Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge, 2024) examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments: unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency.
Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more than human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters.
Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.
This monograph builds upon a decade of research since curating the Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham exhibition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: Collaborations
Part I: Discipline
1. Disciplinary Critiques 2. Extra-Disciplinary Citations and Transformations
Part II: Space
3. Sites 4. Dispositifs: Structuring Relations
Part III: Dance
5. Dancing Architectures 6. Dancing Cybarcorps
Conclusion: Temporalities
Choreographers and Architects whose work is included:
1. Frédéric Flamand and Diller Scofidio +Renfro (DS+R); Flamand and Dominique Perrault / DPA; Flamand and Zaha Hadid Architects ZHA; Carol Brown and Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen; Jessica Lang and Steven Holl Architects SHA; William Forsythe, Maria Palazzi, Norah Zuniga Shaw and Stephen Turk.
2. Wayne McGregor and John Pawson; Nacho Duato and Jaafar Chalabi; Flamand and Thom Mayne / Morphosis; Kota Yamazaki and Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects; Phillip Adams and Büro; Adams and Matthew Bird / Studio Bird.
3. Asher Waldron with the SSDT and Bryony Roberts; Brown and Dorita Hannah; Sharon Mansur and Ronit Eisenbach; Tanya Lukin Linklater and Tiffany Shaw-Collinge; La Vitrina and Rodrigo Tísi; Melissa Lohman and Roberts.
4. Ella Fiskum and Serge von Arx; Ellen Sinopoli and Frances Bronet; Flamand and Jean Nouvel / AJN; JoKanamori and Tsuyoshi Tane; Richard Siegal and François Roche; Forsythe and Nikolaus Hirsch & Michel Müller.
5. Elisa Monte and Tod Williams Billie Tsien & Associates; Tere O’Connor and Julie Larsen & Roger Hubeli / APTUM; Flamand and Ai Weiwei;JohnJasperse and Ammar Eloueini / Digit-All; Alonzo King and Christopher Haas; Siegal and Didier Fiúza Faustino.
6. Jonah Bokaer and Harrison Atelier (HAt); Alito Alessi and Bronet; Yamazaki and SO-IL; Grisha Coleman and John Oduroe; Silas Riener and HAt; Bokaer and DS+R.
7. Childs and Gehry; Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Company and DS+R.
architecture agency 