Adam’s Zine

Miro by Adam Mundzic is a short photography series that looks at accidental art.

It’s a load of lines and marks that appear unassumingly on the street.

“By looking closely at our environment we can create a dialogue of meaning and curiosity behind the mundane marks we see everyday, questioning the idea of what it is to create art and how context and space play a major role in what is considered valuable versus what is considered vandalism.” [Miro Publicity]

The work is simple documentation of marks left on pavements and street corners. It’s a collection of images of graffiti at its smallest, nature that is shyly lingering through marks they leave behind and other unobvious things. Some marks are contextualised as vandalism, some not, but in this collection, all mark making is under microscopic questioning, simply through arranging them into a Zine and holding it up as ‘ART’.

The zine asks, what’s the point of excellent art that plays by the rules, if all mark making by us, accidental or purposefully destructive, shares something about the experience of being human?

Let’s take this work and see it as something that questions the Canon.

If “the true use of art is, first, to cultivate the artist’s own spiritual nature” then perhaps this zine documents the greatest art we can know. This Zine is art that traces humanness in the wild. It shows the human desire to make a mark, and shows that each human will make a mark in a slightly different way. It shows humans will break rules to make their marks. And some marks are left to pass through time, documented or preserved. That feels like an explanation of all art and the why behind people making it and viewing it and archiving it.

If art is meant to “wash away from the soul the dust of everyday life”, then Adam’s work perhaps falls short. Because it is the everyday, with no dust removed.

Or.. has Adam’s collecting of these images, of accidental art work, now lifted them and shined a light on what could have been forgotten, washing away the dust of everyday life through the act of celebrating it, but keeping it raw, too.

If the artist is to say “I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality”, then Adam’s work here is reality in a very bare way. In fact, even the act of documenting it and putting it into a zine shields the most ‘real’ versions of the artworks themselves that live on the streets. They’ve been squashed into a book and captured.

Why might these slightly pretentious and wanky thoughts be relevant to my choreographic practice? Because it sheds a light on how accidental movement, pedestrian movement, through its organisation and inclusion in performance can become celebrated and elevated. And that how, by doing this, it gets to the heart of what I think I’m trying to achieve -

The acknowledgement of how bodies make marks on their own. The archiving of what bodies want to say (through dance). Not marks that remain on streets, in my case, but marks that are fleeting, marks for the moment it lives in space and marks that might be forgotten.

If my reasoning behind making choreography is on the unique marks that each human makes, then to assemble, practice and use just a few codified ways of moving (ballet, jazz, hip-hop) means that the importance of the mark making made on stage feels… meh. It is not reflective of the many movement marks humankind makes, but rather the celebration of a few and the ego’s behind them that have decided ‘this is the way’. Adam’s work gets to the heart of this, this mark making of humans as enough for art, without the need for it to hold up in ‘the court of art’ but rather allowing passers by to come to their own judgement of what happened, why they formed, why the mark is there.

Adam’s work also helps me look at how dancers take on board material. Within a codified technique, the mark making that appears on top of the learned movement technique from an individual is what is interesting to me, not the pristine, power-washed-street perfection. I’m keen to see dialogue between techniques and the person doing it. So I suppose I’m interested in the ‘vandalism’ of codified techniques, and the repurposing of this vandalism as new art. What is sad is that I feel this vandalism is often trained out of people, so much that it can be lost.

At the moment I feel quite interested in art untouched by learned concepts of artforms and the marks made by individuals with their ‘mundane’ and ‘everyday’ vitality, because that’s when I feel like dance is actually communicating something. Perhaps more so, I’m interested in where these two things, the what that is considered valuable by the canon and the what that is considered vandalised meet. How can they co-exist in one performance, in one structure.

Sara Ahmed and Queer Phenomonology in dance

Sara Ahmed and Queer Phenomenology in Dance

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

 – James Baldwin from Giovanni’s Room.

My home, as in, the place where I grew up, where my Mum and my Dad and my Dog still live, is often described as ‘The Middle of Nowhere’. To others, I am sure it can feel like that. A small, two bedroom house made out of granite, with mice in the drainpipes and spiders in the sink, sat in the dip of sparsely populated moorland, with neither people, trees or buildings to help decorate the landscape. It is quite a barren place. Perhaps not an obvious place to find a homosexual, dance academic. Or, perhaps it is.

