modern dance, was inclined to view movements as subject to music. Martin asserts that in order to be accepted as an art form in its own right, dance should be aligned with movements that represent individual and universal concerns through choreography as a unique process of dance (Martin, 1933, p.6). Since the 1960s, on the other hand, the meaning of choreography has not been confined to inscribing movements into the bodies, but it has extended to setting a structure which instigates the bodies to move, in response to the designed environment. Emerging at the Reuben Gallery and the Judson Church in New York, postmodern dance as the antithesis of stylised and expressive movements of modern dance tended to claim distinct artistic initiatives to modify a compositional procedure and to extend beyond a theatre space as the site for performance. The postmodern choreographers in the 1960s and 1970s had individual aesthetic concerns and methods, but shared common ground regarding what choreography means in their works. They intended to abandon movements that represent someone or something else and instead present the body itself as a message. Their choreographic focus is on investigating how and why movements proceed, rather than what the movements display. These movements, then, are not required to be in harmony with music or to be conducted in a stylised manner with technical virtuosity. Instead, the choreographers devise how pedestrian movements and everyday gestures are arranged and combined by using task-oriented and improvisational processes which give rise to physical and socio-political awareness. As an iconoclast, Anna Halprin’s concept of directing rather than choreographing had significant influence on the early generation of postmodern choreographers, such as Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton. For Halprin, improvisation is the key method to emancipate the body from institutionalised
‘mind-expanding’ perception with sensory-assailing experience of images (Grau, 2003, p.200). Scenographer and media artist Mark Reaney also points out that both virtual reality and theatre bring about a suspension of disbelief for audiences and immerse them in a fictive world. What is different between immersive experiences in these two media is that the former accentuates audiences’ sensory involvements with the world while the latter attracts the audiences’ attention to storytelling (Reaney, 1999, p.184). To acknowledge different forms of immersion and avoid misunderstanding, immersion in theatre has often been called by alternative terms such as ‘engagement’ (Reaney, 1999, p.184) or ‘dramatic immersion’ (Packer and Jordan, 2001, p.xxxi) perceived by a cognitive process with a limited range of sensory engagement. However, in of fact, it was before the development of virtual reality technologies that artistic experiments with sensory experience for an audience had been attempted in the contexts of visual art and performing arts. The lineage of immersive practice in the arts can be traced back to Antonin Artaud’s total theatre in the era of Modernism. In his seminal book The Theatre and its Double (1958 [1938]), Artaud, one of the most influential theatre theorists in the twentieth century, objects to theatre which is bound to scripts and appeals to the intellect. Instead, he proposes the concept of total theatre which underlines expressive and spectacular elements so as to provoke spectators to unleash raw and real qualities of the human condition, such as fear, pain and panic. Artaud’s total theatre also embraces the disruption of the stage and auditorium by bringing the audiences into the performance space. For Artaud, to experience total theatre implies the full immersion of the audience. Allan Kaprow’s Happening (see Chapter 2) and Richard Schechner’s manifesto for Environmental theatre in the 1960s are descended from Artaud’s concept of total theatre.
In realms of mediated and digital performance, choreographers’ experiments with technologies are presumably the most natural phenomenon as they are fundamentally engaged with bodies by thinking and substantiating their embodied knowledge of the bodies as the whole entity of mind and body (Remshardt, 2008, pp.48-49). Choreographers incorporate technologies as essential elements of performance, not subsidiary ones, redressing orthodox notions of dance performance by defying its condition, the physical co-presence of human performers and audiences. They not only expand a substance for incarnating choreographic knowledge from a body to an object and a (material or immaterial) space, but also reframe choreographic knowledge itself by reflecting on how a human subject’s corporeal and technological self are entangled to embody the world and the self within the world. As the case studies of this thesis have contemporary choreographic practices involve the disembodiment of the corporeal body in a virtual world and the dehumanisation/mechanisation of the human through cyborgian technologies. From an anthropocentric humanist perspective that treats technology and its increasing physical and cognitive ability as a potential threat to the human, or from a popular posthumanist/transhumanist perspective that pursues the transcendence of the body, technologically generated presence of the human subject in choreographic practices may be conceived as an apocalyptic future for the human body. However, this pessimistic view of virtual and cyborgian bodies perpetuates a dualistic assumption that primarily relegates the body to its sensorimotor surface separated from its abstract cognition and affords the privilege of the human’s inherent nature and its univocal perspective on the world, which is not how the choreographers address and conceptualise to the human body in my case studies. In this thesis, I have argued that the choreographers resist an anthropocentric dualism and hierarchy between the
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