Dance: Performance Visual Art - Dance BA(Hons)

Image: Hannah Nicholls, 'Dress Undress'

The BA(Hons) PAVA (Dance) course allows you to combine interests in visual art and dance practices.

We are looking for applicants who can demonstrate a range of practices through a portfolio of work. We receive a high volume of applicants, but endeavour to interview as many applicants as is possible. In some instances we may invite an applicant to submit a digital portfolio prior to selection for interview. Applicants with strong portfolios but who do not meet the entry requirements are encouraged to apply. Mature students are welcome.

During your studies you will have opportunities to investigate contemporary visual art practices and experiment with composing and choreographing the moving body.

The work students create on the course covers a broad range of forms in performance and contemporary art including screendance, installation practices, site-specific work, live art, and documentation practices.

You develop visual research skills through experiments in drawing, collage, photography, moving image and sculpture, while performance research is delivered in workshops that build improvisation and composition skills and develop abilities in devising choreography for the live and screen body.

The course attracts ambitious and energetic students who have the capacity to work individually and in groups. Through independent and collaborative working methods students explore varied ways in which artists engage with audiences. Throughout your studies on the course you will have opportunities to work alongside students from Music and Visual Art and Performance and Visual Art (Theatre).

You are supported in the development of technical skills relevant to visual art and dance performance, these include, an intensive series of technical inductions to the performance, visual art, sound recording and rehearsal studios. Technical inductions in lighting, audio and visual software programmes, and workshop tools and machinery support the development of student’s creative work, as well as practical workshops in movement research.

You will have the opportunity to present new work in both private and public contexts and develop verbal and written articulation of your practice through feedback sessions.

... why combine visual art with dance?

The course is designed to enable you to establish your own independent and interdisciplinary arts practice. You will examine the convergence of dance and visual art during the 20th century and will explore contemporary practices that are rooted in both contemporary visual art and dance.

Throughout the 20th century visual artists challenged traditional representations of the human body in art, establishing new relationships to the physical and cultural codification of the body. These innovations challenged audiences to encounter the artwork in different ways such as works which offered immersive environments for audiences, or participatory events, in which the audience experience is an element in the work, and durational encounters with the live body as sculptural material within the artwork.

Similarly, dance choreographers and performers questioned the inherited 19th century notions of the performance space and choreographed movement, expanding the understanding of the term dance to include a broader range of physical activities.  Everyday movements were investigated, the body as sculptural object was explored and relationships between performer and audience were questioned.

The Performance and Visual Art (Dance) course builds upon these innovations and encourages creative individuals to develop a personalised and individual art practice. Students on the dance course are supported in the regular development of practical visual and movement skills and engage in a process of sustained interrogation of ideas, concepts, histories and contexts that shape today’s contemporary art practice.

Is this course for me?

This list is intended as a guide to help you make an informed decision about the course before applying. You do not need to meet the below criteria before you apply for this course. If you are thinking about applying for this course but would like more information please contact us.

Glossary

This is a short glossary which very briefly introduces key terms and concepts that crop-up in the many conversations, discussions and debates amongst students. It is certainly not an exhaustive list and the defintions themselves have been simplified, but we hope it offers some sense of the richness and diversity of subject areas covered in the Performance and Visual Art (Dance) course at the University of Brighton.

Choreography: The art of creating and arranging dances. An earlier term, orchesographie, was created in 1589 from the Greek work for writing (graph) and dance (orchesie), and became known as choreography in 1700. The term reflects its early meaning as a written record of dances. By the 19th century choreography was used mainly for the creation of dances and the written record became known as dance notation. Choreography became recognized as an independent art form in the early 20th century and is today situated among the languages of space and of corporeality.
[Sources: The free dictionary, http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Choreography;
André Lepecki, Exhausting Dance, Routledge: New York and London 2006, 132; Cairon Nº 11 Revista de Estudios de Danza, Cuerpo y Cinematografía, 2008, 237.)

Cinematography: The art or science of motion-picture photography. It involves such techniques as the general composition of a scene; the lighting of the set or location; the choice of cameras, lenses, filters, and film stock; the camera angle and movements; and the integration of any special effects. All these concerns may involve a sizeable crew on a feature film, headed by a person variously known as the cinematographer, first cameraman, lighting cameraman, or director of photography, whose responsibility is to achieve the photographic images and effects desired by the director.
[Source: Enceclopedia Britannicca, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/118048/cinematography]

Installation Art: Also described as environments, the term is used to describe mixed-media constructions or assemblages usually designed for a specific place and for a temporary period of time. Works often occupy an entire room or gallery space that the spectator invariably has to walk through in order to engage fully with the work of art. Some installations, however, are designed simply to be walked around and contemplated, or are so fragile that they can only be viewed from a doorway, or one end of a room.
[Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=654]

Modern Dance: A form of dance that developed in the United States and Europe in the late 19th century (through for example Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Haya Holm and Martha Graham), receiving widespread success in the 20th. It evolved as a protest against both the balletic and the interpretive dance traditions of the time and continues to be used in this way. Modern dance artists include Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham.
[partly adapted from: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/387170/modern-dance]

New Media: the term is used to differentiate contemporary technologies from the old media (such as film and video) whose aesthetic is driven by the rectangular frame and the mobile camera. While new media relies on the conventions of the old media to create the illusions of reality, to address the viewer, and to represent space, it also makes use of entirely new means such as the interface and the database.
[adapted from: Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press: Cambride, Massachusetts and London, England, 2001, back cover]

Performance art: Art in which the medium is the artist's own body and the artwork takes the form of actions performed by the artist. Performance art has origins in Futurism and DADA, but became a major phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as a branch of Conceptual Art. In Germany and Austria it was known as Actionism.
[Source: http://www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=218]

Postmodern Dance: A contested term, which encompasses in general a dance which is thought of moving away from the innovators of the mid 20th century,  Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine for example. It refers simultaneously to a historical movement in dance, the present moment in dance, a period that follows modernism.  Key figures include: The Judson Dance Theatre, Simone Forti, Kenneth King, Meredith Monk, Michael Clark, Jérôme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, La Ribot, Vera Mantero.
[partly adapted from: Sally Banes, Writing dancing in the age of Postmodernism, Wesleyan University Press: Hanover NH, 1994, xii)

Screendance: The term Screendance broadly describes a field, which combines choreography and cinematography. There are no hard and fast criteria for a definition of screendance and there have been a number of terms used to describe the work, often limited to an indication of materiality, e.g. Video dance, Cinedance or Dance film. Screendance as a term articulates a common denominator between all of the above.
[adapted from: The International Journal of Screendance, Issue1, June 2010, Editorial]

Screen-based practices: this term includes all kinds of practices which use a screen as a means to display work. This can include film such as Super-8 and 16mm to digital video to internet-based projects and work that is distributed via mobile phones or hand-held devices such as PDAs.