pro-MOTION | 2010
This project arose from being concerned and curious about how contemporary contemporary dance is
advertised today.
We asked our friends in 18 different dance cities to collect flyers announcing contemporary dance and performance within the second half of 2009. The two of us then met in a studio in Hamburg to look at this material. As the packages arrived to our studio, we first laid out the flyers by city. We observed similar patterns of articulation - foremost the clash between a flyer as a product that stimulates potential audiences to go see dance and on the other hand, that of a photograph that documents the dance. Some looked like photographs and others appeared more like pictures of dance. We re-categorized the material into two broad categories: images of bodies and photos. We then defined subcategories and observed material resting on the borders between categories:
1=images of bodies: bodies in stillness // bodies in movement // bodies on stage // artist body as advertisement // bodies in extreme theatricality // alienated bodies
2=photos : staged photographs // banal photographs // problematic photographs // didactic photographs // unreadable photographs // lousily organized flyers // great, graphics!
We wondered why is stage photography used so often to advertise dance? Is it to meet the expectations of potential audience members? Why use photography at all to advertise contemporary dance? And what exactly is represented on the flyer: the dance, the bodies of dancers, the movement, the piece or the problem of capturing dance?
This project is ready to be presented at conferences as an installation or lecture. Ideally it would happen at festivals or places where people meet and talk about how to advertise dance, communicate about it and broaden up the dialogue on contemporary dance.
project by :
David Bergé, Lucia Glass
supported by :
K3-Zentrum für Choreographie, Hamburg