Choreography as seen through the lens of photography. Time in composition: Rainer, Paxton and Charmatz

Amongst the different uses of photography for and by dance, what it is important to unravel each time is as much the (strategy of) capturing the body in motion through photography, as the way in which dance itself understands photography. The way in which it appropriates it, integrates it into its processes or else uses it for a specific outcome (artistic, documentary), but also very simply the way in which the dancers or choreographers conceive of it, grasp it. What do they mean by “photography”? What does the term “pho­tography” cover in their discussions and what status do they give it in their choreographic practices? We shall see that what is involved is just as much the image (a concrete photographic image, the medium or subject of creation), as an idea about photography. The issue here is thus more like what Rosalind Krauss calls “the photographic” that is to say, photography as a theoretical subject, from which a new horizon of interrogation (aesthetic, historical, semiotic…) opens up. When applied to the field of dance composition, “photography” thus becomes a pretext for a reflection on time. Indeed, the intrusion of photography and the photographic into the field of choreography results, in particular, in an investigation on the temporality of movement and its relationship to fluidity.