Performance Generating Systems in Dance: Dramaturgy, Psychology, and Performativity - Softcover

Hansen, Pil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1789388767 ISBN 13: 9781789388763

Publisher: Intellect Books, 2024

Synopsis

Performance generating systems are systematic and task-based dramaturgies that generate performance for or with an audience. In dance, such systems differ in ways that matter from more closed choreographed scores and more open forms of structured improvisation. Dancers performing within these systems draw on predefined and limited sources while working on specific tasks within constraining rules. The generating components of the systems provide boundaries that enable the performance to self-organize into iteratively shifting patterns instead of becoming repetitive or chaotic.

This book identifies the generating components and dynamics of these works and the kinds of dramaturgical agency they enable. It explains how the systems of these creations affect the perception, cognition and learning of dancers and why that is a central part of how they work. It also examines how the combined dramaturgical and psychological effects of the systems performatively address individual and social conditions of trauma that otherwise tend to remain unchangeable and negatively impact the human capacity to learn, relate and adapt. The book provides analytical frameworks and practical insights for those who wish to study or apply performance generating systems in dance within the fields of choreography and dance dramaturgy, dance education, community dance or dance psychology.

Featured cases offer unique insight into systems created by Deborah Hay and Christopher House, William Forsythe, Ame Henderson, Karen Kaeja and Lee Su-Feh.

 

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Pil Hansen is professor of the performing arts at the University of Calgary in Canada, President of Performance Studies international, general editor of the Expanded Dramaturgy book series (Routledge), a founding member of Vertical City Performance, and a dance/inter-arts dramaturg. Her empirical and PaR experiments examine cognitive dynamics of memory and learning, and social dynamics of connection, in creative processes. Hansen has dramaturged more than thirty works in Scandinavia and North America and authored or edited over forty publications. Her latest co-edited books are Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement (2015) and Performing the Remembered Present: The Cognition of Memory in Dance, Theatre and Music (2017).

Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1789388767
• ISBN 13: 9781789388763
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 174