Bart De Baere— Choreography and/as Collaboration 51

Chapter 3: The Museum and Dance Since the 1990s 56 3.1 Introduction 56 3.2 The Resistance of Dance 58 3.3 Curation since the 20s: Revision, Appropriation, and Potential 61 3.4. Exhibiting Dance, Now and Then: Exclusions and Specificities 64 3.5 Conclusion 66

Case Study 3: Curation as Choreography— Copeland’s Choreographing Exhibitions (27) 70

Case Study 4: Activating Dancer Agency in the Gallery— Adrian Heathfield’s Ghost Telephone (2016) 76

Case Study 5: Artist-Led Events—Shelley Lasica and Zoe Theodore, To Do/To Make 80

Part Ill. Between the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Chapter 4: Between the Second- and Third-Wave Dance Avant-Garde 89 4.1 Introduction 89 4.2 Conceptual Dance and the Third-Wave Dance Avant-Garde 91 4.3 Continuity between Recent Experimental Dance and the Post-War Neo-Avant-Garde or Neo-Dada 95 4.4 Conclusion 98

Case Study 6: Boris Charmatz— Institutional Critique and Contemporary Dance Histories 100

Chapter 5: Choreography as Concept and Post-disciplinarity 112 5.1 Introduction 112 5.2 Dancing versus Choreography 113 5.3 Choreography as Concept 116 5.4 Conclusion 120

CONTENTS - ix

Part IV: Concept and Material Case Study 7: Adam Linder—Dance as a Contemporary Art Medium 125

Chapter 6: The Conceptual-Material Bind in Dance and Visual Art 135 6.1 Introduction 135 6.2 Conceptual Work in Dance and Visual Art 139 6.3 The Persistence of a Thing Called Dance 144 6.4 Conclusion 148

Chapter 7: The Limit Features of Dance’s Social Condition (Part 2) 150 7.1 Introduction 150 7.2 Breath 151 7.3 Weight 154 7.4 Tone 156 7.5 Movement 160 7.6 Force/Energy/Effort 163 7.7 Rhythm 164 7.8 Space-Time 166 7.9 Conclusion 167

Case Study 8: Shelley Lasica—Context and Process 168 Case Study 9: Maria Hassabi—Between Sensation and Its Display 176

Part V: Beyond Dancing in the Gallery Case Study 10: Agatha Gothe-Snape—Art as Gesture 191

Chapter 8: The Persistence of Dance at the Point of Its Disappearance 202 8.1 Introduction 202 8.2 The Material Genealogy of Dance 206 8.3 Post-Dance 210 8.4 Conclusion 215

Case Study 11: Latai Taumoepeau— Dancing Moana, Working with Urgency 218

Conclusion: Persistent Resistance 230

Notes 235

Index 341

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub. 12347133

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation on whose unceded land I work and live in Sydney, Australia. I pay my respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any First Nations readers of my book. “Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.”

I began work on this book and its companion, Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s-1970s (London: Routledge, 2022) in 2012, so The Persistence of Dance has been over 10 years in the making. I would first like to thank my family for their patience, support and love— Joe, Sunny and Billy Westbury. I couldn’t do the work I do without you. To mum, Maura Brannigan, and my siblings, Sonia, Kerrie, and Sean, your unconditional love is my anchor. Thank you also to my close friends who sustain me.

Thanks to my colleagues and friends who provided such important feedback on drafts of this book and its chapters. This includes my Writing Dancing group for our 13 years of creative collaboration and support, especially Julie-Anne Long, Justine Shih Pearson, Nikki Heywood, Cleo Mees, Rhiannon Newton, Bryoni Trezise, Nalina Wait, Amanda Card, Nuria Rodriguez Riestra, and Clare Grant; and Susan Best who has been so generous with feedback on this second volume. To my research colleagues on Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum—Lisa Catt, Rochelle Haley, Amita Kirpalani, Shelley Lasica, Louise Lawson, Hannah Mathews, Carolyn Murphy, Zoe Theodore, and Pip Wallis, —thank you for the collaborative work that has informed this book.A very special thanks to the artists who helped me think through their practice, particularly Lizzie Thomson and Matthew Day with whom I worked during the early stages of the project between 2012-2015 when I was still formulating an approach, and Lasica whose thinking and doing anchors so many of my key concepts and definitions. My enormous gratitude to the generous artists who agreed to xii - ACKNOWLEDGMENTS be interviewed for this book; Lasica, Maria Hassabi, Adam Linder, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Latai Taumoepeau, Zoe Theodore, Deanne Butterworth, and Jo Lloyd. Thanks to all the artists whose work I engage with and for the encouragement many of you extended to me. I thank Sarah Michelson, Jonathan Burrows, Philipp Gehmacher, Xavier Le Roy, and Boris Charmatz for the rich work that has fuelled this project. My fascination with your creative imagination and audacity sustained me over the years of writing, and I miss having you in my head already.

