Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Publication: Writing Choreography Textualities of and beyond Dance

In collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil, I have recently published a chapter called ‘Choreo-graphic Writing — Towards More-Than-One Means of Inscription’ in Leena Rouhiainen, Kirsi Heimonen, Rebecca Hilton, Chrysa Parkinson, Writing Choreography Textualities of and beyond Dance, (Routledge, 2024). See more on publication here.

Abstract: Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line is an artistic research project by writer-artist Emma Cocker, artist-performer Nikolaus Gansterer and dancer-choreographer Mariella Greil, for exploring those modes of thinking-feeling-knowing emerging between the lines of choreography, drawing and writing. This research project involved the cultivation of various modes of “choreo-graphic writing” [more-than-one / means of inscription] at the interstice of choreography, drawing and writing, the evolution of experimental language practices as artistic research. Drawing on various “practices” and “figures” developed within Choreo-graphic Figures, Cocker, Gansterer and Greil explore how different performative, sensuous and experimental textual practices and bodily inscriptions emerge as immanent means of articulation for that which remains strictly beyond words: the embodied, relational, affective and material sensitivities and sensibilities of collaborative, co-emergent sense-making taking place in and through the interaction between bodies, between human and non-human agencies.

 

About the publication: A new contribution to studies in choreography, Writing Choreography: Textualities of and beyond Dance focuses upon language and writing-based approaches to choreographing from the perspectives of artists and researchers active in the Nordic and Oceanic contexts. Through the contributions of 15 dance–artists, choreographers, dramaturges, writers, interdisciplinary artists and artist–researchers, the volume highlights diverse textual choreographic processes and outcomes arguing for their relevance to present-day practices of expanded choreography. The anthology introduces some Western trends related to utilizing writing, text and language in choreographic processes. In its focus on art-making processes, it likewise offers insight into how performance can be transcribed into writing, how practices of writing choreograph and how choreography can be a process of writing with. Readers, such as dancers, choreographers, students in higher education of these fields as well as researchers in choreography, gain understanding about different experimental forms of writing forwarded by diverse choreographers and how writing is the motional organisation of images, signs, words and texts. The volume presents a new strand in expanded choreography and acts as inspiration for its continued evolution that engenders new adaptations between language, writing and choreography.