THE PAGE AS A DANCING SITE
The artistic aim of this collaborative artistic research project was the creation and edition of an Artist Book proposing the page work as a site of dance performance.
The book was made from the point of view of choreography; it investigates ways in which movement and sensorial practices may enable and be in direct relationship with page related practices – be they forms of reading, writing, document and theory making, or edition proper.
It emerged during a working period with dance and choreography students at the Danish National School of Performing Arts, back in 2013, as we engaged in practices involving texts from the field of performance studies, doing our best to undo the usual binary distributions that set dance performances along ephemerality, corporeality, liveness, immediacy, physicality – as opposed to forms of documentation, (supposedly) disembodied minds, texts, books, theory, mediation, recording.
Following this pathway, we directed our attention to the experiential, social, architectural, and kinaesthetic relations involved in forms of knowledge production. At the end of the process, the book The Page As a Dancing Site was presented as a choreographic performance of sorts at the school’s library, on the 14th of November 2014.
PAULA CASPÃO (P/F) is a researcher, dramaturge and intermedia artist based in Paris, working at the crossroads of choreographic performance and other fields, and between theory and practice. She holds a PhD in philosophy/epistemology (University Paris-10), and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in performance studies at the University of Lisbon, as well as an associate researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, New University of Lisbon.
With artists and theoreticians Bojana Bauer, Johann Maheut, Ivana Müller, and Jean-Baptiste Veyret-Logerias, she has co-founded INSTITUT, a Parisian platform for criticality and exchange around artistic practices and performance.
Paula explores the modalities of knowledge contained in fiction, along with the multiple fictional and affective aspects implied in knowledge production; she is interested in the politics and economies of perception, movement, and discourse. Both in her artistic and in her theoretical work she has been combining heterogeneous methodologies, temporalities, and materials: conversations overheard in public spaces, weather forecasting, politics, gastronomy, (hi)stories of animals, objects, botanic taxonomies, landscapes becoming archives, sound and noise, documents of many sorts, and ghosts.
She has collaborated with choreographers João Fiadeiro (P), Petra Sabisch (D), Alix Eynaudi (F/B), Anne Juren (F/A), Agata Maszkiewicz (PL/A), Valentina Desideri (I/F), Zoë Poluch (CA/SE). She is the author of relations on paper (2013) and her writings have been published internationally in several revues and anthologies of choreographic arts, philosophy and performance (Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, EUA).
She has directed workshops on dramaturgy and performative practices across Europe and Australia; she is currently a guest lecturer at the Danish National School of Performing Arts, Copenhagen.
