Abstract

Choreographing collaboration: A multilayered approach to somatic and site-oriented art practices is a research-creation thesis project that focuses on multiple sites of collaboration between bodies and spaces (both physical and digital) and how collaboration informs and shapes a creative process in dance and choreographic practices. The creative period of this research project was informed by somatic explorations between my body, a vacant storefront located on Saint Denis Street in Montreal, and Zoom, which was used to communicate with an artist located in São Paulo, Brazil. The creative research period took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted me to critically reflect upon notions of time, my creative process, and my routines as a performer and choreographer in the field of dance for 20 years. As such, one of the goals of undertaking a creative process over a period of 30 consecutive days was to set up conditions for a different creative routine to emerge. Four main themes — intimacy, publicness, transparency, and opacity — arose in this process, and each is examined and described in relation to my analysis of the methods used to expand my approach to both collaboration and choreography.