WORK: hybridity and endurance within solo dance practice and performance

A studio performance (30 minutes) - to include a brief discussion post performance of the practice, experience and further direction of the solo hybrid dance practice and performance

The solo WORK represents an investigation and inquiry into hybrid practice and performance in dance. WORK is the product and register of the author's Master of Arts by Research project undertaken at Deakin University (2010-2012). The embodied inquiry into the nature and potential of hybridity begins and returns to the body in both the physical and written performances. Rather than viewing hybridity and the hybrid body as a pastiche of poorly understood practices, processes and aesthetics, this investigation proposes the hybrid body and practices as one of positive expansion, inquiry, and development for both art form and artist alike.

WORK developed a new approach to movement practice and performance through a solo performance that used physical paradigms of endurance and work to integrate the normally divergent movement practices of contemporary dance, circus and improvisation. Through experiments of endurance in practice and performance WORK engaged in an experiment that placed the author's body as researcher, dancer, choreographer, performer, acrobat and more into the centre of her inquiry. The author's inquiry posed questions as to the potential or otherwise of the hybrid body in the creation of an individual idiom in dance, and challenged bodily endurance in solo performance practice.

This was a performance demonstration of what training-practice, performance-practice and performance might be from a hybrid perspective and also the physical and psychological performance of WORK. WORK is presented as functional, critical, challenging, demanding, and as an endurance event.

The discussion post performance focused on a new choreographic methodology (Studio-led practice as research for PhD study) for extending the potentiality of hybrid work physically - looking forward to removing bias and habitués and potentially creating a new paradigm aesthetically, physically, practically and critically.