The Architect, Le Corbusier coined the phrase, 'the house is a machine for living in' to describe his vision of habitation in the machine age; 'man' and machine accommodating each other in a harmonious flow of urban design. (1) His rational housing projects demonstrated utopian socialist sympathies, and his ambitions for modern engineering and materials in the construction of the mass-produced house, the House Machine.
In appropriating this terminology, I am suggesting the pliability of contemporary dance to wider questions of space beyond its disciplinary frontier in the theatre. In particular, I am thinking of the subtle connections between corporeal identity and spaces of habitation at the level of construction.
In her classic work, The Thinking Body Mabel E Todd described the structural integration of the body, in terms of the properties of the built environment: 'The articulation of the spine works like the structural mechanics of a bridge, bone is comparable to steel for its tensile integrity, balancing forces can be understood in terms of axes, counterweights, and compression' (2). These descriptions suggest the currency of metaphors of construction in relating to the body in the machine age.
Todd wrote her book in the 1930s when modernist construction was literally on the rise. Despite its datedness, her body mechanics continue to circulate as a source for movement research in contemporary dance. The construction of the body determines its corporeal identity. Whilst at times I can think of my body as machine, I can also consider it as home and as stage. For the body in action is never one thing, singular and stable but exists in flux with the activities we pursue, the spaces we inhabit, the relationships we encounter. As Todd states, in living, 'the whole body carries its meaning and tells its own story, standing, sitting, walking. awake or asleep. It pulls all the life up into the face of the philosopher, and sends it all down into the legs of the dancer?. (3)
I am interested in the permeability of spaces and the plenitude of embodiment. To this end, I am seeking to create choreographers which position the body as both dwelling place and machine, inside and outside, public spectacle and private ritual in here and out there, a crossing point for images of modernity and the contemplation of futures unforeseen
I speak from the metropolitan context of London, and from the third floor of a South London tower block whose concrete severity would be difficult to imagine without the contributions of Le Corbusier to 20th Century urban design. Whilst we recognise that the project of modernism is inherently flawed, we continue to live in the buildings it inspired; to move through the vertical cities it spawned; and to allow our gazes to be led along its flat lines. The enduring presence of modernism provides a framework for our thinking about the future. For these are the spaces we move through, the rooms we inhabit, the floors and walls which bind us into urban territories.
Given this context, references to Le Corbusier within Machine for Living are important, not as a celebration of heroic modernism, but as an acknowledgement of the very real spaces we move through. According to Le Corbusier, 'man is a geometrical animal' (4) In making the work, I was interested in exploring just how geometric our constructions could be.
As choreographer, I sought to uncover and unwind our continuing attachments to the modernist line and linear perspective. Movement improvisations explored the formal properties of lines - straight and warped; intersecting and crossing; at right angles; cut up; multiplied; and dissolved. As evolved forms - inter-relating lines, levers, fulcrums and cantilevers, as well as the folding of imagined planar geometries - formed the materials of the choreography.
Underlying this interrogation of linear perspective in dance is a recognition of current shifts in perceptions of space, enabled through the increasing digitisation and mediatisation of our daily lives. For, in this historical moment of accelerated knowledge and information systems, perceptions of space and materiality are rapidly evolving. New modalities of space are emerging through developments in telecommunications networks, information technologies and complex digital infrastructures. These are currently interpenetrating contemporary culture, eroding prior constructs of linear perspective and Euclidean geometries and creating new technologies of perception. They are challenging the assumptions we have inherited, including our idea of home, space and stage.
As those of you who choreograph will know, there is a key moment when you are literally projecting the dance onto the stage, into the theatre. We customise ourselves for the built environment of the theatre, measuring out the dimensions of the space and making the dance fit into these. The proscenium arch theatre, as a framed space organised around a vanishing point, creates an illusion of depth, a site for the experience of both the spectacular and the intimate. This experience depends upon me taking up a position on 'stage' and you taking up a position, in the body of the theatre, its 'house'. This model of space has been 'home' for my creations and traditionally has contained our relations and styles of exchange. Lines of influence are drawn according to an ancient model. Whilst I wonder about this dancer with the theatre inside her, I am questioning the boundary of her dancing.
