Browsing by Author "Doughty, Sally"

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    Archipelago 1
    (2012) Vear, Craig; Doughty, Sally
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    Archipelago 2
    (2013) Vear, Craig; Doughty, Sally
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    Body of Knowledge
    (2017-03-12) Doughty, Sally; Krische, Rachel; Kendall, Lisa
    Body of Knowledge is a research project that explores how the dancer’s body can be considered as a living archive by understanding experiences – dance related and other – that have been collected by and remain in the body. Recalling and categorising memories, events, performances, training, holidays, injuries – to name a few – has inspired us to develop ‘collections’ from which we have generated new performance work. Treating the body as a living archive, we challenge more traditional archives that contain tangible artefacts and documents, and emphasise the knowledge that resides in and with the dancer. This event is the last phase of their Body of Knowledge project, and Sally, Lisa and Rachel will present some of the dancing, speaking and writing practices they have been working with in order to unearth, understand and use their personal archives. They are joined in a post-performance discussion about the project by Betsy Gregory and Sally Hawsley.
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    Body of/as knowledge
    (NA, 2016-05-20) Doughty, Sally
    This performative presentation focuses on a strand of my practice that considers my body as an archive that has the potential to give rise to new performance work. Memory and archive are considered synergistically to create meaning anew from prior experiences and is a process defined by André Lepecki as one that generates rather than imitates (2010: 29). Treating memory as a mechanism with which to document previous experiences (that include movement training and techniques) allows me to trace the lineage of certain ideas, preferences and skills that are present in my performance making. Logging or tracing such influences and experiences offers me a valuable insight into the nature of my practice(s) and acts as an underpinning for new work. I will make reference to three of my performances (a dance for radio (1994); Hourglass (2015) and Hourglass: Archive as Muse (2015)) as examplars of how knowledge and experience housed in my body have been ‘used, cited, or re-appropriated […] for new purposes’ (Burt 2003: 34) and thus, how the body can be conceived of as a 'non-material museum' (Lista 2014). I will draw also upon a current research project that I am working on in collaboration with dance artists/academics Rachel Krische and Lisa Osborne. Invited by Dance4 to engage in a dialogue that focuses on the body as archive, we three will engage in monthly conversation about our practices and the role that our personal archive plays in our work. This presentation includes preliminary findings from our discussions thus far to elucidate the concept of the The (Moving) Body as Archive.
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    a dance for radio
    (2005-09-08) Doughty, Sally
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    The dual identity of the hybrid dance artist-academic: Dance 4 Online Conversations.
    (Dance 4, 2015-03-13) Fitzpatrick, Marie; Doughty, Sally
    This online conversation builds upon research into the identity of the hybrid dance-artist academic and documents conversations with two leading dance curators/programmers.
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    Found in Translation: unlearning ‘expertise’ in inclusive dance practice
    (2023-08-31) Doughty, Sally; Smith, Sue
    Names of presenters: Sally Doughty and Sue Smith Nature of proposal: Presentation/provocation Title: Found in Translation: unlearning ‘expertise’ in inclusive dance practice Abstract: This presentation/provocation responds to the conference theme of ‘addressing hierarchies’, and suggests how ‘unlearning’ can challenge histories of inclusive dance practices. We reflect on our research undertaken as part of Critical Mass, an inclusive mass choreography performed at the Commonwealth Games 2022 Opening Ceremony. Interrogating how disabled and non-disabled young people learn the codified dance styles of Breaking and Kuchipudi, we propose that embedding inclusivity more rigorously in dance practices, from studio to management, promotes unlearning as a guiding disposition. Our provocation is that unlearning expertise in/of the dancing body radically shifts expectations of ‘difference’ in dance practices. Interrogating inclusive participation and translation within Breaking and Kuchipudi, we propose that good practice includes challenging individuals to explore and move beyond existing movement boundaries without prioritising certain bodies or expressive capacities over others. This, in turn, challenges current operational and conceptual hierarchies in dance pedagogy and production. Translation, interpretation and authenticity promote individual expressions of identity, participant-led agendas and the generation of new communities (Bartlett 2017; Whatley 2007; Elin and Boswell 2004), that support reinterpretation and invention rather than fulfilling the physical geometry of codified dance vocabularies. Through unlearning loyalty to a movement idea (‘that’s not a headspin, this is!’) we propose new insights for studio practice and pedagogy in which people with different bodies and neurologies can idiosyncratically express movement whilst being united by qualities, efforts, direction and intention. Approaching movement translation from this perspective requires a degree of unlearning (McLeod et al 2020; Visser 2017; Risner 2009) and the acknowledgement that earlier learnings may be incorrect and reductive. We therefore set a provocation for unlearning that challenges traditional ways of using translation in inclusive dance practices, and reimagines traditional hierarchies or ‘cascades’ of knowledge as more rhizomic structures with multi-directional forces of expertise that inform processes, experiences and outcomes.
