Dance studies
Gretchen Schiller, Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Litt&Arts, 38000 Grenoble, France
In dance studies we have focused on the ways in which gestures create traceforms in space but less on their bodily internal markings which constitute the crafting and labouring of being a performer. I am a choreographer and academic at the university of Grenoble Alps and my professional career in dance began as a professional performer in Canada. Beyond my own experience, I became interested in the ways in which performers draw on inner sensorial strategies to navigate through performance in dance, circus and videodance.
Performer Catherine Schaub-Abkarian while dancing in Akram Khan’s ITMoi[1] called her inner dramaturgy a “cuisine, intérieur” or an inner cooking. A phrase passed onto too her from Ariane Mouchkine. The dancer’s inner cooking or dramaturgy has only been briefly touched in dance performance studies.
In theatre there has been more attention to inner performance strategies with methods such as Stanivslanky, but in dance we focus on the physical gesture and less on inner dramaturgical strategies in training.
It seems, however, that performance literacy has only to gain by inviting the dancer’s performative voice to the academic stage. This voice, is another modality or movement translation which can sit beside visual, sonic, digital, compositional, historical, sociopolitical and gendered readings of dance. By paying attention to the dancer’s bodily know-how we empower the dancer’s agency and intelligence. We understand more closely how dancers’ troubleshoot meaning and problem solve the very act of performing from the inside out.
In 2019 the Gestures and frequencies project at the Performance lab[2] began working with documenting dancer’s inner dramaturgies and creating innovative archive tools. One of the projects, with dancer Stephanie Pons, a French dancer who performed professionally for many years with Angelin Preljocaj, reenacted and verbalised her performance of Paysage après la bataille (1998). She shared her inner dramaturgy which combined the recollection of the choreographer’s instructions, an intimate memory of those who danced with her as well as a paralinguistically-rich oral transmission while dancing.
The internal subjective nature of this term shifts the attention away from the biomechanical description or observation of movement as ocularcentric and towards the subjective crafting of dance experience. We talk about physical impulses, but there are also inner performative dramaturgies or performative scores which drive movement. The inner dramaturgies can be composed of and driven by many factors which include the symbolic, imaginary, memory, textures, functional responses, and bodily listening.
[1] Gretchen Schiller. The impossible-possible of being still. European Drama and Performance Studies, Classiques Garnier, 2017, Déjouer l’injouable : la scène contemporaine à l’épreuve de l’impossible, Hors série. p.1
[2] With Andrea Giomi, Lucie Bonnet, Simone Christ , Ramon Lima da Silva, Thibault Goyallon, Lionel Reveret
Cite this item: Gretchen Schiller, “Inner dramaturgy”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/332716