Josefine Wikström ~ A return to abstraction?

The last decade has seen a fair amount of retrospective exhibitions on early 1960s dance and performance practices and with this the recuperation of categories like score, construction, composition and choreography. Along side this development at museums and galleries in Europe and the U.S. in particular, dancers and choreographers working within the field of dance and theatre, have since the early 2000s, increasingly understood their practice as choreography – rather than as dance or performance. Why is there a return to these type of practices now? What does it say about the state of contemporary art more generally? The return to these practices is often understood as a return to the materiality of the body through phenomenological or positivist philosophical perspectives. In this brief presentation I will instead try to think about the return of dance, performance, and the choreographic in particular, as a return to abstraction and the need of abstraction in contemporary art today.