Choreographing through an expanded corporeality

Abstract

This practice-led research explores the potential for an expanded corporeality through choreography and a posthuman ethics. Engaging somatechnics (body technologies) such as rope tying and Contact Improvisation I develop techniques that seek to rupture the binaries of nature/culture and dis/ability through performance. These techniques establish somatic processes for sharing weight, experiencing suspension and torsion through the body and a tactile exchange with the environment and participating audience. They take shape through rhizomatic rope structures that create complex interconnected systems of support. Through using these techniques to investigate our relationality, I reveal a permeable, porous subjectivity and an erotics of connectivity. My position is that we are always already extended: we lean, touch, and absorb the surfaces surrounding us which can allow us to experience ourselves as dynamic, fluid identities. Throughout this thesis the process of exploring dynamic identities is led by a part-real, part mythical entity called Ethico Super-Girl. She introduces each chapter including the final performance submission, Knot Just Body, a culminating experiment in intimacy, relationality, and ethics. The notion of an expanded corporeality is inspired by ontologies of vulnerability and permeability. It unfurls its choreo-philosophy through engaging with theoretical insights such as Margrit Shildrick’s concept of the distributive body, Rosie Braidotti’s posthuman ethics, and Karen Barad’s theory of queer entanglements. The diacritical cut, introduced by Ann Cooper-Albright and Gabriele Brandstetter (2015), is used as an analytical tool to reveal the potentially transformative space between the ‘dis’ and the ‘ability’. In referencing the work of other artists such as Claire Cunningham, Bob Flanagan, and Rita Marcalo, I demonstrate how queer transformations taking place through contemporary performance trouble assumptions about the boundaries of the body and relations between performer and audience. While dance studies has a well theorised frame of expanded choreography (Harvey, 2011), little attention has been paid to the possibilities inherent within an expanded corporeality. This research offers an original conception of how an expanded corporeality can both reimagine and construct through performance how we inhabit space and specifically our response to dis/ability, through performance. It calls for more pluralistic understandings of embodiment. The techniques and theoretical positions developed in this thesis are relevant to practitioners and scholars in disability studies, dance studies, queer theory, posthumanism, and new materialism.