Releasing the Archive: An experimental clinic for choreographic acts of repair

Abstract

The clinic tests André Lepecki’s (2010) claim that a re-enactment of movement codes is a form of invention that politicizes time by ‘unlocking, releasing and actualising’ what is held in reserve within dances of the past. The clinic attempts to repair the tear between Ausdruckstanz’s Central European origins in Vienna and its Australasian development through the embodied legacy of Gertrud Bodenwieser (b. Vienna 1890 d. Sydney 1959). It does so through experimenting with early somatic foundations of the Bodenwieser Method informed by the Bess Mensendieck System, in particular her feminist nude culture of a body ethics. What can contemporary appropriations of these methods do to our bodies tod..