Drawing and dance

Senga Nengudi: Performance 1978

Watching the dancers performing before Tim Ingold came on to talk reminded me of how dance and drawing have become very close bedfellows over the last few years. However this is not surprising and if we go back in time or look at other cultures you will often find that the arts were totally integrated. Ellen Dissanayake in her book "Homo Aestheticus' has in particular argued that the arts are central to human evolutionary adaptation and demonstrates a close link between painting, song, dance, and drama as activities that are essential to how we build an understanding of our place in the world. This situation is totally at odds with a Western tendency to categorise and atomise, holding up the idea of specialisation that underpins certain aspects of the scientific method. This could be seen at its most trenchant during the period of Clement Greenberg's influence over Western painting during the late 1940s through to the early 1960s. Greenberg was himself reflecting on Lessing's Laocoon, each in their turn writing about the specificity of art forms and how they needed to be refined and honed in relation to their particular characteristics in order to work at their optimum. Ingold would have said, I'm sure, that what this meant was that art was following theory and theory itself is always at least one remove from reality. The work therefore becomes an illustration of theory rather than a becoming in correspondence with an experience of the world. 
As experiential beings we are essentially holistic in our being at one with the world. Therefore we ought to be able to deal with the flow between disciplines as a normal consequence of the totality of life. In everyday conversations we use our body language as much and perhaps more than our verbal language to communicate, our fingers gesture to emphasis a point with sometimes more emphasis than the inflection we put into our words. We act intuitively to respond to situations, not usually having time to break each action down depending on whether it would it be better to use voice or body.  

Dance is a time based art form, therefore video rather than still photographs is a more appropriate way to experience it. However by the very nature of web links what I might put in as links to various drawing/dance/performance events can in time be taken away, so please bear with me if you are following this post at a later date and the links have gone dead. 

Some performance drawing work that is worth exploring as an introduction to the area. 

The MOMA resource On Line is a useful introduction to this expanded field of drawing. 

Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballets have had a long influence on the visual arts, this video is a recreation of Schlemmer’s work. 

Robert Rauschenberg's Pelican is an early performance work that is well worth researching. Rauschenberg was friends with both Merce Cunningham the choreographer and John Cage the musician, as artists they saw how they could effect each other's approach to working, each one stimulating the other and helping each other realise how they could take their particular disciplines into new directions by combining them and in doing so reinventing them. 

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, has walked and danced through a prepared arena of sand to make us aware of the way we move through space and in this instance used two members of her performance troupe to construct a drawing that is designed to shape the nature of dance moves when the dancers emerge onto the stage, not as a separate activity, but as an actual part of the performance.  

Neville Gabie is an artist that uses mark making as an extension of very physical performances his 'contact improvisation' techniques including working with a huge heavy lump of chalk or a bucket of whitewash. Just as dance itself can integrate everyday human activities, Gabie extends drawing into those territories that we often ignore as 'everyday' events. 

David Connearm is another artist that uses the limitations of the body to make his drawings. This is a description of his practice:
"He begins by drawing a line at the top of a sheet of paper, as straight as possible, although it inevitably records minor tremors of the artist's hand. The next line, drawn closely underneath, is an attempt to replicate this line, small imperfections and all, and will also necessarily introduce its own imperfection; and so on down the sheet. Even with this exacting method, the drawings record some degrees of variation. The way in which the paper absorbs the ink is affected by the humidity of a particular day or hour, by the slightly varying speeds at which the lines are drawn, and other uncontrollable factors. Connearn uses Rotring pens in order deliberately to minimize the expressive qualities of the lines."
From the V&A website
In this case it is the drawing as a final result that we see exhibited, but in your head you can 'see' him in action, repeating the same movements over and over again and for me this becomes a type of dance. 

David Connearn, Mappa Mundi: Drawing to the Extent of the Body

The exhibition 'The Artist is an Explorer', curated by Marina Abramovic included several artists working in a vein that overlaps drawing and performance.

Heather Hanson has developed several controlled performances that emphasise the bi-lateral symmetry of the human body. 

Tony Orrico's performances are again treading that line between dance and drawing. 

There is a long history of collaboration between choreographers and contemporary artists, and so those of you wanting to work in this area should not feel daunted by a lack of existing research. 

Revisiting MOMA's 'On Line' could be a useful place to start, especially as it was curated in such a way that there was seen to be a gradual transition between ways of thinking about a line in space and the line as network.
This is how it was described at the time:

'On Line is organised chronologically in three sections: Surface Tension, featuring the artistic drive to construct and represent movement through line within the flat picture plane; Line Extension, composed of works in which lines extend beyond flatness into real space—that is, into social space; and Confluence, presenting works in which line and background are fused, giving greater significance to the space between lines. In following the development of the meaning of line over the last one hundred years, the exhibition traces it in movement, across disciplines, and as it has been drawn out and rewoven in time and space—inevitably reflecting the interconnection and interdependency that are increasingly both shaping and emerging from a globalized society. Line, like thought, once understood as linear and progressive, has evolved into a kind of network: fluid, simultaneous, indefinite, and open.' (MOMA website)

Some of the issues in the post above have been touched upon earlier, see for example:
Is drawing a language (Part three)  

Tom Wolfe's 'The Painted Word' is an interesting critique of Greenberg and other theorists and their influence on art.