For practical help with manuscript preparation I thank Sara Haddad and Lizzie Thomson. Thanks to all the archive and library staff who have been so helpful, especially Anna Rutkowska at UNSW. This project was supported by several research grants through the School of Arts and Media, and publication support from the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, University of New South Wales, a Special Study Program sabbatical in 2016, and an Australian Research Council Grant for Experimental Humanities (2013-2016) shared with Stephen Muecke and Edward Scheer who were very generous with those funds. The Australian Research Council Grant for Precarious Movements (2021-2024) supported the final manuscript preparation. To my anonymous reviewers, the collegial service we do for one another is interpreted so widely. Thank you for the diligence and care you took with my work and the extended responses you crafted. Your generosity helped me write a better book.

PART I

State of the Art

The introductory section of The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art begins by defining its field of study. This work is distinct from contemporary dance presented on the stage that has its lineage in theater and classical ballet and is, rather, contemporary choreography where the central preoccupations and conditions correspond to those driving the broader contemporary arts: dance as a contemporary art medium. Such work has been exposed as both a crucial catalyst for innovation within broader aesthetic developments, and a distinct permutation of art categories such as the post-conceptual. This goes beyond superficial associations of dance and choreography with strategies such as the experience economy and participatory aesthetics that have been employed in the service of a reinvention of the museum. The Persistence of Dance addresses the question of what dance histories, practices, and knowledges bring to contemporary art in its broadest sense in the first decade of the new millennium. Chapter 1 introduces the project of the book. Key artists, theorists, terms, and methodologies are introduced, and the chapter ends with a survey of the book’s chapters. The introductory case study, Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer (2011) by American choreographer Sarah Michelson, exemplifies the work under discussion: a self-reflexive, durational choreography with telescopic range and disciplinary rigor. Chapter 2 outlines the methodology of attending to the poetics or the work of the work of dance where the case studies exemplify methods of experimental composition. Foundational dance principles and key choreographic concepts that draw on a dance lineage focused on the materiality of the body and its biological parameters are described: the mind-body, singularity/collectivity, presence/participation, process, practice, composition and performance. These add new analytical tools to the rich history of formal analysis within art theory, and through their inclusion within an intermedial context we can rediscover them in a new light. The analysis and definition of these terms are drawn from multiple sources on choreography across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries and scaffold the discussion of case studies across the book, articulating with the material elements of dance unpacked in Part IV: breath, weight, tone, movement, force/energy/effort, rhythm, and space-time.

Chapter 1 Dance beyond Theater

The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art seeks to understand a new field of creative work that has garnered attention from our major art institutions, changed the way that dance circulates in cultural economies, and become an exemplar of post-disciplinary art.! This work is distinct from contemporary dance presented on the stage that has its lineage in theater and classical ballet, and is, rather, choreographic works where the central preoccupations and conditions correspond to those driving the broader contemporary arts: dance as contemporary art medium.’ It is also distinguished from performance art, which is understood as an expansion of visual arts practitioners into theater and has been defined as a “genre of the visual arts”; the dance-based works under discussion here would be more accurately aligned with a different lineage—choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Trisha Brown who forged unprecedented intermedial modes of dance.’ Such work, currently exemplified in case studies by artists such as Sarah Michelson, Maria Hassabi, and Latai Taumoepeau, is neither subsumed into the logic of the visual arts from outside nor an invention from within, but figures within an inclusive understanding of contemporary art. Recent research has revealed the crucial role such work has played within broader aesthetic developments in the arts since the mid-twentieth century, and its position in the contemporary situation as a distinct permutation of art categories such as the post-conceptual and post-disciplinary. This history, and its trajectories into the present and future, have nothing to do with the superficial associations of dance and choreography with museum strategies of renewal such as the experience economy and participatory aesthetics that have railroaded more robust analysis of this important field.*

