Choreoauratics: Social Choreographies for the Ears

Abstract

At a time of life when the body is often dematerialised, decentred and fragmented and our natural and cultural world seems exhausted on a global scale, this creative research investigates the potential for choreography as a strategy for recovery and coming together. My research is situated at the intersections between spatial design, somatics, sound art, site-based performance and social choreography. A creative practice that thinks through doing, it interrogates the potential of a choreoauratic site-based performance practice to bring attention to the politics of public places, somatically, architecturally, and socially. A series of participatory headphonic events shifts between the expanded field of choreography, critical spatial practice and theory. The participatory delivery of these test-events target a return to listening, sensory attunement and respons(able) encounter. A new term choreoauratics is cultivated out of this creative research. It argues for the convergence of prosthetic listening and somatic choreography as a critical spatial practice. Tuning into the philosophies and politics of performance research, the language of the threshold offers a theoretical context for thinking through the dispersed, disembodied and accelerated social conditioning of digital infrastructures. Choreoauratic test-events intervene in public spaces, working poetically towards a recovery of the imperceptible and the disappearing. Performing in the margins, the practice orchestrates an emergent form of public activism. Core concepts in this research are; The nomad, the chora, the witness, and the threshold. These concepts stem from the following key theorists; Rosie Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben and Elizabeth Grosz and are re-evaluated as they intersect and comingle through writing and praxis. The harmony of praxis and writing engenders a vibrant middle space, like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic territories, a heterogeneous space that is performed as intensities of speed (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Through praxis the theoretical is embodied in the sensate which brings writing into the choreographic, and as Kristeva suggests into the body, activating the poetic imagination. Choreographies for the ears affect and politicise the way we inhabit and incorporate spaces. A new kind of subjectivity emerges through ubiquitous sound technologies and choreography. This activates the subject and the city in collisions and convergence, coming together in the striated, dispersed virtual space of listening prosthetically. Engaging in the unspectacular, the practice treads lightly, tuning into the intensities of the poetic, sound, the voice, place and the moving body.