The archeology of "Street Dance" by Lucinda Childs

Julie Perrin (1, 2, 3)

1 IUF - Institut universitaire de France
2 MUSIDANSE - Esthétique, musicologie, danse et création musicale
3 Danse, geste et corporéité

This article will not judge the quality of the reenactment nor do I claim it to be the ultimate truth about the work. All reenactments bring with them the poetics of variation. I will, however, use the inconsistency that caused me such disappointment to reexamine more carefully the traces left by Street Dance. As part of my own research into site specific choreography, I wish to conduct a kind of dissection of Street Dance’s traces, to understand the existence of this work through its documentary material. Whilst the implications of site-specific choreography arise from the specific link between a work and a place, I will here study these documents from two angles. The first – important to dance research – concentrates on the nature of choreography and dance, questioning in more detail the way in which movement expresses a special relationship to place.The second angle concentrates on the place itself: what do the documents reveal about the place in which Street Dance takes place? We therefore have to reassess the images of the work as described by witnesses and historians, considering them from the unique perspective of a history of site specific choreography.

Mots clés: Architecture; Ordinary movement; Site specific dance

Domaines: Art et histoire de l'art; Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène

Julie Perrin. The archeology of "Street Dance" by Lucinda Childs. Danza e ricerca. Laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni, 2019, 11, pp.93-109. ⟨10.6092/issn.2036-1599/10294⟩. ⟨hal-02455404⟩