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    Handle with Care
    (2016-12-01) Doughty, Sally; Krische, Rachel
    Digging deep into their personal archives, Sally Doughty and Rachel Krische continue a four month process of collecting, collating and cataloguing their individual embodied collections. This endeavor to amass materials and memories in the moment of performance demands that the personal becomes public; the private becomes shared; connections are remembered, made and lost. They consider how their fragmented past(s) can be dragged into their present(s) to generate new understanding and opportunities for performance making, and in doing so, they invite the audience to re/consider their individual yet interwoven, personal archives.
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    The Holding Space: Body Of (As) Knowledge
    (Palgrave, 2020) Doughty, Sally; Krische, Rachel; Kendall, Lisa
    Body Of (As) Knowledge (BOK) is a collaborative practice-based research project reflecting and expanding upon the practices of dance artist-scholars Sally Doughty, Lisa Kendall and Rachel Krische. BOK examines the body as a living archive, focusing on the collection, articulation and dissemination of the moving body as opposed to more traditional archival materials of artefacts and documents. This multi-stranded project engages with Derby Museum Trust to develop understanding of how traditional processes of archiving work, and includes performative outcomes presented in the museum space, NottDance (2017) and InDialogue Symposium (2016). The three authors propose a radical contribution to the publication in the form of a link to an online holding space for this research project. The digital holding space is a repository for film, audio and written documentation of BOK and seeks to highlight and privilege the assertion that the moving body acts as a living resource of archival information. The authors recognise the inherent contradiction of constructing an online artefact of this living, embodied project, and therefore propose that the online resource, in correlation with the concept of the moving body as archive, has a finite life-span. The authors will utilise encryption technology that makes electronic data ‘self-destruct’ after a specified period of time: the holding space will ‘erode’ or ‘rust’ as time passes, and after a certain point the online document can no longer be read (Bleeker 2012: 1). Therefore, the content held on-line remains only in the memories, bodies and practices of the three artist-scholars and the readers who engage with the online artefacts within the identified timeframe. Challenging the traditional notion that ‘the archive [is] that which endures’ (Roms 2013: 45), this contribution promotes a time-sensitive archive which is ‘subject to change, or even disappearance’ (ibid), to reflect the condition of a mortal, corporeal archive.
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    Hourglass
    (2015-05-09) Doughty, Sally
    In 2015, Sally Doughty received a commission from Dance4 to make a dance performance in response to an exhibition of artefacts from the seminal opera Einstein on the Beach (1976). Created and performed in the exhibition space at Nottingham’s Backlit Gallery, the performance, titled Hourglass, responds to the exhibits, the gallery space and specifically a section entitled Knee Play Three by Lucinda Childs, from the original opera’s score. Doughty developed a choreographic score, which frames the hour long performance. One of the major artistic concerns in the work is to investigate how to document performance in the moment of performing, so that a second choreographic score is developed by Doughty as she performs. Doughty’s costume comprises a wearable canvas that is drawn onto to document Hourglass, which is removed and left in the gallery space, thus contributing to the artefacts in the opera’s history.
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    Hourglass: Drawing in and as Performance
    (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2020-01-01) Doughty, Sally
    In 2015, the author was commissioned by Dance4 to make an improvised dance performance, titled Hourglass, in response to artefacts from Robert Wilson’s seminal opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) exhibited at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham, UK. Reflecting upon the rehearsals and performances, the author addresses the specific themes of ‘what happens when we draw with or from the body’ and ‘choreography as drawing with and from the body’ to reveal how she used drawing in the performance as a means of documentation. The author articulates how her drawings act as a choreographic score that serves the dual function of documenting Hourglass and generating a new performance. It is a relatively common occurrence that performance is documented by someone other than the artist and from a position external to the work, which can establish ‘a distinct tension […] between the performer and documenter’ (Woolley 2014, p. 59). Through developing strategies for embedding her own documentation of Hourglass into the performance itself, the author writes from an in-vivo perspective to disrupt this normative distinction between performer and documenter. She proposes that the nature of her documentation through mark-making in performance collapses any suggestion of such ‘tension’ and offers instead an embodied and embedded practice of drawing in and as performance. Documenting Hourglass through drawing was not an additional imposition of practice-as-research but instead was integral to the artistic practice (Nelson 2013, p.87) and the underlying thrust of the performance. The author provides the context for her own drawing in performance by examining the work of other dance and performance artists who have employed strategies for drawing and performing, such as Si Rawlinson (Ink, 2017), Trisha Brown (Untitled, 2007), La Ribot (No. 26, 1997) and Carolee Schneeman (Tracking, 1973). Broadly speaking, the burgeoning literature and other source materials that cite these artists amongst many others who make marks during