Spacescapes

A fruitful dialogue for the creative body of the 20th century

Dance and drawing are intimately linked to the gesture that performs them. The dancing body creates a figure in space and leaves an impact on site, while the action of the artist sets a point into motion and captures an ephemeral event, which is reproduced in graphic or visual form. Throughout the 20th century, the performing and visual arts thus converged on many occasions. While visual artists investigated the embodied and energetic value of form, dancers and choreographers experimented with the interfaces between sign and action, between notation and improvisation, between a spatial sense of self and an architectural configuration of movement. The hybridization of dance and drawing quickened from mid-century onward, as performance art introduced innovative practices and as borders between disciplines were worn thin, causing interdisciplinary forms to emerge. The body of the artist—whether a dancer or a visual artist—is thus shared by these practices and has become the instrument of their simultaneous realization. Drawing has indeed collided with dance in opening up to three-dimensional space, incorporating surfaces (floor, ceiling, walls) as well as volumes into its process.

This correspondence is the focus of this volume, a collection of original essays and interviews in which the accounts of theoreticians and practitioners echo each other. It aims to evaluate and discuss the specific interaction of the two media and how their practices have diversified since 1962, namely since the first public performance of the Judson Dance Theater in New York.

This book stems from the international symposium “I Love Thinking on my Feet. Dance and Drawing Since 1962,” organized by Sarah Burkhalter and Laurence Schmidlin at the Université de Genève (Geneva, Switzerland) in 2012. Authors and contributors include Cindy Van Acker, Gabriele Brandstetter, Sarah Burkhalter, Pauline Chevalier, Mark Franko, Katrin Gattinger, Julie Enckell Julliard, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Magali Le Mens, Laetitia Legros, Anna Lovatt, Nolwenn Mégard, Robert Morris, OpenEndedGroup, Nadia Perucic, Catherine Quéloz, Yvonne Rainer, Robin Rhode, Susan Rosenberg, Laurence Schmidlin, Katia Schneller, Alexander Schwan, Alan Storey, and Catherine Wood.

The book is part of the Documents series, co-published with Les presses du réel and dedicated to critical writing.