Face-to-face: Form, relation, apparition

Abstract

'I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me' (Virginia Woolf). We sit facing each other and draw on our individual, current choreographic research projects to think through the uncertainties of presence in collaboration, and the ways in which as artist-scholars we extend out into the world. Given the social nature of choreographic practice, we seem ready to be 'made and remade continually', as we encounter the other in the excessive nearness of friendship (Giorgio Agamben). We alternate between form and formlessness, as we engage in fragile processes of collaborative making. If we accept that different practices of relating start shaping the various choreographic contexts we work in – be they aesthetic, pedagogic, theatre, video, writing – at what point, we might ask, do we turn into some kind of hard-to-see apparition? This was a roundtable discussion by artist- scholars at Roehampton Dance.