Please do not touch: Dancing in the Museum

Start: May 25, 2017 05:00 PM

As Tony Bennett (1995) reminds us, the museum is a training-ground to think about time differently. Might dance in the museum of art and archaeology be considered a means to think about history differently?

Marie-Louise Crawley (University of Coventry) asks how choreography within museum and gallery spaces might allow for the emergence of new multimodal dialogues between body, space, time and art object, how it might offer us a new ‘multimodal’ approach for understanding how history is exhibited, or even for understanding history itself?

This presentation will consider these questions by exploring two case studies drawn from her own choreographic practice-as-research: choreography produced in the art gallery as part of the TATE / ARTIST ROOMS Robert Therrien exhibit in 2014, and her current project in the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford (2017).

Drawing on dance historian Gabriele Brandstetter’s recent theory on the ‘museum in transition’, Mary-Louise suggests that the live, dancing body in the museum itself creates a different present so that other previously unrealised potential histories may be given form.
About the speaker

Marie-Louise Crawley is a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Dance Research of the University of Coventry
Registration

Image: Myrrha. Photo credit Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford (2017)