Compositional Frameworks for Dance
A workshop by David Bergé and Trajal Harrell
Wim Wenders has written that if you go to the cinema to see a film that claims to document something, you’re likely to be disappointed….you never actually get to see what you want to see, but rather an attitude towards it, an idea of it, an opinion about it.
When I first saw David’s work the images struck me as being ‘normal’. The photographs, to me an uneducated eye, did not seem to have any of the usual photographic flair. It is only when you delve deeper that you notice the naturalness of the movement, the rational frames, the objects in the periphery and the colours of reality which actually encourage this perception of normality and you realise that this perhaps is exactly what he intends.
The first activity that Trajal introduced at this workshop was a discussion on whether choreography could be separated from dance and vice versa. He went on to quote Bojana Cvejić “If the body I dance with and the body I work and walk with are one and the same, I must necessarily entertain the suspicion that all of the body’s movements are, to a greater or lesser extent, choreographed.”
This workshop did not approach learning as we in this part of the world understand it, where one teaches and the rest listen, but rather was about conversations and collaboration while exploring thoughts and concepts, which slowly but surely led to a shift in perception.
Yeah! David and Trajal – Go on.
