Sensing in contemporary dance. Logic of aesthetic gesture ; Travail des sensations dans la pratique de la danse contemporaine. Logique du geste esthétique.

This work deals with some contemporary forms of choregraphic expressions which give a major importance to the exploration of the possibilities of “feeling” or "sensing" in their workshops : those of the French choreographer Odile Duboc, the American post-modern choreographer Trisha Brown and those of the Dance Contact Improvisation ( a choreographic trend initiated by Steve Paxton, in the same American post-modern movement). For these artists, dance is less based on the learning or the imitation of movements, as one may imagine, but it is more the search for an ability of “sensorial reception”; dance workshops tend to become real research laboratories in which both the “work on sensations” and the “work on senses” prevail. Dancers work on sense, vision, touch and hearing and even, in some workshops, on taste and smell. These sensations lead them to both states of body and movements. Therefore, we may assert that dancers, as natural explorers of the movements, can become explorers of the sensitivity or sensation, because a deep relationship if not a coincidence tends to exist between sensation and movement . this relationship questions a particular widespread opinion of both the “reception” and the “action”. These choreographic works - which are based above all on the “sensation of the movement”, on the “ sensation of the weight”, on the “con-sensus” with gravity - give birth to a “kinesthesy” rhyming with a full “esthesy”. What is at stake is the production of a deeply esthetic gesture - “esthetic” being used in its ethymological meaning (aisthesis= sensation), an “aesthetic” gesture giving back their own abilities of creating a reality to both the senses and the body as a material. This gesture gives birth to a different form of “bodyness” and a different way of being together, another way of thinking the body as well as another way of thinking altogether. ; Cette étude se penche sur quelques modes contemporains de production chorégraphique qui accordent une place cruciale à l’exploration des ressources du ...