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Being part of IDOCDE

Introducing myself as a person who is an educated biologist, as a person who is a teacher for dance improvisation, as a person who is doing video documentation of contemporary dance, mainly in Berlin since 2000, as a person who is teaching dance and video and documentation in various fields, as a person who is busy with archiving and preserving dance history…

Knowing that each of these introductions will only high lighten one part of what I do, I choose to present following research:

Documentation as artistic research

First statement: documentation is never neutral, it is always done from a chosen point of view.

This encouraged me to propose a setup for documentation using a diversity of tools and daring to follow ones interest. The result might be far from a visual representation of what just happen, but it will deliver a variety of  approaches towards an experience the documenting person just had. The method is inviting to use a combination of different tools (video, photo, writing, drawing, sound and body) in order to describe a work you just perceived. Special for dance this seems to be an appropriate way to get closer to tell something about an art form, which is not only visual but also speaking to other senses.

As a preparation I do a warm up in couples called “landscape and explorer”. I learned it from Dieter Heitkamp and I love to do it to wake up curiosity and trust. In this exercise you use all your sences to explore with curiosity and respect the sturctures, shapes and textures of a partner who is providing a landscape. your senses do wake up in an unusual way to support the next exercise of documentation.

The experiment itself is very simple. I do a little sequence of moving in space, talking and showing video. I do it once to give everybody the chance to watch first what is happening. Second time everybody should have chosen a media to be used in order to document. The body included as a possible media to perform with in response. Second time I do the sequence people should follow with their way of documenting. In a third run they have the possibility to change, to adjust, to insist.

I just want to quote a feedback I got on a session we did in march with the same experiment:

“- in my way of approaching the task to document, i was strongly influenced by the warm-up we had done before. The warm-up significantly shaped the choice of method how to document the piece (the 'piece' became a landscape, similar to the body that was explored as a landscape in the warm-up). This reminded me of one of the essential aspects of practice-as-research: to APPROACH some thing through (having had a) sensory experience.

- documentation was not aiming at making a registration of the piece - it was constructing the piece performatively, it was EXTENDING the piece

- the action of documenting became a tool and medium to explore and reflect on my way of approaching the task, both IN the moment and afterwards. Deciding to transpose the method of the warm-up into my method for documenting felt like opening up a creative zone with great freedom and possibilities to play - and i was surprised by myself.”

 (by Joa Hug as response of the same experiment I did in an artistic research group in Berlin)

Transcript of the voice recording of the session in Stolzenhafen 2012

 (original attached as download file):

1. She´s about to start and Ive decided to not watch what she´s doing but instead record my own voice on the phone.