Accountable Temporary Expedients (ATE) is a fluid, experiential methodology for choreographic improvisation and composition. It is focused on integration of states of doubt and confusion resulting in an emerging embodied cognition and decision-making.
Accountable Temporary Expedients is a practice that challenges the ability of dancers to attend to multiple stimuli at once and instigate situations which embrace confusion, doubt and uncertainty. This work stands in response to the notion that dance urges to emancipate. Baldini’s current critique sees dance as being “stuck, gooey, a victim of its own habit and, so in love with itself, it does not recognise its limitations. It is self-seduced, self-sufficient, and self-indulgent. Dance is not afraid of change, yet it is lost and oblivious, unconscious and mono-directional”. ATE intends to provoke dance to wake up, get down to where the guts are and listen. Not to what it already knows and gain pleasure from the satisfaction of being good, but to listen carefully until it hears something to reveal. Or, in Baldini’s words, “it will be nothing, and it will go nowhere”. This publication includes an offering of reflections and research tangential to the practice.