Which Frontiers Next?

In this project I have explored what it means to make choreography under conditions that go beyond my understanding. The project is connected to a science-fictional approach to making art, and it can contribute to choreography studies through those lenses, which take a closer look at the relations between science fiction and choreography while having non-fictional starting points. The artworks and their material relations in this exposition reveal the intersection into which I have arrived during this project. That is why I, as a choreographer and artist-researcher, feel contradicted by the idea of writing a summary, conclusion, or articulating deliverables, results, or novelties of the research project. That said, I will briefly ponder how this process can contribute to Earthly choreography studies and to the manifold field of artistic research.

Maybe one of the results of the project is to further consider what kind of possibilities science fiction can open to choreographic practice on its ontological level, and not only as a topical or thematical starting point. The undercurrents in this line of thinking stem from understanding science fiction as a perspective which, in this case, offers possibilities for choreographic alienations and for choreographic works to exist beyond present knowledges, particularly concerning the relations of materiality, corporeality, and the situational and contextual preconditions of choreographic form. The project can be understood as a contribution to a long history of artists’ interest in science-fictional worldmakings, and in my case, as an attempt to respond to the question of what is understood as familiar and what as alien in choreographic practices, and why.

In a contemporary setting, Dan Byrne-Smith (2020: 12) ponders that perhaps the ongoing integration of technology into all aspects of daily life is one reason why science fiction appeals to so many artists. In parallel, I recognize how science fiction offers possibilities to imagine new forms and relations in the social, material, and performative environments in which my work usually takes place. At its core, the science-fictional lens opens up the chance to explore the boundaries of learned and internalized practices and choreographic thinking. As Byrne-Smith puts it, science fiction is not merely a genre, but can also be a form of practice, methodology, or set of sensibilities, which provides opportunities to imagine new configurations and constellations. This project shares that understanding in its aim to develop artistic sensibilities that reach beyond the horizon and the atmosphere. Exploring these relations further, with the above-stated understanding of science fiction, might be fruitful in the field of choreographic studies, diversifying the understanding of ‘choreography’ even more.

Even if such a perspective does not necessarily produce clear methodological novelties, I believe that engagement with such imaginary matters, which condition choreographic thinking-practicing, can support choreography studies in finding new ways to approach choreographic art. As a dynamic art form, choreography is well-suited to reflect on the ongoing technogenetic shift: how humans and technologies are intertwining, and what kind of cognitive, kinesthetic, and bodily impacts such intertwining entails. These kinds of conceptual-practical questions force me to examine the frontiers of choreographies. I use the plural because, in this project, choreography is a situated and contextual practice, shaped by the historical and material circumstances in which the artistic process unfolds. The conditions for choreographic to emerge are never the same when places change.

This project reveals one path and one way to work with matters that are beyond the comprehension or tactile reach of an Earthly choreographer. The project materializes attempts to work with moving bodies, where no one knows why they move the way they do. This ‘othering’ connects to the objective of queering straight choreographies by which I mean material, temporal, and kinesthetic paradigms based on artistic strategies that do not question what it means to navigate in a prevailing straight world, straight spaces, or straight infrastructures. In this way, queer/ing choreography can expose how ‘normal’ choreographic practice is constituted, and at the same time reshape the choreographic orientation itself.

I do not think that the project addresses any specific gaps in the history of choreographies, but it contributes to its expansion, quite literally. The project deviates from my own history as an Earthly choreographer who used to make dance pieces in spaces that we call black boxes. I continue to implement, probe, and destabilize my existing choreographic thinking in other kinds of material, urban and non-urban circumstances, by the keyboard and away from the keyboard, beyond the black box that used to support my artistic work.

Regarding the novelty aspect of the project, it has brought me to a previously unexplored intersection of cyber and outer space choreo-realms. The body takes place between these spaces daily through diverse practices. This spatial intersection opens new research possibilities. I am drawn to the opening cyberspace and developing understandings of AI embodiments or humanoid choreographies, and examining the techno-ecological conditions that require new cognitive and bodily skills and artist-agencies that are yet to come. This, I believe, is one function that artistic research can serve in society.

Artistic research and choreography function in this journey simultaneously as a research question to be examined, as an embodied method to explore questions and create art and meanings, and as an artistic embodied outcome. If I look at how this project reaches toward cyber and outer spaces, it opens the path through which I arrive, awkwardly, at the starting points for the next research process, in which the questions revolve around, or should I say orbit, the rapid eye movements of hyper-reading, the navigation strategies employed by the reader in the space of the internet, the corporeal connection to digital devices and touchscreens, and the encounters of moving humanoids, avatars, cyborgs, and yet unidentified alien matters and beings. In the near future, I will continue exploring the effects and impacts these moving relations have on the choreographic body/ies, understood both as a performing human body/ies and as the body/ies of the artwork.