Abstract

This hybrid thesis situated between choreography and design investigates the relational dialogue between the body and the environment to reveal spatio-temporal choreographic parameters that operate in the way the body encounters the built environment. Part of the “corporeal turn” (Sheets Johnstone 2009) this research aims to consider the body as an agent and site of experience, to better understand how it is affected, conditioned, and implicated in its relations and interactions with the built environment? Through an embodied analysis the work proposes the active posture of negotiation, as a possible way of interacting with our environments that accounts for the potentials, possibilities and expressions of an individual body’s point of view. Choreography here is framed as an organization of movement in action (Forsythe, 2014) that occurs in the body, through the material medium across elements of time and space. Thus a choreographic conversation between body and environment, that goes beyond purposive and goal-oriented approaches (Herbert, 1999) embedded within material objects, to better understand the way we inhabit our bodies and how we are shaped by our environment. Aiming to subvert traditional choreographic practice while affirming the potential of practitioner situated knowledge, the research utilizes embodied practices through a hybrid assemblage of text-images-notes-analysis, that reveal the hidden parameters through four multi-sited bodily studies created between 2017-2019. The research centers the body as the site of analysis to explore four parameters of bodily negotiation as: micro-macro scale, negative space, repetition and harmony, which operate on the body through the environment’s characteristic constraints, and thus shape bodily experience and expression. If we were more aware of our bodily relationship to the built environment, and if we brought embodied awareness further to the forefront of our phenomenological experience, would this shift our embodied consciousness and the way we inhabit our bodies through the world?