performance, refers to practices in which the marks are made as a result of the moving body being in direct contact with the mark-receiving surface, so that the movement of the artist generates line (Le Mens 2014, p102). However, in Hourglass, the author made drawings by hand in response to movement that she had already made during the performance, as opposed to drawings made by the full-body in motion in the moment of moving. Therefore, in this chapter, she proposes that her drawing methodology challenges the more established, familiar methods of artists such as Brown, Schneeman and Rawlinson, and addrsses a gap in contemporary performance practices and literature that refers to these two forms. The author goes on to discuss how her interrogation of methods used to draw Hourglass gave rise to her design of a wearable canvas that was integrated into the costume, onto which she hand-drew key features from the performance such as spatial pathways; movement/vocal material and moments of interaction with audience members, during the performance. Towards the end of the performance, the author repurposed the wearable canvas by removing it from her costume and hanging it in the gallery space as an exhibit. This contributed to the artefacts from the opera and evolved as archival material arising from Hourglass, but functioned also as a compositional score to inform a future performance work titled Hourglass: Archive as Muse (Doughty, October 2015). Drawing and mark making is an established and well documented approach to making compositional scores for improvised performances. The author will draw upon her experience of working with leading movement improvisers Nina Martin and Lin Snelling, to exemplify the role that mark making plays in their practices and discuss how this informed her personal approach to drawing in Hourglass. The drawing’s dual function of documenting existing and generating new performance will be discussed here. The author identifies parallels between drawing and improvising in performance, and articulates how her approach to making spontaneous decisions in one form is reflected in and informs the other. This chapter aims to contribute to the literature and contemporary performance practices that address dancing and drawing by proposing a strategy that challenges many of the established and documented mainstream approaches.
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    Hourglass: mark-making in and as performance
    (2017-12-08) Doughty, Sally
    This proposal responds to the specific themes of 'what happens when we draw with or from the body'; 'choreography as drawing with and from the body' and 'performative drawing - witness or viewer'. It aims to reveal the processes that are implicit within the author's methods of documenting an improvised performance through drawing and mark-making, and how the resulting documentation has the potential to act as a choreographic score to generate new performance work. The author reflects upon a performance commission that she received from Dance4 in 2015 to make an improvised performance in response to artefacts from Robert Wilson's opera Einstein on the Beach (1976) on exhibition at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham. She gave two performances of the hour-long work, titled Hourglass, at the gallery on Saturday 9 May 2015. She articulates her approach to documenting Hourglass from an in-vivo perspective. Treating the exhibits on display as a multi-modal document of the opera's development and performances, Doughty developed strategies for embedding her own documentation of Hourglass into the performance itself. In doing so, she disrupted the normative distinction between the roles of performer and documenter so that the performance's documentation was not conceived of as an additional imposition of practice-as-research but instead, was integral to the artistic practice (Nelson 2013, p.87). Interrogating methods for documenting or 'scoring' Hourglass gave rise to the design of wearable canvases that were integrated into the costume, onto which Doughty hand-drew key features from the performance, such as spatial pathways; movement/vocal material and moments of interaction with audience members, during the performance. Towards the end of each performance the wearable scores were repurposed as she removed each wearable canvas from the costume and hung them in the gallery space as exhibits, thus contributing to the artefacts from the opera's history. The author provides the context for her own drawing in performance by examining the work of dance and performance artists including Trisha Brown (Untitled 2007), Carolee Schneeman (Tracking 1973) and Si Rawlinson (Ink 2017) who have developed strategies for drawing in performance that 'encode movement' (Roben 2012). She proposes an alternative method of documenting that challenges a body of literature and artists' methods of documenting, in which the body gives rise to the mark in the moment of moving. It is a relatively common occurrence that performance is documented by someone other than the artist and from a position external to the work. Michael Woolley observes that 'a distinct tension exists between the performer and documenter' (2014, p. 59), and the author proposes that the nature of her documentation through mark-making in performance collapsed any suggestion of such 'tension', offering instead an embodied and embedded practice of documentation that arose seamlessly through the performance. Nelson notes that when documenting, 'the literal, indexical function of words is less useful than more poetic modes' (2013, p.90) and this is reflected in the mode of drawing undertaken during the performance of Hourglass. The mark-making shifted from a representational style of drawing to a technique that included Doughty's personal responses and a more poetic commentary on the work. The process and creative potential of treating the hand-drawn scores as archival material from Hourglass to inform new performance work such as Hourglass: Archive as Muse (Doughty, October 2015) will be discussed here, concluding that drawing in performance has the dual potential to document and generate.
