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Abstract: This thesis aims to explore the function of walking in archiving dance practices. The case that will be used is Walk+Talk, a project that was initiated by Philip Gehmacher in Vienna, in 2013 and continued also in Brussels, Stockholm and Reykjavik. In this project, the invited artists were expected to create, each one on their own, lecture- performances under the instruction of the simultaneous use of walking and talking in order to reflect on their own methods and practices. Due to the vast amount of the material created, only the first series of lecture-performances that took place in Vienna will be used and analyzed. The concept of the walking archive is a contemplation consisted of notions taken from the writings of Michel de Certeau, Bruno Latour, André Lepecki and Lena Hammergren. The notion of walking as a creative device and the relationship between walking and thinking are not new ideas; this thesis attempts to be a valid account of this connection in relation to the notion of the archive, a complex notion that its relationship with the human body is rather recent. In dance as a performing art, until recently, archiving had been considered only through notation systems. Therefore, in the present thesis, a sub-chapter on the relationship between dance and notation was necessary, along with another one on the current shifts in dance archiving and the problems and challenges related to the notion of the archive. The analysis of Walk+Talk is based in the theoretical model that I call 'a walking archive'. The definition constructed is 'the walking archive', which is a body that expresses a singularity which performs the archive through walking. Walking is an action that functions in time and space. Each singularity expressed through a walking archive has also the ability to affect and be affected by the other walking archives. Spatial poems are created on stage, collections of memories, reflections, expressions of experiences that consist an assymetrical and fragmented whole, #a portrait of a generation#, as Jeroen Peeters successfully has pointed out. The performative aspect of archive is taken from Lepecki's concept on the body as archive, where he explains that the archive can only act and that choreography is a perfect medium to do so. The view of the use of space as the creation of fragmented, invisible poems is taken from Certeau's poetic view on walking and its relationship to language. Also, Hammergren's notion of the 'flâneuse' is a segment of a walking theory that is related to the writing of the history. A 'flâneuse' is someone who during writing about the past, experiences a walking, a wandering with her senses, attempting an embodied approach on the writing of history. This is also a concept that is included in that of the 'walking archive' presented here. The relationship between walking and talking is also explained with Latour's proposition on the notion of the body and especially on his approach on what it means to be an articulated subject: articulation is not only about speech, either oral or written, but it extends to include the notion of embodiment.

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Mariachi and its music are one of the most meaningful symbols for Mexicans around the world. For them, it is a tradition that is present in the most important stages in their lives. There are many elements that make the Mariachi popular. However, my goal is to try to relate the visual representation of the Mariachi music through the analysis of album covers to the term "otherness" or "the other" because I believe it is an unexplored territory. In this thesis one of my objectives is to find out the construction of meaning in the representation of Mariachis. I will describe many theories and how they are related to "the other" as well as focusing in the constructionist approach. The Mariachi "other" is represented in a context of cultural tradition that came from social issues throughout Mexican history evolving to a whole different character that has a certain ambivalence in the everyday life of Mexicans. This thesis tries to deliver some insight on the cultural influences and recent popularity of this specific craft and how it is evolving. Still images of Mariachi album covers represent a small part of the life of a Mariachi artist who embodies simultaneously, a fraction in the stereotype of the Mexican. Visual representation is not well-adjusted but it allows us to differentiate and make distinctions from their reality.

