Les ombres en danse contemporaine. Métaphores pour penser le(s) sens de l'expérience du sujet dansant

My reflection departs from an ethnography of production processes among three companies of contemporary dance in Lausanne and Bern. The six productions I attended stage existential topics as human fear, human loneliness and relationship between living and dead people. With the creation of ritual’s characters (shamans, spirits) and fictional figures (monsters, ghosts), I will show how choreography can be seen as a kind of reinvention of our contemporary rituals.

How can we analyze performances of our contemporaneity in an anthropological perspective? As the research domain is still new for the discipline, I privileged an interdisciplinary approach, mostly collaborating with the dance studies. But as the latter principally express interest on the aesthetic dimension and sociology on the production context, I aim to bring these two approaches into dialog thanks the study of production processes. My focus lies on the making of art (Ingold 2013).

In order to understand the act of dancing the closest to the one of a dancer, I adopted a phenomenological perspective, dancing myself. This attempt to experience dance phenomenologically is fruitful for methodological purposes. This auto-ethnography (Pink 2015) permits me to formulate more accurate questions and go beyond the logocentric focus imposed by the method of interviews.