At the same time that someone might look at my house and think that ‘this is in the middle of nowhere’ (or as a friend once put it, ‘this is the most godforsaken place I have ever been to’), when I view my house, I think of it as very much in the middle of everything. Or if not the middle, a crucial starting point; of memories, of feelings, of ideas and dreams, of family. Sara Ahmed in ‘Queer Phenomenology’ defines familiarity as ‘what is, as it were, given, and which in being given “gives” the capacity to be orientated in this way or that’ (Ahmed, 2006). The crumbling outer wall of my house is to me, familiar. I know it through different memories; of playing tennis by myself and hitting the ball on and off of it, I know it through the bracken and lichen that I have seen grow through cracks over time, the swallow and jackdaw nests that are put to use in spring and summer that are made and re-made each year just between the top of the wall and the guttering, the guttering too has its own familiarity, its own memories, a thin plastic tube that somehow weathers the storms and gale forces that have sent trampolines and tents over our head, the memory of a failing water collecting system made from dustbins on slopes, that my mum introduced since an obsession over Armageddon took a hold of her and she started worrying that Donald Trump in power means that our taps would run out of water. To others, though, what is in front of them, is just a wall.

Of course, it might not just be a wall for them. The wall might remind them of something in their own lives. Perhaps they saw a wall like it in their favourite film, in their grandmother’s house. The grey colouring of the stone might match their hair, or their granite counters in their island kitchens back in their home in Kensington. Ahmed says, on this, that ‘even in a strange or unfamiliar environment we might find our way’ (2006). Even if you have no memory or feeling about my wall, you will most likely have enough knowledge to know that you can’t walk through it. So with familiarity, on what is immediately in front of me or because of a memory of a thing that I can relate to what is in front of me, I can orientate myself through a space, through the familiar and also, the unfamiliar, using knowledge I have to guide me.

My dance research has centred around this idea of noticing what I do in my dance improvisations. It’s been about noticing how I orientate myself in space.

I’ve noticed that I always orientate my body in response to something else. Perhaps what is in the space, perhaps a feeling, always many things, multiplicities of responses. Some of this orientation is a response to me inhabiting ways that my body has practiced moving before i.e., using my dance training. Some of this orientation is a response to me deliberately trying to not move like I’ve moved before, and perhaps move like someone else. I’ve also noticed though that responses are not attempts at replication, of moving using a certain technique in my toolkit or moving exactly like a choreographer who’s work I have seen, but instead, my body orientates itself in my improvisations through entering a conversation between where I’ve been (my dance training, work I’ve seen) and the present state of my body in that moment of dancing. To add to this mix, I also carry with me in my improvisations a desire to move. Some desires on some days are more specific, i.e., to move like a Cunningham dancer, some desires are opinionated, to be fucking excellent, other desires might just be, to move.

Ahmed says,

“If orientations are as much about feeling at home as they are about finding our way, then it becomes important to consider how “finding our way” involves what we could call “homing devices.” In a way, we learn what home means, or how we occupy space at home and as home, when we leave home.” (2006)

I am doing this research so that I can understand my movement habits. Both, to find new ways of moving and to be able to define how it is that I move. I am doing this research to notice what ‘homing devices’, what movement habits, draws me back into the familiar patterns I use when I move and dance. I am a product of technical dance training, and so the research comments on how my technical dance training has made me improvise. But, I am a product of many other things and so this research is not entirely biased of that training in dance. Let’s start there, though.

What is known.

I am a product of dance training that focused on what’s labelled as ‘contemporary dance techniques’. From 2020-2023, during term time, I trained in Ballet, Cunningham, Graham and Jazz dance techniques as my ‘core’ area of study. As I progressed through my training, weekly or twice weekly classes in the ‘Release’ technique, in improvisation and contact improvisation and in street dance styles also enriched my programme of study. My definition of the focus of this training and the course’s programme, having completed it, is to train contemporary dancers for the working dance industry (as performers), with an awareness of also equipping dancers with skills that can be used in dance-theatre, including jazz dance and musical theatre. For example, in my second and third years, singing and acting formed part of my study.

‘Contemporary’ techniques, in this context, aren’t that ‘contemporary’. Rather than chosen for their ‘newness’, the techniques have been chosen by what is deemed useful for a versatile contemporary dancer of today. Cunningham, Release and Ballet are common techniques studied by contemporary dance students in the UK. The addition of Graham is more specific to the institution where I trained. It’s worth noting here that, as an opinionated and belligerent 18 – 22 year old during my training, I was quite resistant to the dance techniques that took me away from my ‘axis’, my ‘correct ballet posture’ which I sought to ‘master’, and those techniques that took me away from western dance techniques in general.

