Public defence: Rosalind Goldberg

Choreography as a meaning-generating aggregate
The focus of my research project has been to examine choreography as an aggregate of meaning production specific to dance, where habits of perceiving and understanding the body are probed, and an incentive is provided for seeking out words and concepts. By placing the body at the center of my research, I want to highlight its capacity for producing meaning through processes belonging to sensation that are sometimes enacted prior to cognition—where movements and sensations appear faster than words, in a different mode of expression. My research has found support and resonance within the interdisciplinary field of New Materialism, in which the concepts of materiality, the flesh- iness of the body, and discourse/language are thought immanently together. Drawing on the principles of New Materialist theory for my choreographic work, I have explored how meaning is something to be sensed, something that resists reduction to linguistic meaning alone. A feeling of coherency can provide an experience of meaning before any attempt to adequately render this meaning in words. There is an increasing tendency under late capitalism to reduce the use of language to efficient and functional communication. Meaning is then often relegated to the status of information conveyed by performative language. Against this, I want to stress that meaning-production in dance requires that we take into account how the corporeal, the material, and the discursive are entangled with one another—a condition that, through the sensorial dimension of dancing movement, distinguishes meaning-production in dance from meaning as it is produced under a regime of efficient labeling.
This research project entails the creation of choreographic methods and choreographic work in which corporeal expression by way of movements and sensations is expanded in order to probe and then challenge the dancers’ habits of sensing and perceiving dance. Thus, my choreographic method takes the sensorial input as directional and specifically focuses on the intensity of sensations that overflow and confuse the intelligibility of movement for both the dancer and the audience. This approach is broadly based on the premise that choreography is capable of expanding our perception in ways that inspire us to search for words to describe our sensorial experience. By staying with the materiality of the body and how intricated its fleshiness and the discursive-linguistic dimensions are, I am approaching meaning production in contemporary dance through this New Materialist perspective, in the process hoping to contribute to the manifold of knowledges about the body within the field.