Research-Creation
Below, you can access the artistic and academic creations of the Dramaturgical Ecologies group. Publications, performances, talks, and other pieces that might help others think with us through dance dramaturgy, blackness (as method), and the dancer's embodied dramaturgy.
Co-authors: Baird, Haley; Dugan, Dana; Montesi, Vanessa; Nye, Matthew-Robin; martone donde, christian scott; Willkie, Angélique
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Article Interview
As the Covid19 pandemic stopped the rehearsals of the performance Confession Publique in 2020, we took this time to collectively think about the relation of agency and dramaturgy in dance creation. What emerged is a multi-layered interview-article to Angélique Willkie, where we tease out the various agencies at work in the choreographic process and the strategies she uses to navigate between them as she wear the double hat of performer and dramaturg. Here we propose some of our founding notions: embodied dramaturgy and the dramaturgical body.
Dance Performance
Confession Publique is an autobiographical solo that never saw the light of day. Relegated to oblivion, it was Angélique Willkie who brought to the surface the desire for this artistic object. Like an offering, Confession Publique is intended for her today. This dive into the intimate can now be done with four hands. With Angélique as a muse, it is now her mysteries that form the material, the matrix, the mattress of her confidences in a game where introspection inevitably meets its obligatory counterpoint, the confession.
We tackle the themes of the private, the secret, the deep and the swampy as a rebellion against the vulgar unpacking that we are confronted with every day. It is about nobility and elegance in the confession of our failures, our faults and our defects. We try to see the unveiling as a poetic gesture, a necessity, a little vanity...
Text by Mélanie Demers
Credits
Ideation, direction and choreography: Mélanie Demers | Performers: Angélique Willkie with Anne-Marie Jourdenais’ participation | Dramaturgy: Angélique Willkie | Rehearsal director: Anne-Marie Jourdenais | Music: Frannie Holder | Scenography: Odile Gamache | Lighting design: Claire Seyller | Costumes : Elen Ewing | Technical director: Hannah Kirby | Special thanks: Éléonore Loiselle
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Encounters and Podcast
A a series of podcasts to address points of articulation and/or tension in and between the fields of dance dramaturgy and black performance studies. The ABCs of DE engage and focus on articulating how the concepts of ‘blackness’ and ‘dramaturgy’ (productively) rub up against one another. Each event will highlight two primary “keywords” emerging from our research, placing them in relationship and examining the movement between them.
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Dramaturgical Ecologies
With(in) Confession Publique
Conference Presentation
Dance Studies Association, October 14-17, New Brunswick, USA.
A lecture performance organised as an “open rehearsal” involving Angélique’s and Mélanie’s “embodied histories” (Noland, 2009) of blackness in conversation with the creative process of Confessions Publiques while being interrogated and facilitated by the research assistants’ questions, interventions, and speculations. The open rehearsal allows us to navigate questions we cannot answer, but which manifest in the microcosm of the creative process and the macrocosm of its context, whilst honouring the complexity and tensions inherent in the work and in our different racial positionings. This navigation carries the possibility to (de)stabilize naturalized contemporary dance culture by agitating and decentring practices that might (re)produce systems of white supremacy by conceiving of the performer’s body as a neutral canvas.
A Gathering at 3Ecologies Institute, December 14-18, 2022
As a culminating event for Murmurations, Dramaturgical Ecologiesthree hosted an hybrid event with online sessions of their Ground Provisions event at the 3ecologies (Sainte-Anne-du Lac, QC), closing a year-long series of outreach activities focused on articulating how the concepts of ‘blackness’ and ‘dramaturgy’ productively rub up against one another. Using a necessarily interdisciplinary lens, our explorations will move across and through Black studies; diasporic studies; visual arts, dance and performance practice; process philosophy; and performance studies gathering artists, scholars and public intellectuals, aiming to both generate and destabilize dialogue and reflection on black performance and dance dramaturgy.
In dialogue with Dr. Erin Manning, who brings the philosophy of movement into the realms
of neurodiversity and blackness to inquire into the normative prescriptions of whiteness /
neurotypicality; and Dr. Adebayo Akomolafe’s provocative reflections on post-activism, global
crisis and ontofugitivity, Ground Provisions emerge from a desire to generate dialogue and
reflection on dance dramaturgy and black performance studies, diasporic conceptualizations
of blackness in its creative manifestations.
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