María José Martínez Sánchez - Böcker

Dynamic Cartography analyses the works of Rudolf Laban, Lawrence Halprin, Anne Bogart, Adolphe Appia, Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood, and Hélio Oiticica. They are practitioners who have worked on different areas of enquiry from the existing relations between body and space through movement, events, or actions but whose work has never been presented from this perspective or in this context. The work and methodologies set up by these practitioners enable us to develop a practice-based exploration. Some of the experiments in the book – Micro-actions I and II – explore the presence of the body in the space. In Kinetography I and II, Laban’s dance notation system – kinetography – is used to create these dynamic cartographies. Kinetography III proposes the analysis of an urban public space through the transcription of the body movement contained on it. The series Dynamic Cartographies I, II, and III analyses movement in geometrically controlled spaces through the Viewpoints techniques by Anne Bogart. Finally, Wooosh! and Trellick Tales present two projects in which performance is applied in order to analyse and understand urban and architectural space.

Dynamic Cartography analyses the works of Rudolf Laban, Lawrence Halprin, Anne Bogart, Adolphe Appia, Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood, and Hélio Oiticica. They are practitioners who have worked on different areas of enquiry from the existing relations between body and space through movement, events, or actions but whose work has never been presented from this perspective or in this context. The work and methodologies set up by these practitioners enable us to develop a practice-based exploration. Some of the experiments in the book – Micro-actions I and II – explore the presence of the body in the space. In Kinetography I and II, Laban’s dance notation system – kinetography – is used to create these dynamic cartographies. Kinetography III proposes the analysis of an urban public space through the transcription of the body movement contained on it. The series Dynamic Cartographies I, II, and III analyses movement in geometrically controlled spaces through the Viewpoints techniques by Anne Bogart. Finally, Wooosh! and Trellick Tales present two projects in which performance is applied in order to analyse and understand urban and architectural space.

How can performance create and transform places of urban renewal and regeneration? What does performance contribute to the creation of community? These are some of the questions addressed in this study of the relationship of performance to urban space.Marrying theory with a series of international case studies of performance practice and interviews with practitioners, this interdisciplinary study examines how space is performatively produced to create a sense of ‘placeness’.Offering multiple perspectives on space and place, this book investigates the connections between space and the construction of social and cultural narratives. It focuses on the multiple ways performative actions produce space, including theatre, installations, site-specific work, visual arts and digital performance.Combining interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary performance, architecture and digital media studies, this study builds on a clear theoretical framework that draws on the work of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefevre, Richard Schechner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Lev Manovich and Slavoj Žižek. It offers themed sections comprising theory, studies of practice and interviews with practitioners. Case studies include site-specific work by Catalan collective La Fura Dels Baus, Barcelona, Spain, the Prague Quadrennial, community engagement in Praça Roosevelt in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Portland Inn Project in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Campo de la Cebada in Madrid, Spain, and digital spaces created by artists in India and Bosnia and Herzegovina.