M.A. Nadja Rothenburger
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christina Thurner
The dissertation examines autobiographical narratives of stage dance choreographies of the 1970s to 1990s and their embedding in socio-temporal crisis discourses. In these, author, protagonist and narrator often coincide, resulting in multiple perspectives and sometimes contradictory life stories. The author, dancer, or narrator-subject that artists and audiences seek to capture is staged as an unstable one, since it eludes final determination. The performativity of this 'crisis-like subject' gives rise to a spectrum of questions about subject formation and authorship in the artistic production process. Autobiographical stage dance choreographies - Auto_Choreo_Graphies, the conceptual proposal of the dissertation - operate with different means such as language, movement, algorithms, spatial and visual formats. The autobiographical access takes place through borrowings, allusions and quotations, so that a multilayered interplay of the arts is created. This requires a parallel and complementary reading of Auto_Choreo_Graphies. According to this claim, the research interest of the dissertation is based on three approaches: First, autobiographical narratives in texts, choreographies, installations, films and performances from the field of contemporary dance will be examined comparatively for their differences and similarities. Second, a focus is placed on the life stories favored or rejected in each case and their relationship to subject formation. And finally, thirdly, possible entanglements between a fragile (self-) understanding and a critical relationship to the social conditions under which the respective works were created. This results in a second focus on crisis narratives or dislocation, which are treated as discursive contexts in the analysis, just like autobiographical narratives.
