Social choreographies of emotion

Academic summary

In the research project Social Choreographies of Emotion, I will investigate the political agency of emotion as an alternative to its commodification through the lens of social choreography. By focusing on emotions of love and fear I want to examine how they are choreographed and what are the processes that lie underneath this social choreography. I want to continue the production of social choreographies that question how our feelings, desires, and fears are commodified and what the means of resistance and alternatives could be. My aim is to assert choreography as a tool for mirroring and reflecting on social changes of our affective realm. Through that, I continue my artistic practice in re-questioning the constellations of aesthetics, economics, emotions, and performance that make up our social sphere.

The research will start from two points: the effect of mass media on the perception and the purpose of fear/love on the one hand and fear/love as a tool of social control on the other. Can social choreography be a tool for re-inventing and politicizing our affective-intimate sphere? How choreography can be an agent in bringing to light the invisible, often, overlooked shifting processes that organise our behaviors as a society?  I want to make these questions visible as staged social choreographies in the research which will frame a place of social gathering for observation. The research will be devised as an accumulative layering of theoretical reflection /deconstruction, affective embodiment, social gatherings, and performative staging which articulate methodologies of appropriation of established social formats in a performative frame. These methodologies will be grounded in the tension between the immaterial and material, construct and affect, challenging the space between reality and fiction.