A Decade of MA Solo Dance Authorship

PROGRAMME
Developing from the initial pilot phase (2007–2009) the core programme
structure has provided a flexible framework within which
SODA students and staff have explored the tensions, trajectories
and directions that SODA has taken within the institutional and
educational frameworks that it has had to operate within or find
ways of accommodating. SODA in many respects tracks the development
of the dance, performance and art worlds and reflects the
more recent impact of social media. This includes not only the
various ‘turns’ since the 1990s in the field of dance and performance
- linguistic, conceptual, digital, educational, affective, sensory
and so forth; but also (as primarily an international programme)
the experiential, educational and artistic backgrounds
and assumptions of the staff, students, visiting artists and mentors
(see Lists) who have shaped the broader directions and ethos
of SODA. As Sabine Huschka indicated in the 2006 Symposium
‘the choice of teachers and their respective profiles would determine
largely the contents of the education’ (Cramer, 2006:24)
As things change and transform over time, so then do attitudes
and approaches to the core terms of the programme – solo, dance,
and authorship. If the title (in 2006) presented a potential problem
to the artists and theorists who attended the Symposium,
then the shift of approach to the title not as a problem but as a
problematic through the experience of the pilot programme
(2007–2009) became not only a memorable and useful acronym,
but also a useful and productive point of discussion and disagreement
in both practical and conceptual modes, a catalyst for positioning
and integrating both practical and theoretical approaches
to making art work. This would confirm a sense (in both educational
and artistic environments) that how we think of arts practice
and how we receive arts practice has been contested since
antiquity as a source of both pleasure, disagreement, censorship
and emancipation.
Uferstudios Backgrounds (2011) Photo © Sven Hagolani
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