_hey t—here – observations with-in a social choreography initiative Urban Anatomies Teleport

Abstract

This written thesis follows processes where social questions yield artistic practices, that I call tools. In addition to this document being a thesis, this is a journal, and an open access archive, and a toolkit.

I have written this thesis keeping in mind a not-too-long-ago moment in time when I was working as a dancer and felt a desperation for the lack of tools and know-how to work with people in a way that is socially sustainable. Thus, this thesis works partly with questions that span much longer temporalities than the frame of these MA studies. I open the thesis with the question I seem to have embraced the longest in my life: what is it to be good to one another? Thus, my intention is to indicate how artistic questions are embedded in life.

Structurally this thesis begins by laying background information and a proposal for a contextualization between the agents at hand, the reader and the writer (or as deliberately referred to in this thesis: ‘the grapher’). This is done as an attempt to set the situation of reading this thesis as an embodied place, in which the movements of the artistic questions and dilemmas can potentially be directly observed by the reader. After this I present my reading of my professional terminology: the notions of choreography, movement and body. My strategy of observing is presented throughout. The structure then goes on to ask artistic and social questions in turns, travelling through examples from each artistic project I have engaged in during the MA studies, with the main emphasis on my artistic thesis project Urban Anatomies Teleport, which is an initiative to investigate urban planning as corpus and choreography through walking and listening to music.

One parallel throughout this thesis describes my hands-on attempts to find my way of working in collective processes as a choreographer, and another parallel deepens these questions into the soma and broadens them into a societal context. Throughout these pages I conceptualize a practice that seeks to use one’s ‘situated knowledge’ to cause micro-collapse within one’s situation, habitat, or system. I call this ‘situating and teleporting’. In connection to this, I introduce the tool of ‘t—here’, a sensory feeling of a shift, or a transition, or a teleportation. ‘T—here’ – derived from the ethos of ‘walking here rather than walking there’ – is an intersection of the writings referenced in this thesis by the researcher Sharanya Murali and the choreographer João Fiadeiro. In my queer experience, as the situation collapses a tiny bit, room for new movement within the situated self is released just a bit. And a micro-break-out of energy takes place. Teleporting in ‘situating and teleporting’ is a glimpse of ‘preacceleration’ (in Erin Manning’s sense), a means to trace fugitive momentums for change.

How do we work together? How to form a question together? Where does a body end and a relation begin? How is one’s standing affecting their situated knowledge? How do I stand? How to greet a mountain? How are you? What if a question is approached as movement? What if moving is approached as asking? What is t—here already? How to facilitate an unknown audience?

In a historical line of postmodern and contemporary choreography this thesis joins the gesture of asking what does ‘the operative’ in an artist’s work intend?