So, while I see extreme importance in marking spaces with scents and dance excrements, I fear permanence. I fear being held accountable for my words. I fear the box of hetero-normative languages that proved to be so violent. So how do I contextualise myself through words in this thinking frame?
Entitlement, as in I’ve been doing this art form my whole life; fearlessness, as in not knowing or ignoring the codes because of class defecting; modernity, as in the belief that everything will happen if I work hard enough; patriarchy, as in I am male-presenting; and racism, as in I am white in the Northern European grant-funding art world. These contextual factors allow me to apply for money, residencies, and performances, believing that I will get them. They construct my system in a way that balances just right so I can work hard on something without hopelessly doing it. I am not sure I am at a place where I am playing with these factors, but they help me build resilience and work towards something, hoping it will happen. A pinch of débrouillardise (resourcefulness), well-directed charm, and anger allow me to approach institutions with choreographic proposals, believing they can get accepted, and that is not to be taken for granted.
This entitlement does not feel like arrogance; it feels infrastructural. It is a quiet confidence produced by repetition, by being mirrored back by institutions often enough that belief becomes almost automatic. It is the sense that there will be a form, a deadline, a jury, a language in which my work can be translated. That translation is not neutral; neutral grounds don’t exist anyway.
Modernity, for me, operates as a temporal fantasy: the belief that effort accumulates, that labour will be rewarded, that the future is expandable. It allows me to work intensely without tipping into despair. Hope, here, is not an abstract feeling but a material condition, something produced by access, by past support, by the visibility of others “like me” succeeding. At the same time, I am aware that I am not yet playing with these forces so much as being carried by them. They act as collaborators that stabilise me, that absorb risk on my behalf. Gratitude, then, becomes complicated. I am grateful not only to individuals who supported my work, but to a broader ecology that makes it plausible for me to imagine my work unfolding on a stage. This plausibility is not evenly distributed. Naming it does not dissolve it, but it does shift how I locate myself within it.
Listening to rooms, the energy they provide, the presences they support. I want to listen in order to later propose other narratives. Layer upon layer upon layer. To propose choreographic experiences, I first need to acknowledge that I am sharing this space with others. I cannot build on negating the shared time–space. From this small, complex, opaque realisation, we can embark on a story of research with bodies on stage. It feels fun, ghostly, and adventurous. That’s the contextual expression of gender identity in my work: I want to remain beyond binary stories, make things more than dual. Muddy waters, as I like to call them. The muddy waters of contemporary dance. “We must learn to be at home in the quivering tension of the in-between. No other home is available. In-between nature and culture, in-between biology and philosophy, in-between the human and everything we ram ourselves up against, everything we desperately shield ourselves from, everything we throw ourselves into, wrecked and recklessly, watching, amazed, as our skins become thinner.” Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water, Astrida Neimanis
After years of learning how to be the 'best dancer’ that France could ever possibly know, it was time to add layers to make opacity tangible. Instead of unlearning, undoing, or erasing, I am eager to, as Isabel Lewis told me one day, layer experiences. I don’t want to undo memories of lived experiences, and I’m not sure I can, to be honest. So instead, I choose to complexify my reality. After many failed attempts at finding a job as a 19-year-old dancer around Europe, I decided that maybe I could benefit from a few more years of friction, going to Switzerland to learn from Thomas Hauert at La Manufacture Lausanne. This three-year-long experience taught me to place my sensorial body–mind experience as the central pièce de résistance. What I am going through experientially is the diamond. During this Bachelor context, the writing thesis comes after the choreographic movement proposal. We are asked to give context after the proposal has been made, so it becomes more of a tracing of what happened: marking with chalk, writing vectors of words on paper when they orient and disorient, rendering visible/invisible. The Swedish singer Zara Larsson sings:
The more I experience,
The more mysterious it gets
Better let it unfold
’Cause I’m not young enough to know everything anymore
And it feels so good to know I don’t know what I’m doing
Another contextual factor that greatly influences my choreographic work is the emergence of social media when I was a teenager. I grew up with a phone in my hands from the age of 13. Facebook was accessible from 13, and I was there. I’m used to seeing a diffraction of images lodging themselves deep at the back of my retina; things are crashing and clashing constantly. ADHD generation for sure. I can go from a food video to absolute trigger-warning pictures to a bizarre cake recipe, and it does not strike me. I’m calmed down; the brain assembles and layers all these things. A melting pot, a soup of possibilities. An economy of attention was born. This way of growing up strongly affected my sense of choreographing. I love layering movement scores, complexifying the room by multiplying sources of information and marrying things together, composing with the digital as much as the real. Making the digital real and vice versa. Referencing a million things is a big instinctive choreographic game, a symbiosis in the cyborg.
