Performance lecture: Hi Jinx

Abstract

This embodied presentation is a response to the relationship between archive and repertoire, researcher and performer. Investigating the shifting nature of live practice, this research takes new narratives from old forms, attends to the transgressive, subversive expressive aging and fleshy body that exceeds expectations of what ‘this’ particular dancing body should be doing and where she should be doing it, whilst developing live routes that push boundaries of presentation within conventional dance practice. These initiatives demonstrate the relationship between fact and fiction, and ask the audience to consider a fresh approach to contextualising practice within a broad contemporary dance framework. Hi Jinx pays homage to the ‘mythic’ seminal early twentieth century dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Heidi Dzinkowska. This Performance Lecture crumbles icons and rules and asks: why do we create historical icons? Exploring artifice, both on stage and screen, this Performance Lecture is constructed as a documentary theatre offering expert witness and exposing theatrical devices. Attending to the impact of fiction in real stories alongside fictionalising history, Hi Jinx devises a method to create an authentic history and aims to dissolve distinction between fact and fiction and offer both as real experiences. The construction of authenticity on stage is both contradiction and artificial and this intellectual performance ‘game’ discriminates, deconstructs and distinguishes fiction from non-fiction.