Table of Contents

Introduction / Gurur Ertem, Noémie Solomon

Choreographing the Temporality of Movement (or, the present crossing out of presence) / Rudi Laermans

Facing Time in Dance and the Dance of Time / Geisha Fontaine

Change and Event: Contemporary Dance and the Praxis of Transformation / Boyan Manchev

Reconstruction2: On the Reconstructions of Pupilija, papa Pupilo and the Pupilceks

Thoughts on Duration / Adrian Heathfield

At the New Babylon / Myriam van Imschoot

We might say that dance and time have a privileged relation, that they form an intimate yet paradoxical partnership. Among many others, the philosopher Paul Valéry famously claimed: “Dance after all is merely a form of time, the creation of a kind of time, of a very distinct and singular species of time”; more recently William Forsythe has described bodies in dance as time machines, and time as the exquisite product of the dancing body; Merce Cunningham spoke of dance as the “impermanent art”; Xavier Le Roy of the performing body as nothing but the passage or the crossing of different temporalities and modes of thinking; La Ribot of dance as that which makes time visible. Contemporary dancers and choreographers have taken hold of speed and slowness not only to refigure the contours of dance, but also to propose alternative modes of subjectivity within contemporary culture, imagining and enacting multiple modalities of thinking, experiencing and inventing time.

This book consists of some of the contributions to the conference in the frame of second iDANS Festival that took place over a full weekend in collaboration with the Istanbul Modern Museum on 16th and 17th of May, 2009.