A Body Carries Many : Towards Visiting Practice in Choreographic Making

Abstract

This written final thesis explores my choreographic research through the lens of an embodied choreographic practice I call the Visiting Practice. Drawing from methodologies and perspectives from pedagogy, dance, and movement-based practices, supported by artists' examples, the research combines concepts and notions from philosophical and ethical thinking in relation to performance-making.

The text first unfolds around the notion of practice, examined through three interconnected perspectives: an anthroposophical view on practice, transformative and transcultural approaches to movement embodied practice, and the mapping of my own dance background and bodily knowledge. From this ground, I turn to the notion of visiting, first considering its ethical dimensions in relation to tourism, then expanding it as a conceptual and embodied approach within choreographic thinking and making. Situated within the current social and political atmosphere, the Visiting Practice is explored as both a movement and conceptual framework—one that activates the dancing body as a fluid archive through elements and tools such as repetition towards transformation, traces, and layers, and that invites performative attention to gaze, presence, and ethical responsibilities in choreographic creation with others.

This thesis offers the Visiting Practice as a method for engaging with embodied knowledge—one that opens relational, sensitive, and context-aware pathways in choreography. It proposes a way of sharing, transmitting, and generating movement-embodied knowledge through choreographic frameworks. Following a curiosity to explore its activation in artistic contexts, I reflect on my choreographic works as spaces where the Visiting Practice takes form, offering concrete examples of how it might be actualized in both embodied guided gatherings and performance-making.