Abstract:
In Aerating Absorption places performance onsite a storage building with an aim to unsettle a stifling affect encountered onsite, as a held breath that suspends the site. The research explores what might be discovered through mining this held breath, suggesting that in this germ of breath, one might fruitfully unsettle a potentiality within the perceptual apparatus of performance: that is, other ways of seeing, sensing, and making; other ways of negotiating what choreography can do. To explore what choreography can do, is to nurture a ʻcan doʼ attitude towards choreographyʼs capacity to be otherwise, to transform, to change. Such an approach to choreographic research is intimately woven with Spinozaʼs Ethics (via the affect), for no one knows what a body can do. Petra Sabisch (2011) points out that such a nurturing of what a body (and choreography) can do is immediately tied methodology for each time it must be invented anew; and indeed one might suggest this as the destabilizing project of choreographic research: to evaluate the processes through which choreography finds its being. It is through this provocation then, that one might say the research attains its philosophical (and pragmatic) manner, for in exploring the processes through which it frames and might frame otherwise; it questions the ground of its being through the practice of placing performance. In Research Excavations, the research engages a processual thinking through practice, through which the genealogical layers of theatrical precedent of my practice are unearthed and explored as to how choreography might do otherwise. This process of excavation metaphorically mines the buildingʼs held breath through a mutual exfoliation of corporeality and site. It further begins to unsettle (though does not realize) the potentialities of the site through exploring reception and the sensation of time passing for the final shaping of a performance that took place in October 2012. It might be said that this long-term excavation is the essential research activity of the projects unfolding. For it is through this process that there becomes this discussion; it is through the singular, material and experimental inhabiting of site that I come to think through my practice. The research concludes with a discussion of how through practice, performance and writing, my understanding of what choreography can do has fundamentally changed.