QCA CONNECT

Presented by A/Prof Erin Brannigan

Erin Brannigan is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of New South Wales.

Monday 16 October 2023 in S07_1.23 | 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Erin Brannigan is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of New South Wales. She is of Irish and Danish political exile, convict, and settler descent. Her publications include Moving Across Disciplines: Dance in the Twenty-First Century (Sydney: Currency House, 2010), Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Bodies of Thought: 12 Australian Choreographers, co-edited with Virginia Baxter (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2014). She has published various chapters and articles in film, performance and dance journals and anthologies. Her current research project is Precarious Movements: Dance and the Museum with AGNSW, Tate UK, NGV, MUMA and artist Shelley Lasica and monographs associated with this project are Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s -1970s (London: Routledge, 2022) and The Persistence of Dance: Choreography and Contemporary Art 1990s-2020s (NYP).

In The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art, Brannigan explores a category of choreographic practice with a lineage stretching back to mid-20th c. 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 theatre-based dance. The disciplinary conditions of dance persist in key examples of this work within the formulation of material-as-concept. This formulation is in keeping with certain traditions of conceptual art which can be linked to Sol LeWitt's work and writing, and which emerged concurrently in the work of his dance peers such as Simone Forti and Trisha Brown in the downtown NY scene. Dance played an essential role in that earlier period in establishing key ideas and strategies that have influenced the course of contemporary art. The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art seeks to clarify some continuities and differences between the second-wave (mid-1950s to the mid-1970s) and the third-wave (1990s-present) dance avant-garde. A relationship between the third-wave and gallery-based work is established through a close reading of key artists such as Maria Hassabi, Sarah Michelson, Boris Charmatz, Meg Stuart, Philip Gehmacher, Adam Linder, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Shelley Lasica and Latai Taumoepeau. Alongside this, discussions and practices associated with 'conceptual dance' are found to resonate with the categories of conceptual and post-conceptual art, and critical work on the function of visual art categories and labels builds on discussions of Minimalism and Neo-Dada in Choreography, Visual Arts and Experimental Composition 1950s-1970s (2022). This helps clarify the historical, cultural, aesthetic, analytical, philosophical, and practical grounds on which the two art forms currently meet. The book concludes with the persistence of dance in its disciplinary formulation within the current post-disciplinary context, and offers a model of post-dance that encompasses dance as a contemporary art medium.

This event is supported by Deputy Director Research, Professor Susan Best, QCA.

Event organisation by Dr Laini Burton, HDR Convenor, QCA.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Dr Burton at l.burton@griffith.edu.au.