In 1992, Graeme Murphy, one of Australia’s most acclaimed choreographers, was commissioned to produce a full-length work (Grove 2001). Murphy was given just twenty-three working days in which to achieve it.
Compared to a novelist, how little a choreographer is expected to explore or revise! We don’t say to a composer, ‘Here’s the orchestra;
take them next door and start whistling your symphony to them,’ but that’s just about what we require choreographers to do. Even at the top professional level, their job is seen as a matter of putting steps together, not (like other arts) as a form of thought. (Grove 2001: 1)
Australian choreographers are seldom given time to explore, test or revise their work. A few renowned choreographers, less constrained by the terms of their commission, often take a year or more to complete a work, but the results are there for all to see. The work of Pina Bausch, Maguy Marin, William Forsythe and other such independent artists lasts for years, touring internationally and seeding new creations in other environments as well. By contrast, the Australian dance industry suffers a perpetual shortage of highly evolved new work. Universities that contain departments of dance-study are uniquely positioned to work with industry to advance the kind of knowledge that will enrich and extend choreographic practice. If we consider the crea-tion of new work as a process of evolucrea-tion, then time becomes an essential ingredient.
A theory of the dance ensemble as an evolving dynamical system Drawing on contemporary writings (e.g. Clark 1997; Heylighen 2001; Kauffman 1995; Thelen 1995) and extensive studio investigations, we contend that
knowledge unspoken 93 collaboration in creative activities is something to be pondered to advantage.
One perspective is that the dance ensemble is a microcosm of world structure, related in important ways to the larger concerns of societies and cultures. We theorise too that a collaborative ensemble is a dynamical system. The work of twentieth century physicists and biologists has revealed a universe that end-lessly generates novelty where complex systems evolve by accumulation of successive useful (and at the time useless) variations (Kauffman 1995). We have observed this kind of complex system in the dance ensemble, revealed as vital and energising for the artists involved (McKechnie 2005, 2007; Stevens et al. 2001, 2003). The studio process can be characterised as a ‘community of creative minds’ where cooperation and teamwork are essential elements of discovery and innovation.
The creative process in dance making – the editing, modifi cation, creation and re-creation – appears to be a kind of evolution. For example, a movement subtlety seen in one dancer appears in the body of another, changed, often extended or transformed by the individual length of an arm or leg, a subtle shift of focus, a sudden stillness, an inclination of the head, perhaps a radical recasting of the rhythmic tensions. As a specifi c example, the processes involved in creating Red Rain consisted of a cycle of generative and explora-tory actions (Finke et al. 1996; Stevens et al. 2003). Initial generative phases consisted of pre-inventive structures with properties that promoted discov-ery. Examples from Red Rain include retrieval (red images: tomatoes, blood, red earth, red wax, red kidney beans), association (the concept of blood led to associated concepts of life, veins, arteries, spine, death, ritual), synthesis (blending of concepts of breathing and blood with red/blue paper), analogi-cal transfer (consideration of a paper sculpture as spine or personal history;
pattern of helix movement as analogue of DNA structure). Pre-inventive properties in creative cognition included: novelty, ambiguity, meaningful-ness, emergence, incongruity and divergence. Exploratory phases included attribute fi nding (red/blue paper → womb, nest), conceptual interpreta-tion (beans as bloodfl ow or aurally as rainfall), funcinterpreta-tional inference (book/
spine paper sculpture) and hypothesis testing (helix pattern problem and solution).
Processes involving both thought and action unfold in time. Substantial achievement is the result of the blossoming of ideas, the selective success and further evolution of some of these and the dying away or editing out of others. Charles Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’ (Dennett 1995) about the evolu-tion of species can also illuminate the evoluevolu-tion of ideas in a creative process.
Dawkins (1989) coined the word ‘meme’ as a cultural analogue of the gene. He proposed that our ideas, beliefs, values, actions and patterns of doing things are conceived and evolved in mind processes, just as genes are conceived and evolved in biological processes. But the meme, in this theory, is replicated,
94 shirley mckechnie and catherine stevens
not in biologically defi ned cells, but in the minds of individuals and groups.
Memes, he said, are also subject to variation, and to selection and replication, according to adaptive pressures. The nexus between memetic evolution and the concepts inherent in theories of self-organising dynamical systems can provide new ways of thinking about how dances are made within a collabora-tive framework.
These, then, are the two basic elements that form the basis of such a theory. First, the idea of a meme: a unit of culture, a pattern, a poem, a way of building a canoe, spinning a thread or a yarn, making a dance, or embellishing a particular style – the phenotype or distinctive expression of genotype in a given environment.1 The meme is an idea nurtured in minds and passed from one to another by a process of selection, elimination or adaptation, and Barrett has suggested that the exegesis is a meme or cul-tural replicator (Barrett 2007). Second, the idea of the dance ensemble as a complex dynamical system adapting through time to the day-to-day changes inherent in any creative process. Such a system is sustained or not by its ability to adapt, to cooperate, to deal with ideas that are generated by group processes.
A third factor characteristic of evolutionary ideas is the need to pre-serve diversity. Biological evolution requires counterbalancing mechanisms that operate on both genotypes and phenotypes which preserve reservoirs of diversity, some of which may be counterproductive in the immediate environment, that ensure immediate and long-term adaptability. That is, any genotype should have multiple possible expressions in multiple phe-notypes which can vary with time in response to the environment. Barrett (2007) emphasises the importance of infi delity in evolution, meaning a departure from customary ways of thinking and doing things. Such depar-tures that occur within an individual’s arts practice may of course constitute major breakthroughs or revolutions for an entire artistic style (Martindale 1990).
These theoretical frameworks provide powerful tools for thinking about how dances are made and communicated. While contemporary choreogra-phers increasingly view the interchange between themselves and the dancers as a necessary part of ‘evolveability’ and, indeed, speak about these proc-esses as natural and productive, it is seldom in terms of a self-organising dynamical system or that of evolutionary theory. To think in these terms would enable them to comprehend their creative processes within theoreti-cal frameworks that can be applied to all natural systems, such as minds, groups, societies, cultures, weather patterns and economies. Time allows the emergence of greater complexity, and with it a much greater potential for fi nding the much sought for and often elusive pattern of structure and meaning.
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