Bogomir Doringer - I Dance Alone to Dance of Urgency
Could clubbing (subculture) be observed as a micro-environment in order to find out how certain patterns of behaviour on a dance floor are telling stories about their wider contemporary cultural and socio-political systems? Bogomir Doringer in 2014 started filming differnt clubs from a bird’s-eye view with an aim to document variations of collective and individual choreographies world wide. The collected footage initiated an interdisciplinary artistic research project that is using artistic and natural science methods in studying the social phenomenon of clubbing.
Could we understand clubbing as a living system that regulates and stabilizes vitality and functioning of collective and individual body, in regard to the changing conditions in society? Are social and political changes manifested and filtered through dance floors? Through the investigation of a variety of clubbing sessions and the creation of an encyclopaedia of international events, suitable clubs are selected to be filmed based on their curatorial and cultural interest or political agenda and so on. Knowing the spatial typologies of the clubs emerging from the mentioned selection, a mobile laboratory is designed to fulfil the requirements for collecting video, lighting, sound samples. It will include different types of recording devices to support the observation and further investigation by the project partners.
Choreography in its broader sense, is used to understand how relations among body movements are creating specific patterns of behaviour. From the scientific perspective it is important to consider the individuals on the dance floor as cells constellations and further observe analogies with body movements. The project unites disciplines very different from each other, creating an innovative approach to the study of club culture as a social phenomenon and serving as a testing ground for recent theories concerning the roles of boundary on pattern formation in biology. It aims to rethink what is an individual in a community, what a community is, how it functions and how are relational and connective spaces between individuals lived, experienced, understood.