A super modern dance and other romances

This performance has been co-produced by: Greenroom (Manchester, UK), hÃ…b Art (Manchester, UK), Dance Initiative Greater Manchester (Manchester, UK), DeVIR/Centro de Artes Performativas do Algarve (Faro, Portugal), In Vitro-Culture Tube (Thessaloniki, Greece) and performed at Greenroom(Manchester, UK), DeVIR/Centro de Artes Performativas do Algarve (Faro, Portugal), Vis Motrix Theatre (Thessaloniki, Greece), Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (Lincoln, UK). This performance is a piece of conceptual choreography applying Marc Augé's notion of Supermodernity to the field of dance and choreography. The subtle humor that underlines the performance comments on the ambitions, contributions and vanities that revolutionary and constitutional documents entail. It is a mature manifestation of choreography offering something more profound than bodies in high velocity. Supermodernity is an academic term coined by Marc Augé in anthropological studies. Applied in performance studies, Supermodernity is a step beyond the ontological emptiness of postmodernism and relies upon a view of plausible truths. Where modernism focused upon the creation of great truths (or what Lyotartd called â€master narratives or “meta narrativesâ€), postmodernity is intent upon their destruction (deconstruction). In contrast supermodernity does not concern itself with the creation or identification of truth value. Instead, information that is useful is selected from the superabundant sources of new media. Postmodernity and deconstruction have made the creation of truths an impossible construction. Supermodernity acts amid the chatter and excess of signification in order to escape the nihilistic tautology of postmodernity.It is not only that modernity (in opposition to modernism) is our antiquity (the leitmotif of Documenta XII), but modernity can only be our antiquity or else antiquity is the only way that our contemporary modernity finds its identity by recognition and acceptance of the antiquity.Thus, contemporary art gains its identity not by abjection but by recognition of its subject. And it is exactly this action that complicates its identification and classification. But, this awareness of existing relations (either of oppositional or evolutionary or coincidental character) will allow for a cross fertilization and a subsequent qualitative development of the field.