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Choreographers handbook︎︎︎
A Choreographers Handbook is a book filled with words of wisdom for art making (not just dance). Here are a few:

Inspiration:
  • Useful if you can get it, but working is more useful

Habits:
  • Work against them to make them conscious
  • Make a piece only with your habits

Repetition:
  • The difference between a repetition that is only filling time and a repetition that resists deliciously our desire for the new, without ever feeling bored or frustrated.
  • The smallest imperfection stands out like a punctuation

Risk:
  • If I didn’t want to risk everything every time- I would have nothing to risk
  • It’s just a stupid dance
  • What performance changed everything for you and why?

Intimacy:

"Our job as choreographers is to stay close enough to what we’re doing to feel it, and at the same time use strategies to distance ourselves enough to grasp momentarily what someone else might perceive."

Contract:
  • The first thing the audience sees establishes how they read it.
  • Can be broken, which can be a way of communicating
  • You are teaching the language at the same time you are using it

Breaking the Rules:
  • The rules are only useful if they’re working
  • If it’s not working, drop it (on a need to break the rules basis)

Theory:
  • It’s nice when people of a theoretical mind are interested in what we do. It blesses us with a different perspective, which carries a seductive sense of validation, that the mess we create can be grasped by a logical mind
  • The mess is also quite seductive

Collaboration:
  • When you allow yourself to make a discovery, then there is something there for your audience to discover
  • When you try to agree too much with your collaborators, then there’s nothing new to discover, for you or the audience
  • Talking is only one way to collaborate
  • Talking shouldn’t become an easy escape from the frustrations which might eventually lead you somewhere

Originality:
  • You can’t make a piece by trying to be original
  • What is going on around you? What is the historical context in which you jump? Can you know this and still work?
  • History is looking over your shoulder
  • Is there something you haven’t done you want to do?
  • Sometimes the thing we need is so close to us that we can’t see it, so we undervalue what we know, in favor of what we don’t know
  • Why you started doing this in the first place…maybe that has been buried under other people’s classes and performances
  • Contemporary performance has to establish its conventions and then stretch them. This is connected to the way in which creativity is seen as something which must involve a breach or transgression.
  • Burrows: the function of an artist is to evoke the experience of surprised recognition.
  • The challenge to subvert can be too strong, before something has a chance to reveal itself

Technique:
  • What if there was nothing to improve?
  • How do you want to move?
  • The aesthetic agenda held within our bodies from a lifetime of training create perimeters that both enable and limit our ability to imagine what might also be possible; how might we hold onto these physical blessings, whilst liberating ourselves from the boundaries they sometimes set to our imagination?
  • It will do its job weather you focus on it or not
  • The audience enjoys skill, but anybody doing what they want to do, and doing it well, appears skillful

Time:
  • Squeezing movement into the wrong time frame can be quite gripping. The dancer is engaged in the attempt to negotiate the conundrum, and because they are engaged, the audience is also engaged.
  • It’s just a way to wake things up
  • The dance that goes all speeds is unpredictable; this then becomes predictable
  • Audiences like change
  • The tendency to dance without a beat (which led contemporary dance to establish itself as an art form) leads to longer works than can be sustained by a short dance form.

Failure:
  • It’s often the attempt to so what you’re doing which makes us intrigued
  • As long as they know that you know you’re failing, if you’re uncomfortable about it they will feel uncomfortable        
  • Accepting self consciousness

︎︎︎from A Choreographers Handbook by Johnathan Burrows
Welcome to mapping collaboration, a toolbox for workshopping and creating across disciplines...

In spite of a long history of interdisciplinary creation, from our earliest recorded arts to our present moment, artistic pedagogy has created divisions between disciplines. This has left artists in a "post-Babel" condition where we don't share the same language and definitions. It’s also encouraged artists to develop practices for devising, creating and composing work that are distinct to their disciplines.

The inspiration for this project came from faculty and students at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts where BFA, MFA and PhD programs in Dance, Theatre Production and Design, Visual Art, Film, and Music and Sound all work together in studio settings and playfully experiment with processes of art-making.

We wanted to create a database of projects, assignments and theory that we collect inside the studio and from research happening in other places. We are curious about how we collaborate and how structures reoccur, translate and deviate from one discipline to another.

Composition is central to these processes and offers a base for our approaches and experiments. We are excited about what our students are doing and inspired by the new languages in contemporary art and performance we continue to see develop.

︎︎︎select a category above to build assignments, learn more about how artists process ideas across disciplines and to create a collaborative process of your own

︎︎︎these tools are collected and used in workshops and classes; some are resources from artists; some are quotes about art-making and how bodies think and listen; others are ideas to expand and disrupt your own training and processes.  

︎︎︎Each idea is intentially short- and not meant to be executed as written, but to be adapted to your own practice and specific project/context. Some may be taken in parts or combined with others to spark new ways of training and making together.

︎︎︎submit your own ideas and tools so we can keep building this site!