I am currently developing ideas for a new research project, CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES — Deviations from the Line, in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil.
CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES — Deviations from the Line is a proposed interdisciplinary,
collaborative research project between artist Nikolaus Gansterer (Austria/Vienna), choreographer
Mariella Griel (Austria/Vienna) and artist-writer Emma Cocker (UK). With
‘arts-based research’ at its heart, this research project stages an
inter-subjective encounter between drawing (Gansterer),
choreography (Greil) and
writing (Cocker) in order to:
* Investigate those forms of
‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ produced through collaborative, interdisciplinary
exchange, ‘between the lines’ of drawing, choreography and writing,
* Explore the performativity of notation (figures
of thought, speech and movement) for
articulating and making tangible this
enquiry,
* Contribute new knowledge and
understanding to debates about the specificity of artistic enquiry and expanded
practices of drawing, choreography and
writing.
CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES — Deviations from the Line explores
the nature of ‘thinking-in-action’ or ‘figures of thought’ produced as the
practices of drawing, choreography and writing enter into
dialogue, overlap and collide. Central is an
attempt to find ways of better understanding and making tangible the processes
of enquiry within practice (specifically within the research area that overlaps
between drawing, choreography, writing), and for asserting the epistemological
significance of this habitually unseen or unshared aspect of an artist’s /
writer’s / dancer’s endeavour. Through processes of reciprocal exchange,
dialogue and negotiation between the key researchers, CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES — Deviations from the Line will interrogate the
interstitial processes, practices and knowledge(s) produced in the ‘deviation’
for example, from page to
performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters.
The collaborative research quest is one of tracing and understanding these
permeable frontiers, to challenge the assumptions of the clear-cut disciplinary
line and produce new articulations of ‘expanded practice’ between the lines of
drawing, choreography and writing. The research pressures drawing, choreography and writing beyond the
conventions, protocols and domains of each discipline: for choreography, beyond the domain of the body and space of the
theatre; for drawing, beyond the domain of the two-dimensional page; for
writing, beyond the domain of language, the regime of signification. By investigating the points of overlap, slippage and
shared processes within the disciplines of drawing, choreography and writing, CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES — Deviations from the Line will contribute new
understanding and knowledge to the burgeoning discourse on and around the
significance of artistic research practice, helping cultivate new vocabularies
and forms of notation for reflecting on artistic praxis.