Ahmed says ‘orientations are about the direction we take that puts some things and not others in our reach’. To be pragmatic and consider the logistics behind creating a course to train versatile contemporary dancers, choices have to be made. And so by incorporating the chosen core studies and additional techniques into a programme, some ‘orientations’ in my dancing have been practiced through the course, with the training programme designed to put some things within my reach (such as posture and placement of the Cunningham technique), and some orientations have been put out of my reach. I have noticed, for example, as I improve my ballet posture, the postures I attempt to find for hip-hop suffer.

With this knowledge from my training in my body, as I dance now in my improvisations, I can see traces of my body remembering things that it has been taught, even when I am not consciously thinking about ‘using’ these ‘techniques’ in my dancing and even when I am just dancing for the sake of dancing (for fun).

I notice:

I move on an axis that is up-right often,

I sometimes move to make shapes rather than feelings

I move with turnout

I move and turn

I move and I am often vertical

Jennifer Jackson, a ballet teacher and author of An Essential Guide to Classical Ballet says

Like all classical art forms, ballet draws on the classical ideals of balance, harmony and proportion. These qualities are found throughout nature, including in the human body, which is naturally vertical, symmetrical and balanced (2020).

If this is true, then what I notice, this search for the vertical, for symmetrical moments that are rarely deviated from, in my improvisations seem to come from being influenced by ballet. Especially, when I pair this with my noticing of how I often want to turn out my muscles or even just slot in ballet steps such as particular turns or jumps. It’s worth mentioning here that I was never particularly good at ballet. Growing up, I enjoyed watching it and would often watch rehearsal videos of royal ballet dancers (as this was what was most readily available). But it seems that ballet has been the loudest voice in my training simply because, perhaps, nearly every contemporary/jazz teacher that I have been taught by, has also studied ballet, and because it was the movement practice I learnt first.

Right now, in this time where I am been questioning why I move like I move and to counter some of these things, I have been seeking ‘affordance’ for ways of moving that contradict my practiced movement patterns. If I largely move within the constraints of western dance techniques, if ballet structures remain engrained in my movement, then how can I give myself more options to move away from these structures?

If I look at Jennifer Jackson’s definitions of ballet as balanced, harmonious and proportionate (2020), an obvious place to start is to go against some of this.

I started exploring how I can move in ways that feel like they counter what is ‘harmonious’:

I move across the body, sending limbs across my axis so that my body twists and scrunches.

I move my pelvis, my rib cage, knees in circles, getting bigger and bigger and bigger, so that I don’t lead from my arms, my legs.

I move, following my nose, entering my backspace.

I move, inverting my limbs so that they are ‘upside down’.

Physically, I am working to break away from something that feels proportionate.

But, I notice that another thing has entered and swarms the body from my training and from ballet. The feelings of doing these techniques. A kind of ‘dancer’ personality that wants perfection and virtuosity. The same personality can be anxious and fear moving altogether. It can be snooty and serious and moody.

I explored how I can move with different feelings:

I move with shifting dynamic textures

I move with different intentions (for example, move to be ‘imperfect’, move to make ‘a mess’, move without striving for virtuosity)

I move with my own humour

I move without fear

What I noticed was that much of these starting points for movement took me away from learned techniques from my training.

What I also noticed, is that my training was still being utilised. And so my movement becomes a conversation between trained pathways and new explorations.

My research question, after gaining knowledge and after noticing that some learned techniques linger in improvisations, even when I am trying to counter my training, and after seeing how ‘colonised’ the way that I move has become from learning such techniques is, what way of moving is my own?  How can I find ownership of a way of moving that feels free of fear and external pressure, but also one that feels satisfying and ‘worth’ something to me? Perhaps also to audiences?

What is my physical voice and how can I use it?

Choreographing the enquiry:

Traversing The Fantasy

I am a choreographer in training.

