Writings in space and time

Academic summary

With the doctoral research project ‘Writing in space and time’ I have addressed the role of language in my artistic practice by considering choreography as writing. I have looked at this larger notion of the written, not in opposition to the body or movement, but as an extension of it. As part of my choreographic practice I work with language as material, using voice, speech and memory to write in space and time. I consider language, not merely as content, information or a vehicle for meaning, but as material and a choreographic capacity that participates in the organisation of attention, experience and imagination. Speaking implies listening, and I understand dance as an art form which is not primarily visual, but an art form where different senses are being engaged and are working together, such as listening, feeling and seeing, and invoking remembering, imagining and thinking. Spoken language can produce spaces, images and temporalities without relying on visual representation, allowing listening and imagination to become active modes through which choreography is experienced.

My interest in language and orality stems from a desire to work with a removal of the visual focus and to propose listening, imagination and memory as alternative modes of writing and experience, to disrupt the prevalent modes driven by visibility and visuality. Rather than diminishing what is seen, this shifts the function of visibility: the body on stage does not necessarily represent or illustrate what is spoken, but can become a presence through which something absent, remembered or imagined is made perceptible.

Throughout the research, speech and voice developed towards singing, music, sound and field recordings, all approached as materials for choreographic writing. Practising and performing have been central research methods, allowing questions and materials to develop through repetition, duration and the continued encounter with audiences. At the same time, I have confronted writing in space and time with writing on the page, investigating what happens when oral, embodied and remembered material is transferred into published form. The relation between performance and publication consequently became an important dimension of the research. Publishing functions not simply as documentation or dissemination, but as another site of artistic practice and a means of examining how choreography, language and memory transform as they move between bodies, spaces, performances and pages. Through these different forms, the research proposes writing as a practice that exceeds the written text and emerges through relations between language, embodiment, time, space and imagination.