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The term social choreography has enjoyed an increasing popularity over the last decade, in the dance and performance field as well as beyond. We investigate in this thesis first and foremost how the term is used in a contemporary dance context. We take a detailed look at the theoretical concept of social choreography proffered by literary scholar Andrew Hewitt, who proposes dance as a playground where new political and social ideas are tested. Hewitt mainly presents social choreography as an analytical object and tool, but also suggests it as an artistic strategy, although without making any prescriptions in this regard. We apply the theory on one specific contemporary dance performance, On Trial Together, which the artists Saša Asentić and Ana Vujanović describe as a social choreography. What does it mean to talk about a dance performance as a social choreography? Can a social choreography be intentionally instilled, to what extent and what are the hopes and the results thereof? With these questions in mind we test social choreography as artistic strategy, which is trying to rethink the theatre as a place of the performative that could potentially bring about social change. This leads us to classic questions about the role of art in society and to recent discussions on the political potential of contemporary dance. Looking at dance and performance studies texts of for example Claire Bishop, Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Kunst, Rudi Laermans, Jacques Rancière and Ana Vujanović, and on the basis of our case study, we take a rather critical stance towards social choreography as artistic strategy. On Trial Together formulates a critique of the complex working conditions of the (German) dance scene. Our finding is that this critique loses its credibility as it is formulated by means of and serves as an ideal example for these conditions. Furthermore we conclude that On Trial Together, using social choreography as artistic strategy, fails to exhaust the theory’s true potential, which lies in its rather unconscious persistency and slow development over a period of time and is mostly only visible retrospectively. Therefor, finally, we return to social choreography the way Hewitt describes it and conclude that it makes most sense to use it like he suggests, as analytical object, which also means that we will only really know the social choreographies of today in the future, as they will develop without our knowledge or conscious initiative. Nevertheless, specific performances are singular movements inside these social choreographies and can play a decisive role in their slow development and direction.

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The 20th century has been witnessing a double crisis: one on the notion of the body and the other on the notion of the human. In the context of our post-modern world, where humanity has to deal with globalization, decolonization and numerous wars, a complementary view on the body arose, underlying the body’s recognition and its dissolution or disintegration at the same time. In dance, there has also been a shift in the understanding of the body. The body has traditionally been considered as the major medium of the choreography. If we take the example of classical ballet, it is clear that the body was a vehicle for narration. It was considered a mere anatomical element that had to surpass its natural boundaries. This “dream of transcendence” characterizing ballet fostered the artifice. But in the course of the 20th century, dance has been moving towards a more essential expression, in its search for the pure movement. In the text Terpsichore in Sneakers, Sally Banes coins the notion of post-modern dance to refer to a purely formalist dance . Contrary to modern dance which dealt with embodied expressionism, post-modern dance searches for “formal autonomous movement” . Therefore, this new form of dance is self-reflexive and conceptual, since it re-defines choreography beyond the human. Consequently, “successive generations of choreographers stripped away the expressive resources of dance such as the dramatic story musical visualization” . In 1960 Trisha Brown made her dancers walking on walls with the help of a climbing device. She stated that “the dispositive through which a body is able to perform the impossible [must] show the limits that are surrounding the body” . In this case, the body is integrated into all sorts of mechanisms which actually reveal the constraints and the capacity to overcome them. The dance technique is no longer something that must be hidden. This had an impact on the representation of the body on stage. Nowadays in society as well as in performing arts, bodies are hyperconnected. Becca Wood assumes that there is an “increasing ‘instability’ of the body in a contemporary world where the digital screen images mediate and renegotiate our physical encounters” . She proposes to reconsider how we can strategize new possibilities for somatic practices and performance. . In this thesis, we will try to draw a portrait of the dancing body in its relation to technique and technology. We will argue that technique in dance in an essential element to achieve a process of subjectification which itself allows the dancing body to reconnect with its identity. And as identity is shaped by both subjectivity and the relation to the others and to the environment, we will state that the body in dance is necessarily related to its material surroundings on stage. With the help of the Foucauldian concept of the technologies of the self we will analyze the notion of technique and its meaning in the field of contemporary dance. This will lead us to study the relations of power that are underlying in every artistic process of creation and the shift in the representation of the body in dance.

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In the high-technological world that we live in, body modifications have become extremely common by shaping individuals identity. Within the different body modifications movements, the case of Modern Primitives has raised many controversies and debates both within academics and lay press. It is widely accepted that as a (sub)cultural movement that emerged in the 1980s in San Francisco, modern primitives are pioneers in the use of body modifications and have opened many doors to many professional body modifiers. Highly inspired by ‘tribal’ cultures, however, modern primitivism does not escape criticism, especially from anthropologists who see their practices as an idealisation of the racial ‘other’. Since the 1990s – thus – modern primitives have become object of both affiliation and criticism. It is the aim of the present paper to study what has remained today of this (sub)cultural movement and – if still exist – how does the commodification of some practices such as tattooing or piercing, affect the supposed ‘modern primitives’.