Among what some have described as a domination of dance and choreography within the recent performative turn in the museal sector, definitions, specificities, and careful framing have often been lacking.’ Various iterations of dance in the gallery have included adaptations of stage-based works for the new context, works made for proscenium theaters located in multi-arts centers (such as the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Centre Pompidou, Paris), new works responding to exhibitions and permanent collections, and public programs engaging visitors in the practice of dancing. This project seeks to refine definitions of this broader field by following artists’ self-determination and intentions. As Artforum editor David Velasco notes, there is a “dissonance between those who aspire to the museum or think inside its terms and those for whom it’s simply another horizontal ‘space’ to work in.”° In order to overcome broad generalizations and associated misrepresentations, The Persistence of Dance turns to key works and exhibitions amongst the broader performative turn, and relies on the commentary of the artists themselves, to unpack the specificities of this still emerging field. While the aforementioned activities have their own benefits and challenges, the focus will be on choreographic works that, to reiterate, share the preoccupations driving the field of contemporary art; they are presented as a part of that field, both inside and outside the major arts institutions.

Situating the current field in dialogue with preceding periods of intense dance-visual arts exchange is crucial to the mapping ambitions of The Persistence of Dance. A recent wave of literature has revised the narratives of the mid-century period through a focus on individual dance artists, such as the work of Carrie Lambert-Beatty on Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Morse on Forti, and Susan Rosenberg on Brown.’ This revision of the historical backstory to the current situation has been important in making sense of the new choreographic work—how it can be defined, characterized, contextualized, and analyzed in terms of its specific lineage back to the work of John Cage, Halprin, and Neo-Dada. In the following I refer to the second-wave dance avant-garde, which was centered in post-Merce Cunningham New York from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, and the third-wave dance avant-garde beginning in Europe in the early 1990s and continuing until the present in local occurrences. The deeply intermedial condition of dance since its emergence at the turn of the twentieth century, post-classical ballet, is beyond the scope of this work, but that historical backstory informs a resistance to arguing for innovation where there is often, in fact, a return.’ A central premise of this book and its companion, Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s-1970s (2022), on the earlier, second-wave avant-garde—that the interdisciplinary depends upon the disciplinary—acknowledges a delicate balance in the field between the corporeally focused findings of disciplinary leaders, and the special condition of dance as always already intermedial.°? The Persistence of Dance thus insists on a disciplinary identity for the art form historically, in response to the more recent expansion of choreography as a practice, object, metaphor, and concept.’® From Forti’s seminal work in Yoko Ono’s loft in the early 1960s, to Michelson’s disciplinary incursion in the Whitney Museum of American Art in the 2010s, the case studies here exemplify a sharpening of the medium-specificity of dance in the intermedial field of the contemporary arts where all arts are (apparently) equal, and discipline comes in the form of a rigorous, critical survey of the state of play. So while the approach in this book acknowledges that notions of post-discipline, a-discipline, indetermined, and generic art are all relevant to the field under discussion due to the significant role of dance in the intermedial revolution of 1960s North American experimentation, I ultimately plump for post-dance as a category within which to discuss the future of the still emerging field of dance as a contemporary art medium to retain hard-won and highly specific disciplinary knowledges and practices.

1.2 Intermedial Methods for Intermedial Practices

If Western dance in its interdisciplinary formulation was confronted mid-twentieth century by Forti et al., it re-emerged in the twenty-first century within a complex set of relations between, first, intensified and widespread experimental and intermedial/post-medium creative practices; second, a crisis in disciplinary terminology; and third, the visual arts’ turn to performance more generally, and dance specifically. These are the key developments that broadly frame the project of this book. The following thus centers its critical work on creative practices within the associated network of institutions, discourses, and traditions with which such developments interface: dance training, dance studies, dance studios/centers, museums of art, galleries, art theory, art criticism, historiographies, canons, contracts, literacies, ethics, writing, sculpture, theater, archives, capitalist economies, and curatorial practices. So transmedial practice and the accompanying inter- and intra-disciplinary scholarship have, as Australian art theorist Terry Smith declares, paved the way toward what I hope approximates “a genuinely contemporary art-historical” position that can hold all that is of relevance to the work of the work."