A thought I have been preoccupied with for a while is why and how movement is made. Having originally set out on a research journey that wanted to understand dramatic intention behind movement, I have been led to discover more about the intrinsic sensations of the body where movement naturally occurs. I could, as others have, define these movements as ‘intuition’, as ‘embodied-cognition’. These movements could appear as improvisation, a desire to dance to music, they could not just be dance but rather movement that aims to calm me down such as ‘stimming’, the movement patterns could be something as simple as movement as part of a reflex, the natural pull away of my hand when it touches something too hot to handle, or my understanding of proprioception when navigating a busy tube station. All of this thinking is body-thinking, it is thought that is ultimately guided and led with the whole of the body, not just the brain. In a recent conversation with Dr. Aby Watson, a queer neurodivergent choreographer, performer and academic of ‘stim-dancing’, Watson reminded me of the ‘neuro’ in neurodivergent, emphasising the fact that neurons ran throughout the body and this made me want to think more of the diversity in body-thinking that exists and ranges person to person, body to body.

As a choreographer in training, I seek to become aware of how my body thinks. Not aware so that there is an outcome of me then being able to manipulate what my body thinks, as perhaps I had previously tried to achieve with using dramatic intentions in my work, or indeed during technical dance training, but to become aware so that I understand what my body wants to say in the moment and why, so that environments that I can set up in my rehearsal studios can foster and give affordance to my body and help it generate material.

Seeking to do this has led me into practices that facilitate greater reflection on my improvisations, my habitual movement, my struggles and thoughts whilst choreographing and I have created feedback loops that circle practice with reflection with theory with practice with reflection with theory and so on.

Through doing this reflection and research into my practice, what becomes clear is how my confidence, my fear and my shame around how I move holds me back. I am preoccupied so much more with how a movement will be perceived when choreographing than I am with what the movement is exploring, the enquiry of my choreography. A shift was needed at the beginning of my research, towards this idea of choreography and dance as enquiry rather than as a creative outcome or product, in order to loosen up myself from the perfect, and I feel as though this shift of thinking is continuing to help with maintaining an openness in my choreographic development.

On the day that I am writing this, I feel not like a choreographer at all, the etymology of the word being to ‘write dance’, a dance (Khoreia) writer (graphein). This is partly what I do, but some of the dancing doesn’t become written, it doesn’t form enough as ideas to be fully constructed into coherent words and some of the dance remains as philosophical thoughts of enquiry that float around, change and interrupt what I make. These thoughts have the ability to shift constantly and so my practice does as well. In fact, right now, I feel much more like (albeit a mediocre) philosopher who has chosen dance as the knowledge sharing output for my thoughts, wonderings and abstract enquiries about the world and how I take part in it.

You cannot say things like this and not sound wanky and pretentious.

But this is how I can best describe what I am feeling, which in dance, isn’t often put down in words.

At the moment, the enquiry, the knowledge-seeking, the making dance that makes me think more about how and why I and others make dance, is what is exciting to me, rather than creating the best version of Cinderella that dance has ever seen. I think it’s important to add here that I believe the best ways to share knowledge is through engaging, entertaining, relatable, fun and enjoyable experiences for the viewer. So, even the best production of Cinderella that dance has ever seen could be how someone, a choreographer, enters enquiry about the why they make dance, the how they do it and enquiries about dance and philosophy more broadly. It’s hard not to mention internationally acclaimed choreographer Wayne McGregor here, who’s work deals with scientific, body-knowledge enquiry, but who’s work is frequently performed on ballet stages to audiences in their thousands each year, many of whom might be unaware of Wayne’s research that assists the making of his dance and simply in awe of the spectacle this research can produce.

Through researching how and why I make dance and entering choreographic enquiry, I have found a sticking point in my practice that makes me more and more curious each time I come across it. It’s the concept of ‘the imagined’ in dance-making. Fantasy. At first, this came up in my practice as me wanting to understand how intentions and actor-training systems could help me to pin down my imagination so that it was helpful in the performance of my dance to provide me with the ‘right’ textural qualities that I felt that the dance I was doing, needed. I feel it more important now to focus on my use of fantasy and imagination that already exists in the ways that I make dance. Philosopher Slavoj Zizek states that there are fantasies so engrained in us that it’s these imaginings that help us see and process the world. He writes a wordy definition of what it means to traverse these fantasies, and upon reading it, I realised that Traversing The Fantasy is something I want to do much more in my practice. Zizek says:

“In our daily existence, we are immersed in ‘reality’, structured and supported by the fantasy, but this very immersion makes us blind to the fantasy frame which sustains our access to reality. To transverse the fantasy therefore means, paradoxically, to fully identify with the fantasy, to bring the fantasy out.”