The architect, Daniel Libeskind in his book, The Space of Encounter describes how our notion of the classical stage, 'is really not fitting to contemporary reality being swallowed by space' (5). The grand narrative of introjection and projection, so characteristic of modernism no longer holds firm.
Digitalisation has fundamentally altered the way we look and are looked at - we enter a third space - translucent, screened, scanned. Contemporary bodies in the current moment are lived on the inside and networked on the outside. We are engaged in a phase shift in culture to do with scale, skin, perspective, distance, limits, interaction, presence, interior and exterior space. Newtonian physics no longer holds the floor. Skin once the boundary of the self, no longer signifies closure, for technology is extending life expectancy, the physical environment, perception and memory.
What this means in a practical sense is a re-vision of how we understand the body in space. Rethinking the relationship between container and contents means moving beyond binaristic thinking to consider the entwining of systems. In dance, it might he helpful to consider the body, not as a shell or surface that houses a depth or interiority, but as a material of space. As a choreographer, this involves exploring corporeal surfaces in terms of planes, rotations, convolutions, inflections and torsions, binding the choreography into the built environment at the level of a subtle mechanic. Space no longer a container for the body becomes enfolded amplifying the bodily realm into a kind of kinetic architecture.
In Machine for Living a series of permeable surfaces - skin, perforated steel, and digital animation - intersect creating moiré patterns which give the sense of a liquid state in which body and container form a continuous whole. This immersive experience dissolves the privileged perspectival position of traditional theatre in favour of multiple perspectival positions. Confronted with a series of possibilities for viewing, each audience member creates their own mix of the work throughout its 70-minute duration. Encouraged to engage with the work as a physical journey, the spectator composes their own story from a series of tableaux and interactions. Viewed as an architectural promenade the work can be said to exist at the intersection between traditional perspectival thought, evidenced in the presence of the dancers as mobile stages, a kind of distorted modernism, in the play on Corbusier's concept of home, and digital culture, through an animation series which morphs the whole.
In working within the expanded realm of cross-art form practice, categories of kind are challenged. As a choreographer, the place of the dance, its context or space of habitation traditionally defines its terms of reference. Similarly, for a visual artist, his or her work is designed for specific kinds of spaces. Previously I have followed inherited wisdom and described my work as Dance Theatre. However, in working with a visual artist I have shifted to consider a practice called Installation Performance. This term embraces the artistic traditions of both the visual and performing arts. I appreciate that it does not denote the where of performance, but rather suggests that something is being installed, is being accredited to a specific space and that in doing so we are also modeling the space of interaction, determining or suggesting certain kinds of exchange between performer and spectator, art and community.
One has to have some vision in order to survive. In this current crisis of modernism, it seems imperative to consider a range of perspectival positions and mobile points of view, to resist the fixity of vertical relations, of binary thinking and to create diversions, intersections and branching pathways where once were straight lines.
Daniel Libeskind, encourages actors to work on cities, to 'abandon traditional acting and become fully engaged in transforming the city' for the architects of the future will be choreographers of the city. (6) Within the current context our understanding of the space we inhabit and our material nature is being transformed. Artistic institutions are being displaced by a metamorphosis of its practitioners as they extend their art process into new domains of influence. In Machine for Living we follow the movement of our thoughts in the enactment of spaces; architectural thinking is transposed into choreographic practice; the industrial residue of modernism becomes a testing ground, both obstacle course and site, for our dances.
Carol Brown, choreographer, artistic director, Carol Brown Dancers and AHRB research fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts, University of Surrey Roehampton.
References
1. 4. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1989; Jencks, C., Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1987
2. 3. Todd, M. E., The Thinking Body, Princeton, Dance Horizons, 1937
5. 6. Libeskind, D., The Space of Encounter, Thames and Hudson, London, 2001.