Curated exhibitions have set the terms for much of the recent framing of the dance-visual arts story, which is taking time to emerge in the critical and academic literature of artist-theorists, critics, and scholars. The post-2007 work of curators such as Sabine Breitwieser, Corinne Diserens, Eva Schmidt, Catherine Wood, Stephanie Rosenthal, Helen Molesworth, Carlos Basualdo and Erica F. Battle, Ana Janevski, Thomas J. Lax, Martha Joseph, and in Australia, Hannah Mathews, Lisa Havilah with Emma Saunders and Susan Gibb, and Zoe Theodore, is of interest to this project. Their exhibitions have brought to light the work of artists both historical and contemporary between, across, and among choreography and contemporary art. However, with its own rich history of analysis and practice, dance literacy within the visual arts context has been exposed as a blind spot. This has had repercussions regarding contemporary art historiographies, but also curatorial practices, associated presentation opportunities, and access to/for audiences, and is symptomatic of the power imbalance between the visual and performing arts. As Smith writes, contemporary art is “a trendsetting force within international high culture” and certainly trumps contemporary dance in terms of visibility, influence, and scales of economy.’? And as Tate Modern Director of Programme Catherine Wood points out, this suggests we pause and consider what dance has to gain in this new order. 1° The pressing question of the inclusion of dance in art collections and archives is driving points of tension between museum and choreographic processes that are underscored by issues of power and authority.'* Elsewhere I have described within the character of dance “an unassertiveness that is constitutional and productive, rather than negative, [which] allows the discipline to advance into territories that are undefined and thus still under-negotiation, in a persistent and tenacious way.”!* With dance becoming “the newest desirable art object,” agency and intention become central and need to be balanced with the openness of the form.'®

Institutional critique has always accompanied the development of dance as a contemporary art; the form has historically dealt with complexities around the fixity of the art object, documentation, commodification, and subjectivity, and has demonstrated a resistance to institutional spaces. Upon entering the museum or gallery, dance is forcing institutional change not only at the level of internal procedures for collection, conservation, and archiving, but the very architectural context of the museum as well as its ethical practices of care and stewardship. However, the important recent work within museum studies on the impact of performance and choreographic practices on curatorial, public programs, infrastructure, and conservation work is peripheral to what follows.!”

The Persistence of Dance centers the question of what kind of dance is appearing in galleries and museums across the turn of the twentieth century and why. This can only be understood in relation to both the discipline-specific and shared histories, practices, and knowledges across dance and the contemporary arts, which are revealed by attending to the work of the work. Such an approach is anchored by the material-conceptual bind that has framed developments since the 1960s. New understandings result from a turn to medium-specific dance elements such as breath, weight, tone, movement (qualities), force/energy, rhythm, and space-time, which supplement and sometimes replace visual arts elements such as line, figure, surface, volume, color, etc. Dance elements, compositional practices, and choreographic concepts offer much to the rich and historical field of formal analysis within art theory and update the toolkits available to match contemporary practices. In the eleven case studies in this book, dance tests its disciplinary terms through intermedial exchange, and the approach taken in what follows—which Smith might describe as part of the “historical materialist critique” of art—perhaps argues for some commonalities or “consistent dimensions” across these works at the very moment that contemporary art is often defined as “periodless,” “posthistorical,” and “anachronic.”'* Such a move is dependent on the genealogies established across this book which follow those set out in Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s-1970s.

An imperative for dance to reclaim its own language, which has appeared since the turn of the twenty-first century within both practice and commentary, follows a prior movement across the 1990s to shed dance of dance at the very moment it entered into a newly intense dialogue with the other arts. This reclaiming supports the disciplinary work in my approach and extends to general artistic principles such as labor, process, context, presence, concept, material, authorship, and subject, which also feature in dance and choreography. In the following case studies, such terms are fleshed out through an incorporation of how they persist in these new choreographic manifestations. Through such a method, aesthetic strategies and features that were developed in the second-wave dance avant-garde such as an interest in presence, an anti-representational mode, an emphasis on process over product, a critique of visuality and movement, and self-reflexivity, can be identified in the more recent work of artists such as Michelson, Meg Stuart, Boris Charmatz, Hassabi, Shelley Lasica, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Adam Linder, Taumoepeau, and Xavier Le Roy to argue for a continuity between the earlier period and the current third-wave dance avant-garde.'? Other artists who belong to this configuration would include Latifa Laabissi, Maria La Ribot, Alexandra Pirici, Trajal Harrell, Nadia Lauro, Senga Nengudi, Melati Suryodarmo, Jennifer Lacey, Ralph Lemon, Sara Wookey, Tino Sehgal, Pablo Bronstein, and Francois Chaignaud and Cecilia Bengolea, and a new generation including Yve Laris Cohen, Miriam Kongstad, Malik Nashad Sharpe, Ligia Lewis, Andros Zins-Browne, Isabel Lewis, Jimmy Robert, Mel O’Callaghan, Gerard & Kelly, Daina Ashbee, Eisa Jocson, Paul Maheke, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Jahra Wasasala, Tamara Cubas, River Lin, and Isaac Chong Wai. I begin with Michelson in Part I to draw out the key themes of this book and bring us closer to understanding the topography of this still emerging field of practice.

