Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance

Develops a new framework to understand performance and temporality in contemporary dance.

Performing Temporality in Contemporary European Dance probes rhythm, offbeats, and other patterns to examine how twenty-first-century choreographers perform time. Jonas Rutgeerts calls on the philosophical writings of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Gaston Bachelard to theorize work by choreographers renowned for their productively idiosyncratic approaches to dance: Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, Ivana Müller, Mette Edvardsen, and Mårten Spångberg.

Rutgeerts analyzes syncopation in the work of Burrows and Fargion, hesitation in Müller’s While We Were Holding It Together, repetition in pieces by Edvardsen, and the audience’s experience of the present in Spångberg’s Natten.