Accepted Research Proposal

Working Title:

The Materialization of a Choreographic Process through an Interdisciplinary Approach

Summarise the research, aims, and key objectives or questions

• How can an interdisciplinary approach, drawing from visual art forms, serve to explore alternative modes of physical thinking in dancers?

• How would including dancers in the visual art-making process support them to develop analytical knowledge and find new ways to use their body as a thinking tool while developing alternate methods in crafting a choreographic score?

• Observe, recognize, and describe pattern changes that occur in creating a choreographic score that penetrates a collection of varied intra-actions between the materiality of bodies, objects, and the environment.

• Identify strategies that intertwine visual art within and through choreography and how this can be used as an analytical or interpretive tool to propel people to view art through various lenses.

• How can the methods practiced be applied as a teaching tool?

Explain how your project contributes to (or challenges) existing work in the field (i.e. the originality or significance of your project).

This study draws on the foundation of improvisational movement through a phenomenological lens drawn upon the intra-action of objects and measuring agencies. This prompts questions that examine the subject-object relationship in which it engages. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, I can further explore the meaning-making of material reconfiguring, analyzing work by the following scholars and artists. Research by Karen Barad speaks of material-discursive practices of entanglements between human and non-human bodies coming to matter through her theory of Agential Realism. Max van Manen offers a comprehensive approach to phenomenological reflection between being and acting. The core of William Forsythe’s work, Choreographic Objects, explores methods of setting individuals into motion through installations that explore objects within the environment generating a choreographic score. Trisha Brown was an interdisciplinary choreographer and visual artist who questioned the relevance and distinction between multiple art forms. Jackson Pollock was a visual artist who dripped, drizzled, poured, or splashed paint on the canvas below him. Art historians at the time coined this, “Action Painting” because of the idea that one would be able to imagine the actions that went into the making of the painting.

This project builds on each of these theories and artists’ work, holding the potential to reveal new meaning in the materialization of methods explored within and through the choreographic process in developing movement Scores. A shared agency arises in both materiality of body and visual-art and the intra-action in and through the practice of making both human and non-human art. Entangled through collaborative analysis, the body becomes a tool for thinking as it reconfigures a response to the patterns of reconfigurations from its artwork. The body is brought to life as it diffracts rather than reflects agency as an active participant in an on-going becoming of interdisciplinary possibilities.

Please provide a brief outline of your proposed plan of work (research proposal).

The aim of this investigation is to devise methods that will examine movement possibilities that would impede customary practices and habitual movement dancers have previously learned. This study will incorporate dancers participating in the visual art-making process, then transfer movement methods to the choreographic process. Dancers will begin in the studio creating mixed media art on canvas with acrylic paint and pouring mediums. They will then use their painting and dialogue in and through the process of painting in crafting a choreographic Score.

Laban movement analysis will be utilized as a framework to observe and map movement as a pattern of change that occurs in developing the expanded choreographic Scores. By means of improvisational acts, the layering of action will be investigated through elements of Body, Effort, Shape, and Space and how movement correlates to the practice of making and interpreting. Utilizing the painting as a source for a written notation record entwines both subject and object within the context of developing new methods to pursue greater specificity and complexity in dancers’ movement abilities.

Both visual and movement art produced in the studio will culminate into a performative platform in a museum or gallery. Linking transitions and movements between paintings’ material come to matter through its intra-activity as an active participant reworking and reformulating action and how it becomes materialized through its causal relationship between one another. Opening the space of performance to an audience, the performance becomes a part of their world, their reality within the event. They engage in the process of exploration to discover the layers of the work so they can truly be interpreters of the art-making process.

The thesis will comprehensively develop into a practical manual containing the many tasks and strategies devised and tested in the studio, contributing to improvisational practices and creativity as an interdisciplinary approach.

Please detail any specific facilities, equipment, or funding required for your investigation. You must highlight where you feel these are not available.

The facility to be used is a studio space in Neptune City, New Jersey, USA. All participants will be required to wear masks, social distance on the premises, and have temperature checks prior to entering the facility, due to Covid19. In the case of quarantine or LockDown put in place by governing agencies, all work will be completed through a virtual platform via Zoom.

All art materials and equipment necessary for this project will be self-funded by the primary investigator.

Annual Review

Please provide a reflection of your progress to date

The research study, The Materialization of a Choreographic Process through an Interdisciplinary Approach, includes dancers in the visual art-making process and supports them to develop analytical knowledge in developing new ways to use their body as a thinking tool while exploring alternate modes of composing choreography. The project aims to investigate methods that will explore new movement possibilities in dancers through making visual art images to merge with the process of creating choreographic works through Score reading and improvisational movement tasks.

Over the past year, I have focused on the development and implementation of methods practiced within the research study. Generating a framework for the context of the study has allowed a sense of boundaries through experimentation and improvisational tasks. Guided by the initial materials has been essential in making visible the aspects of what can be discovered through the intra-action of matter and its limitless connection.

Following the Ethics Application approval, I began to work with participants. The intersubjective nature of the project allowed for the materialization of questions to surface during the practice. This enabled additional modes to emerge in the exploration of visual art-making mediums and prompted space for possibilities to emerge through collaboration.

Contextualizing the aesthetic function of visual art began to permit the Score to fabricate movement and inscribe work on the body. Therefore, it becomes possible for multiple visual forms to function as the catalyst to apply physical intelligence and interpretation through body knowledge. What I have discovered is that although I may have set expectations to reach a specific intention from the research, the journey through the doing and making with of investigation of materials in the course of the process is what is guiding the body to acquire new knowledge as it shifts the physicality of its architecture by using the body as a thinking tool.

The work has begun to feed itself. Through the reflectivity of my voice and those I am collaborating with, it speaks back to me. Through measuring agencies, both human and non-human. The materiality entangled within the research diffracts spacetimemattering and how the artwork is a part of a connected becoming of the production of knowledge.

Summarise your key objectives for the next 12 months

Over the next 12 months, my key objectives are to continue to: examine methods in the studio lab, research artists and theorists in the field, attend research training through LJMU, participate in intensive sessions through Transart Institute, present my work in LJMU’s Research Cafe’ and Transart Institute’s Residency, and begin to write chapters of the thesis. In this process, I seek to develop additional tasks to propel and expand the dancer’s movement capabilities, transposing the compositional act of choreography. I will discover what is useful within the practice, what needs to change, and the adaptions I need to make in the next phase in and through the practice-led research process. Devoting time to analyze text guides the work as I question how art, theory, and philosophy move together, how thought is felt, and where this work fits into society. The training and intensive sessions as well as my supervisory meetings, allow me to learn from and communicate with artists and receive critical feedback on my work. In working diligently, I aspire to cultivate this investigation, substantiate it, and articulate the work into written, verbal and performative language.

Reflections on research training undertaken

Research training by LJMU and Transart intensive sessions have provided informative and insightful to process and procedures and develop critical thinking, intellectual risk, self-reflection, and theoretical knowledge. This support among institutions and their artists through the community is imperative as practice-led research is constantly changing and overlapping among the world of arts-based communities.