A focus on the practice of producing works of art, that is, composition, differentiates my approach from an interest in the archival impulse of the museal turn to performance, a separate and rich field of investigation that appears here only in the notion of the body-archive as a material, processual, and resistant feature of the discipline.*° Choosing this method of analysis has also led to a general (but not total) exclusion of philosophy and critical theory. This has constituted a discipline in itself and a way of working that is out of step with current popular methodologies.?! We have recently seen the most significant philosophical turn in dance studies since the work around Michel Foucault and the subjected body of the (ballet) dancer in the late 1980s to early 2000s.”* Monographs on the state of the art released in the last decade make substantial use of continental philosophy—particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari— including books by Jenn Joy, Petra Sabisch, André Lepecki, Bojana Cvejić, Ramsay Burt, and Derek McCormack.” This body of work in many ways constitutes a Deleuzian turn in dance studies. In counterpoint to this excellent work, in the following chapters I do not bring a toolkit of methodological apparatuses to my encounter with interdisciplinary creative practice (in dance studies typically philosophical lenses such as phenomenology or post-structuralism, but also anthropology, sociology, or musicology), but frameworks and concepts drawn from theories of composition, and utilizing specific terms for particular works that undertake singular compositional experiments.

1.3 Revision and Specificity: Choreography as a Contemporary Art Medium

Part of the task here is to reassess the use of terminologies such as avant-garde, intermedial, conceptual, material, as well as choreography, dance, and dancing, in light of claims made by, and on behalf of, a group of European choreographers working since the early 1990s. Geographic, economic, and cultural specificities are exposed as major players in the public profile of this group referred to as “conceptual,” a cohort of artists also closely associated with the engagement between dance and the art museum. An expansion of the field of dance as a contemporary art medium beyond this group contributes to decentralizing the critical debates that shape not only historiographies, but the kind of work being made. Paradigms from art history such as modern, post-modern, Minimalism, and conceptualism, which have often been applied to contemporary dance in misleading ways, are confronted by putting dance analysis into dialogue with art theory to arrive at a more representative account of the current state of affairs. Overall, the (relatively) new and international field of choreography as a contemporary art medium is considered in light of the ongoing contributions dance-based knowledges make to progressive art practices, including non-object-based or dematerialized art, and post-conceptual, post-disciplinary, and participatory practices. This lens incorporates the “prehistory of contemporary within modern art,” a project that dance has been largely excluded from but to which it can offer rich models of contemporaneity such as “the ontology of the present ...what it is to be in time.”**

Finally, the dance-gallery interface is a stubbornly white space. African- American choreographer Ralph Lemon is an important and high-profile spokesperson on this; he quips (good-humoredly) that Michelson’s work “is the whitest” work he’s seen.” He also describes the layers of minoring at play here when he notes that being a dancer in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) atrium (as opposed to its main galleries), was “about being in that body politic and that kind of ghetto” and “less about being black and more about being a dance person.””° Systemic racism within the relatively minor form of contemporary dance is writ large once you reach a sub-genre within it such as dance as a contemporary art medium where the endemic white privilege of “high” art weighs in. In Australia, important work by First Nations artists such as Latai Taumoepeau (Tongan-Australian), Vicki

Van Hout (Indigenous Australian), and Brian Fuata (Samoan-Australian) is emerging as some of the strongest in the field. And, internationally, artists have diversified from the narrow racial and socio-cultural profile of the North American second-wave to include Vera Mantero (Portuguese), Maria La Ribot (Spanish/Swiss), Maria Hassabi (Cypriot), Trajal Harrell (African-American), and Miguel Gutierrez (Colombian-American) who are highly visible and subject to rigorous critical attention. The latter’s “Does Abstraction Belong to White People?” is a powerful statement on “the politics of race in contemporary dance,” and joins work by Lemon that confronts the tensions between a predominantly conceptual, analytical field of contemporary dance, and the realities of race, community, politics, and culture that increasingly partner with the same.’ African-American scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz has also been increasingly active as both a commentator and curator specifically regarding the racial inequities in the field of dance as a contemporary art medium.”®

