Abstract:
This thesis probes the dark, occult movements of choreography provoking an engagement with concept horrØr and speculative philosophy. Merging expanded choreographic studies and post-dance practices, the project applies an artistic research methodology generated through transcultural poetics, performance writing methods, and a trilogy of experimental dance productions: KARE; kind artificial real experience (2016), blackOut (2018), and 5th Body (2018, 2019). Distinctions are interposed between nuances of bl ck-space, dark space, and darkness revealed through text, choreographic strategies, and live performance. Concepts underpinning this research are informed by a range of theorists - notably Eugene Thacker, Dylan Trigg, and Reza Negarestani - and absorbed into praxis through a choreologics that rethinks bodies as envoided, spectral, unhuman. The examined performance blackOut, renders enstranged figures drawn to the edge of horrØr's precipice, unravelling choreographic darkness as a hiddenness that compels dance toward anonymity. Dissimilarly, tangata whenua concepts of Te Pō (Darkness Perpetual, the Unknown) recount cosmo-genealogies of a time anterior to the world of light. Derived from mātauranga Māori, sequences of appellations unravel multiple gradients of Te Pō. Within the performances generated during this study, Pō consciousness acquires a choreographic translation and embodiment. Calling into question the aesthetic potency of speculative choreography, the artist imagines unfoldings of ancestral dark space layered with mystery upon mystery. Drawing on the critical theories of André Lepecki, experimentation in international dance implicates black-light as a minoritarian force arising out of, and from within, neoliberal colonialism and its relentless perpetuation of white enlightenment and hyper-vigilant modes of illumination. Relinquishing dances' parallel obsession with the ever-illumined, its obverse is invoked within this study through dark aesthetics posited by theorist Martin Welton as threshold states: penumbra, gloaming, gloom, shadow. Correspondingly, Natten choreographed by Mårten Spångberg, presents a salient international precedent toward the performance analyses advanced by this research. The project finds that within the bl ckening choreosphere attendants can encounter the alien materialities of an unspecified, collective darkness.