This book offers new ways of thinking about dance-related artworks that have taken place in galleries, museums and biennales over the past two decades as part of the choreographic turn. It focuses on the concept of intersubjectivity and theorises about what happens when subjects meet within a performance artwork. The resulting relations are crucial to instances of performance art in which embodied subjects engage as spectators, participants and performers in orchestrated art events. Choreographing Intersubjectivity in Performance Art deploys a multi-disciplinary approach across dance choreography and evolving manifestations of performance art. An innovative, overarching concept of choreography sustains the idea that intersubjectivity evolves through places, spaces, performance and spectatorship. Drawing upon international examples, the book introduces readers to performance art from the South Pacific and the complexities of de-colonising choreography. Artists Tino Sehgal, Xavier Le Roy, Jordan Wolfson, Alicia Frankovich and Shigeyuki Kihara are discussed.

Increasingly, instances of performance art, either live or recorded, involve the choreography or execution of planned movements and actions, as part an encounter between various individuals, in an exhibition context. Although such artworks can have multiple meanings, the ways in which these works help to produce inter-subjectivity, even tacitly or as secondary effects, allow the emergence of subjecthood to arise in ways that are special or depart in some way from the regulatory structures that usually produce subjecthood. The approach taken by this thesis is to make explicit these tendencies drawn from multidisciplinary perspectives on how to identify subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and how they are related. The main theorists engaged with are: Helen Reese Leahy, Tony Bennett, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, André Lepecki, Amelia Jones, Emmanuel Levinas, Rosi Braidotti, Sara Ahmed and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. The complex nature of choreographed artworks necessitates an approach that is nonreductionist. The choreographed works discussed in this thesis supplement and further elucidate these theories in specific, multi-sensory, kinaesthetic, somatic, affective, ethical, political and regional ways, they are experiential in the full sense rather than restricted to text-based theories. The main works consulted are by choreographers: Tino Sehgal; Xavier Le Roy; Mark Harvey; Sean Curham; Boris Charmatz; Joshua Rutter; Alexandra Bachzetsis and val smith; as well as those by contemporary artists: Jordan Wolfson; Pablo Bronstein; Kalisolaite 'Uhila; Alicia Frankovich; Rebecca Ann Hobbs; Angela Tiatia and Shigeyuki Kihara.

This book illuminates the relationship between philosophy and experimental choreographic practice today in the works of leading European choreographers. A discussion of key issues in contemporary performance from the viewpoint of Deleuze, Spinoza and Bergson is accompanied by intricate analyses of seven groundbreaking dance performances.

There is a category of choreographic practice with a lineage stretching back to mid-20th century North America that has re-emerged since the early 1990s: dance as a contemporary art medium. Such work belongs as much to the gallery as does video art or sculpture and is distinct from both performance art and its history as well as from theater-based dance. The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art clarifies the continuities and differences between the second-wave dance avant-garde in the 1950s‒1970s and the third-wave starting in the 1990s. Through close readings of key artists such as Maria Hassabi, Sarah Michelson, Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher, Adam Linder, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Shelley Lasica and Latai Taumoepeau, The Persistence of Dance traces the relationship between the third-wave and gallery-based work. Looking at these artists highlights how the discussions and practices associated with “conceptual dance” resonate with the categories of conceptual and post-conceptual art as well as with the critical work on the function of visual art categories. Brannigan concludes that within the current post-disciplinary context, there is a persistence of dance and that a model of post-dance exists that encompasses dance as a contemporary art medium.

"In October 2017, four internationally influential practitioners of immersive experiences gathered at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island in New York for a panel discussion on the creation of immersive productions. The panel, entitled "All the World is a Stage," was part of the Future of Storytelling Festival 2017 (FoST FEST), advertised as "the world's leading immersive storytelling event." During this discussion, each of the four panelists described examples of their work. Hector Harkness, Associate Director of Punchdrunk International, explained how the company created productions that "rip up the rules for the audience" so they can "go beyond the boundaries of closed environments." Food technologist, experience designer, and multimedia artist Emilie Baltz described inviting audiences to step up to a microphone and use their tongues, teeth, and lips to play musical popsicles in an installation called PopStars. Jon Sands, founder of Poets in Unexpected Places, revealed how his strategic placement of poets on subway cars across New York City turned commutes into impromptu poetry slams for unsuspecting riders, some of whom joined in by improvising their own poetic works. Justin "JB" Bolognino, CEO (Chief Experience Officer) of META, an experience production company, described his commissioning of Jon Morris, artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Windmill Factory, to design a music-festival queue into an experiential artwork. Entitled Right Passage, the work was a "room-scale sound and light performance installation" involving moving walls that guided festival participants efficiently into the concert venue (Windmill Factory 2017). Through their detailed descriptions of how their productions organized the bodies of performers and spectators in space and time, the panelists hinted at the presence of choreography in their productions"--

Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance and Performance illuminates the relationship between the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and experimental dance and performance in the works of leading European choreographers, Xavier Le Roy, Jonathan Burrows, Boris Charmatz, Eszter Salamon, Mette Ingvartsen, Jefta van Dinther, and Jan Ritsema. Combining intricate analysis of seven groundbreaking works, including Self Unfinished by Le Roy (1998) and Weak Dance Strong Questions (2001) by Burrows and Ritsema, with a philosophical discussion of the body, movement and time in performance, as well as the notions of theatricality, affect, improvisation and process, the capacity of choreography to 'express' thought is unravelled. Choreographing problems involves composing ruptures between movement, the body and duration in performance such that they engender a shock upon sensibility, one that inhibits recognition. This book offers a practical insight into the matters of choreography: it allows both the versed and the non-trained spectator to observe in detail how the thought and the practices of making, performing and attending reinvent performance and dance today.

This book illuminates the relationship between philosophy and experimental choreographic practice today in the works of leading European choreographers. A discussion of key issues in contemporary performance from the viewpoint of Deleuze, Spinoza and Bergson is accompanied by intricate analyses of seven groundbreaking dance performances.