Abstract:
This practice-led research Masters asks how processes of simulation might be explored through choreography. This has been provoked through a reading of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of simulation, a concept within which difference is seen in-itself and not in comparison to other. This research aims to resist the logics of identity that are at play in much choreographic simulation and to contribute to the international field of choreography through the articulation of simulation as something other than an attempt to copy. The research methods have been developed through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome and the notion of experimentation as a method of inquiry, with particular reference to Sara Bailes, Avital Ronell and Robin Nelson. This thesis refers to re-enactment choreography and virtual theatre that uses technology as a seen extension of form, as points of departure. This project more specifically situates its-self alongside the work of choreographers Andrea Bozic, Sidney Leoni and Luís Miguel Félix. The studio practice involved a considered relationship of moving-digital-image, in particular science fiction films. This activated a virtual engagement (in Deleuze’s sense), with potentiality via imagination and memory in an attempt to expand the possible and destabilize the body as an organic whole. An engagement with impossible choreographic tasks emerged as a generative strategy to do this. What this practice unearthed is interwoven through five themes or plateaus: Machines of Fact and Fiction, Feigning Emotion, Disruption, Displacement and Time.