Writing from my choreographic practice, not only does my body think with it’s many neurons, but it can also fantasize and believe it’s own lies. That makes choreographing the reality of something, working with the reality of my body, a challenge. Zizek goes on to quote Richard Boothby who says:

‘Traversing the fantasy’ thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic reality, but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of fantasy that transcends imagining.’

It took me a while to understand what this means, but I’ll continue for now. Zizek helped me by framing Boothby’s remarks, saying:

“Traversing the fantasy is ‘not to see through it and perceive the reality obfuscated by it, but to directly confront the fantasy as such. Once we do this, its hold over us is suspended – why? Because fantasy remains operative only insofar as it functions as the transparent background of our experience – fantasy is like a dirty intimate secret which cannot survive public exposure.”

Importantly, Zizek/Boothby/Lacan is not asking everyone to stop fantasizing, but writes about what happens when there is an awareness of the fantasy, in the moment it occurs.

Let’s look at a fantasy that has come up in my improvisational dance practice. That fantasy is ‘I am seen as ‘good’ if I dance with a balletic alignment’. For whatever reason, perhaps my training, perhaps being a product of a western society, that is a fantasy that has a severe grip on my practice and has done for a long time. If I traverse this fantasy, however, I am noticing when a movement I do makes me feel ‘off’ and I recognise this discomfort that makes me feel the pull to ‘restore’ this movement, in my case, to get back to balletic alignment and to return to the fantastical image in my head of a ‘good dancer’. I am made aware of this impulse and I believe the fantasy that if I do restore my movement, I am good, I am valuable.

But if I am to traverse the fantasy, I would not do this. I would not rush into the known. Instead, I would continue to dance whilst aware of an arising tension that unsettles me, aware of this feeling of an awkwardness in the body and aware of the fantasy that correction towards how my body has been codified by trained technique equates with an idea of ‘goodness’. And it’s in this unresolved sensation of dancing both ideas at the same time, dancing the feeling of the pull of correction into good ballet alignment and the not rushing to do so, where I feel like I am finding my choreographic material at the moment. It’s in this gap that I think things are interesting, that I feel like I’m finding ‘self’ in dance. And this makes sense, because it’s my body in a kind of dialogue of where I’ve been (my training, my fantasies) and what my body wants to say in the moment.

I am just a choreographer in training… so let’s look at someone who is established. Let’s circle back on Wayne McGregor’s work. Through understanding more about my own practice, my perception of how McGregor works has changed from thinking his interest was simply in generating new movement (and almost failing to do so, with it so rooted in balletic language), to now thinking that one of his interests is in this dialogue between how a body has been trained and how it wants to think.

^ Dancers Joseph Sissens, Fumi Kaneko and William Bracewell in a streamed rehearsal of Wayne McGregor’s MADDADDAM, filmed at The Royal Ballet and Opera House.

In fact, I could see his work as trying to embody this tension between how something has been trained to move and the vitality at the core of these bodies and how they truly want to move and think like. Viewing Wayne’s work this way makes it much more moving to me. The work no longer is about the stories or technology that Wayne collaborates with, but instead, they become tools in which a body sits in the tension between their trained system and defying it. McGregor choreographs this unsettled place, of landing neither in or away from systematic dance, allowing the dancers to dance both their understanding of their training, their awareness of the pull towards it and to not rush back to ‘the known’ or ‘their known’.

I’ve written of queer theorist Sara Ahmed and her definitions of orientation and dis/orientation before, particularly Ahmed’s definition of queerness as ‘facing towards a home that has been lost and towards a place that is not yet home’. This feels like the gap where Wayne is asking the dancers to dance in. It feels like I’m watching dancing that is a recognition of the unsettled nature of the ‘home’ of bodies and the queering of balletically trained dancers.

I am researching my practice to understand what my ‘home’ is, what comes up that pulls my body to a known and what unsettles this. I’m interested in becoming more aware of my fantasies that help me process the realities of when I’m choreographing and I’m interested in what happens when I don’t rush back to the known, when I choreograph this unsettling. Not because I’m defying the way that my body has been coded up until now, because that is part of my artistic self too, but because by dancing in the unsettled place, I open more doors to more enquiries. I am open to more choreographic material. I am working to give affordance to more choreographic possibilities. As a choreographer in training, that feels like the most important thing I can be doing for my practice right now, perhaps forever.