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    Hourglass: The Archive as Muse
    (NA, 2015-10-16) Doughty, Sally
    This proposal is for a performative presentation that responds explicitly to the conference themes of ‘designing process and innovative modes of making’; ‘sited practices’; ‘improvisation’, ‘context and responsivity’ and ‘professional practice’. The presentation focuses on the author’s recent commission by Dance4 to develop an improvised performance Hourglass (2015) in response to artefacts from Robert Wilson’s opera Einstein on the Beach (1976), exhibited at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham. Working with artefacts that have their own history and narrative can suggest a particular kind of responsivity that has the potential to mirror their original purpose. The challenge here was to create meaning anew in response to an original choreographic score by Lucinda Childs, other exhibits and the site itself. Through the process of making and performing Hourglass, questions surfaced for the author around how the performance might sustain itself beyond the duration of the exhibition and access to the site. Treating Hourglass as an archive and referring to Dancing in the Gallery and Museum (Wookey 2015), the author proposes to recycle Hourglass post-exhibition and reflect upon the process of doing so. Innovative modes of making, including the recycling of performance scores hand-drawn during Hourglass will instigate the design of the creative process from which new material and meaning arises, and which avoids the trap of either directly replicating the archive that is Hourglass or the initial source material: the opera. This performative paper collapses together live performance, video excerpts and a more traditional spoken delivery of findings.
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    I Notice that I'm Noticing
    (Oxford University Press, 2019-04-25) Doughty, Sally
    This essay considers the concept of noticing in improvisational movement practices and interrogates how what and how we notice can have a significant impact on movement material that is spontaneously composed. This essay takes as its starting point the premise that the act of noticing is a conscious and active form of engagement, and then goes on to discuss this in relation to what and how dance artists notice in the moment of improvising. The author draws from her experience of studying with leading improvisers but primary focus is on the author’s experience of working with American dance maker Deborah Hay in her 2011 Solo Performance Commissioning Project (SPCP). Interviews with dance artists Simon Ellis and Matthias Sperling provide further in-vivo perspectives in order to exemplify the significance of noticing in Hay’s performance practice.
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    I think not.
    (2011) Doughty, Sally; Ellis, Simon
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    The identity of hybrid dance artist-academics working across academia and the professional arts sector
    (Intellect Ltd., 2016-04-01) Doughty, Sally; Fitzpatrick, Marie
    This article reports on interim findings from an evolving research project that sets out to examine and document the experiences of hybrid dance artist-academics working across academia and the professional arts sector. Three round table events and an online conversation enabled the capturing of voices of those who operate in academia and the professional arts sector in response to the research project’s three main aims: • To understand the experiences of the hybrid dance artist-academic • To shed light upon the contextual factors that shape these experiences • To offer recommendations that may support a productive, creative practice environment for the hybrid dance artist-academic. This article further contextualizes commentaries within wider discourse on artistic practice and/or Practice as Research (PaR), such as those from Practice as Research in Performance (PARIP) and the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts (ResCen). The relationship between arts-making practices and neo-liberalist frameworks is explored. The emergent issues of hierarchies, dissidence and the epistemology of the hybrid dance artist-academic are presented and conceptions of agency and community are reconsidered.
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    Izkraso Pats
    (2004-01-16) Doughty, Sally; Olga Zitluhina Dance Company
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    The Lovers
    (2013) Vear, Craig; Doughty, Sally
    The Lovers (2012) is a hypermedia performance for dancer and musician (Sally Doughty and Craig Vear). It articulates the impact of intermedial performance environments upon composer-choreographer collaboration, specifically, the relationship between digital music composition and contemporary choreography. Magritte's 'The Lovers' asks of us to consider the feel of a kiss through a material interface. We have taken this intermedial 'connection' as a theme with which to explore a hyper-performance composition. Here a dancer and a musician 'connect' through digital technology with in a Kyma Sound, mixing the touch of music with the feel of image. Only here it is the dancer's movement that connects sound to our ears and the musicians gestures that expose the visual image.
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    Please Do Touch
    (2020-02-28) Doughty, Sally; Krische, Rachel; Kendall, Lisa
    Collaborating on a research project entitled 'Body of Knowledge', dance artists and academics Sally Doughty, Lisa Kendall and Rachel Krische explore how the dancer’s body can be considered as a living, corporeal archive. 'Please Do Touch' continues this journey, developing this research into a performance work that inhabits DMU's Leicester Gallery. Drawing upon past experiences, movement and conversation, they consider how embodied memory can be as resonant and as rich in history as the exhibits on display in the galleries. A series of evolving performance encounters takes place between the performers and audience throughout the gallery. This new work aims to provoke the personal memories of the audience as the performers recall and share their own histories through movement, spoken and sung choreographic responses. Please Do Touch is produced by Dance4 and in partnership with New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, De Montfort University and Leeds Beckett University. Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.