A Dramaturgical Analysis of Contingence: Virtual Improvisation in Public Space 

Contingence, an improvisational dance piece performed in public spaces in five different countries and live-streamed to a central virtual meeting location, focused on the ideas of communication online and the importance and possibilities of the body on a public virtual stage. The possibilities of performing online with an international cast formulated questions around the precarity of online performances, the importance of improvisational mindsets in pandemic times, and how the body can exist in two spaces at once: online and offline, public and private. These elements contributed to the question: How does the virtual stage allow for more malleable artistic processes through dance improvisation in a globalized context, while additionally recognizing the importance of the private body in public online communication? 

Improvisation is used in everyday thinking and society, according to Leach and Stevens (2020), and these skills were only amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research into online bodily communication was relatively uncharted territory before the sudden surge in online work, and the dance industry struggled to adjust to a two-dimensional world. Public space and online performances challenge the way the audiences and artists exist in a liminal space both as participants, as the artists can be performing and the audience are observing and performing their experiences, such as through reactions. As a dancer, choreographer, and producer, I had a unique view of audience and artist roles in Contingence and how each role contributed to the liminality of the space. Performance in itself is an “event with its liminoid nature foregrounded, almost invariably clearly separated from the rest of life, presented by performer and attended by audiences” (McKenzie, 2004). 

The performing artists were reflective of Sheridan’s Performance Triad as it was a technologically based performance. In the Triad, the three roles are participant, performer and observer (Sheridan, et al., 2004). In the piece, the artists played more than one part, performing, observing and responding to each others’ performances. There were also two other sets of observers: the audience members watching online and the people in the outdoor areas who may have observed the improvisational movement.

In the Performance Triad theory, the conventional theatre performance lies at the centre, with each collaborator contributing an equal amount, while technology surrounds the entire performance (Sheridan et al., 2004). In this way, technology had more influence on the performance than any of the collaborators alone. In theories of audience perception and public space performances, the role of the artists is important to the performance and outcome. These theories also challenge the audiences’ experiences in a public space while working in the private sphere of a Zoom webinar (Calvi, 2013). Audiences in the public space are not always prepared for performances, whereas the online audiences for this piece were. However, the chosen performance setting as physically in public space though at the same time, coming to the audiences through digital space, created a setting that could have felt public or private, depending on the viewer. This configuration required the artists to have an expansive awareness of themselves in a public space (Calvi, 2013), which was instructed through rehearsals and reinforced through elements such as safety and videography. 

An important aspect of the artist selection process was the performers’ comfort with not only public space improvisational performance, but also with controlling their own camera. Similar to Jennifer Nikolai’s “camera-dance”, the artists of Contingence were able to see their movements and thus had the agency to make subtle choices that affected the audience and other artists moving in the online space (Nikolai, 2016). While self-directing their improvisational movement and camera angles, the artists were continually informed by the spaces around them and their cultural experiences (Sherman, 1998). Comparing Asian and Western styles of filming and photography contributed to the outcome of the piece because of the influence of “context-inclusive styles versus object-focused styles” (Čuš Babič et al., 2018). This manifested in the differences between the artist from Singapore and the other artists from Europe and North America, specifically in how they presented certain aspects of their performances on camera, such as their head in relation to an object. However, there were many similarities in the movements, as well as the objects and body parts focused on during the piece, which could be attributed to globalization. The theory of globalization that was used during research, which was evident within the cast and dance score, was from Dr. Nayef R.F. Al-Rodhan and Ambassador Gérard Stoudmann: “Globalization is a process that encompasses the causes, course, and consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human and non-human activities.” (2006). Although the improvisational score was reflective of the cultural background of the artists, dance is not a reflection of culture, but an extended expression of it (Kringelbach & Skinner, 2012). 

A particular area that was researched for the score was the cultural influences on gestures, hand movements and positions. Different cultures tolerate different things when it comes to movement in public spaces, which became apparent through a reflection from an artist while rehearsing outside was the comfortability of self-touch in a rubbing sequence, as opposed to a shaking sequence, because rubbing your hands together has a purpose and is more culturally acceptable (Shepherd, 2021, p. 274). The relationship between culture and movement is dynamic and untethered in definition, which was mirrored in the performer-videographer relationship, as the artists were their own videographers. 

The fluid relationship between a physical body dancing and technology invites a sense of improvisation. In bringing dance to the virtual stage, many artists may desire to secure authorship and ownership, which is compounded by the fact that dance improvisation is unrepeatable (Whatley & Waelde, 2016). In further looking to public space as a contributor, interactions in public space usually rely on improvisation based on societal norms in moments that are heavily influenced by current happenings. 

Risk is inherent in every dance and physical performance, to the artists, participants, audience members, and anyone else around the performance space. For Contingence, it was a set of public spaces in Ireland, Germany, Portugal, the U.S. and Singapore. With the addition of the virtual staged aspect, the risk was increased through the means of virtual performance, public space and the global pandemic, even considering the physically distanced and internationally separated cast. Embracing risk allows for more openness (O’Grady, 2017) and the virtual stage affords such an openness, creating opportunities for cultural and artistic exchange to happen on the virtual stage. The application of risk as a key concept was to encourage critical learning in the artists and audience members alike in a method similar to how public space “activist artists attempt to expose the participants’ own role in constructing an exclusionary version of the world by placing them at risk in order for growth and change to occur.” (O’Grady, 2017). This allowed Contingence to “embrace the risks associated with leaving gaps, spaces, cracks, and crevices for people to explore” (O’Grady, 2017) for the artists and the audiences. These “cracks” and “crevices” were created through the liminal or non-spaces available only to virtual stages, as the performers worked in public spaces internationally, while a global audience watched in a variety of public and private spaces (Augé, 2009). By allowing the public into the private, the audience were somewhat encouraged to take on that risk, albeit one with a low percentage of negative outcomes, as the performance could simply be turned off. This form of risk “implicates audiences in the action”(O’Grady, 2017) which is driven by the need for more risk in daily life. There was the additional risk of performing in public space which has long contended with political and social constraints on public space expressions, especially within the surveillance cultures of the U.S., Singapore and Germany (Lyon, 2017). At its core, dance improvisation is a risk-filled endeavor that would not exist if risk was not invited into the process.

The technique of embracing uncertainty is necessary while working dramaturgically with dance improvisation and the score created for Contingence reflected this, by seeking out the “gaps” for the artists “to explore” (O’Grady, 2017). Scholar André Carreira inspired a similar approach to risk which allows the space to also create “a type of dramaturgy”, which in this case, were the international public spaces and the virtual stage. The dramaturgy created by the virtual space separated the audience members to the same degree as the artists, in contrast to a typical proscenium performance setup that only separates artists and audience, while allowing each group some contact. In more conventional dance performances, risk is also involved, in the creation, in the box office and even in the dancers' bodies. Considering the setup of the performance, only the five artists’ videos were shown, and at certain points, only one was visible to the audience, this created the dramaturgy of risk; risk of missing the initiation of a movement or the risk of the audience losing track of a performer. These elements, although set up by the improvisational score, were unknown to the audience in the hope that it would increase the audience’s and artists’ openness to the unknown.

Creating an improvisation dance work for the globalized virtual stage allows for more risk-taking, which leads to more openness, empathy and a new creative artistic process crafted in part by all the participants and their physical bodies as they communicate in a blended private-public virtual space.

References 

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Shepherd, D., 2021. Portfolio. https://djshepherd94.wixsite.com/dianashepherd/contingence

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