In Choreography, Visual Arts and Experimental Composition 1950s-19705, the historical background for the current work across dance and the gallery required attention to an influential group of artists made up of white, middle-class, educated, English-speaking Americans and Europeans. Their influence was ensured by privileges such as their democratic society, access to relevant and sometimes powerful cultural resources and organizations, international and national mobility, and the benefits of philanthropic traditions and government arts subsidies that supported national cultural priorities. Other artists highly relevant to the discussion of the field’s emergence, including Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica living and working in Brazil, and Cuban-American Ana Mendieta, have been written into this narrative by theorists such as Lepecki, and in curatorial work by Rosenthal and others. The important but unrealized project of Adriano Pedrosa, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Olivia Ardui, Histórias da Dança / Histories of Dance (2020), at Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand in Brazil, expands the historical field globally and the catalogue and anthology are manuals for future revisions.*? Important essays by Lepecki and DeFrantz cogently set out the terms for a curatorial way forward that acknowledges the legacy of “neoliberal imperial colonialism” inherent to current systems of curatorial care, inclusivity, and institutional framing, and seeks a different apparatus that might encourage deeper change through attention to “sensation,” “microecologies,” and other “radical or antinormative potentialities.” 3°

One contribution this book makes to decentralizing the current field is the introduction of important case studies from the South Oceanic, including the work of Taumoepeau alongside other Australian artists of settler descent—Lasica, Linder, and Gothe-Snape. Writing from the geographical (if not socio-economic) periphery in Australia throws fresh light on the legacies of North American art as they continue to inform and shape local activities, while recognizing local knowledges and practices that have previously been excluded from our art historiographies. I work in Sydney, Australia on the land of the Gadigal and Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation. This locates my position as an Australian of Irish and Danish political exile, convict, and settler descent working within the Western tradition of contemporary art and dance, with awareness of the much deeper cultural traditions that bind music, dance, painting, sculpture, and site in the art of our Indigenous people. I pay my respects to elders past and present and extend those respects to all First Nations readers. I anticipate a growth in self-determined trajectories and opportunities for local First Nations choreographers engaging with choreographic and visual arts disciplines, processes and contexts already begun by artists such as Amrita Hepi, Van Hout, Tammi Gissell, Daniel Riley, and Dalisa Pigram. “Always Was, Always Will Be, Aboriginal Land.”

1.4 Scoping the Field: Across Theory and Practice

As noted previously, Michelson, as a UK-born, New York-based choreographer, is a key case study in this project and an analysis of her work, Devotion Study #1—The American Dancer (2012) follows as Case Study 1. Her works made for the gallery help map out some of the key arguments in this book. The central position of the conceptual here aligns with the broader shift in progressive art toward the conceptual and post-conceptual since the mid-twentieth century. The following notes the continuity between the emergence of this tendency in relation to Minimalism and Neo-Dada and current dance-gallery work in order to insist on a role for dance as a contemporary art medium within this development. So rather than see the recent museal turn to dance as a new migration or intermedial experiment, we can understand how it is the most recent expression of an historical exchange. Links such as those between Brown and Michelson are integral for understanding the recent work at the interface between dance and the visual arts, and this book bridges those two periods of experimentation in dance: the second-wave dance avant-garde and the third-wave dance avant-garde that began in Europe in the early 1990s and is still underway. Chapter 4 directly addresses continuities and innovations between the recent and earlier, mid-century period, building on the work of Cvejić, Lepecki, and Rudi Laermans who also address the legacy of conceptual art vis-a-vis the third-wave dance avant-garde. Avant-garde is understood here, following art theorist Peter Bürger, as a critique of the autonomy of art through a narrowing of the art-life divide, thus constituting an attack on established and stable (autonomous) forms of art.*! The Persistence of Dance also recognizes the complicity between originality and repetition in avant-garde art in step with art theorist Rosalind Krauss’s understanding of the term. The North American art theorist writes that “the actual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that ‘originality’ is a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence.”*?