I have an Instagram folder where I put all the references for future/current research. This folder contains outfit, food, and visual inspirations, as well as some quotes. This folder is a constant reminder that I can world-build a space where all these references exist. Even though this folder usually serves more as a costume or scenography space, I am sure it influences what I envision movement-wise. Living in a post-truth world, dissociating in the digital, I choreograph for oomf (one of my followers). Taking pictures, dancing phone in hand, constantly massaging myself to remind my body–mind of its existence. Here is an English translation of a draft of my MA thesis (which I write in French) that talks about this:
I always find something to write about. I take these exams as creative endeavours to learn more about myself and to experiment playfully with my suspicion towards writing. I don’t consider writing as an expansion of my choreographic practice; I see it as something adjacent. I see it as something to be feared and that I have to do to get funding, as our social system attributes more intelligence to the verbatim. I’m coming from the deep countryside of rural France (300 people). No one in my family has a university degree or pursued an artistic career. Imagine vineyards all around you; patriarchy is very well implanted. My mom does everything at home: cooking, washing, and caring, on top of her full-time job. No public shops or public transport, amazing cuisine, ocean waves one hour from my parents’ house. Discussions about anything other than factual matters are non-existent. Talking about concepts, emotions, or ideas would be out of place. The conversations are based on whom I met, what I did, and what I’ll do. And in retrospect, why not?
By leaving my parents’ household at 14 years old to go study dance in Paris, I did extract myself, à la Didier Eribon, from the social context I grew up in. In his book Retour à Reims, Eribon describes the movement of extracting himself from the rural socio-economic context he grew up in to build a Parisian cultural elite homosexual version of himself. He becomes a social defector, refusing everything that his own context presented to become an other. It’s a process of othering one’s own context to fit into a new one, the “better” one, “ascending” socially, culturally, economically. I built myself in opposition to this rural world while, for the first time, embracing and acknowledging my homosexuality and studying at the finest school temple of art France thinks it provides. Acquiring new tastes, learning what to like or not, distancing myself from my “not smart enough” family to understand high art. I was told that I am part of the cultural elite of this country by entering this school, humbly named the National Superior Conservatory of Music and Dance of Paris (CNSMDP), that I should become a machine, an abstract canvas.
In this context, the moving body is of extreme value both in the countryside, where manual work is mandatory to earn money, and at the conservatory, where dance is then “talking without words.” A person becomes a great performer by moving really well, never complaining, and executing the choreographies with such virtuosity that an audience admires beauty in its finest form. This way of educating a teenager leaves traces. It took me a very long time to believe that words could have value and could be taken seriously. I always put trust in my lived experience, as adults could not be trusted on both the elite Parisian side, which was super violent towards my androgynous body, and my parents, who physically and verbally belittled me. Body language practices remained a space of empowerment for me. I felt strong, I felt seen, and I felt that I could trust the ephemerality of such language. I was harder to grasp in such forms, such ethereal forms of being. That’s why I turned to dance in the first place.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
Chapter 9: It reminds me of a show by Carolina Bianchi that I saw recently. In her show Brotherhood, she asks a guy a question in a fake interview to reveal the blatant patriarchy that plagues our artistic circles. She asks him if he ever questions his own vitality. “And you, do you feel alive all the time? Because I’ve been dead since the incident,” or something like that. Her show is staged as a kind of elaborate thesis on the complex sexist violence inflicted on us by the brotherhood. I constantly ask myself the same question: Am I really alive? I’ve had an unfortunate tendency to see myself on a video game screen for the past few months. I am dead. I struggle to get out of the Styx. My eyes perceive the screen; the people around me are characters just like Beyoncé and that demure TikTok girl on my screen, just like Baldwin and J. Butler in my books, just like my deceased great-grandmother and my many friends who committed suicide. I see all this, and I fall further and further. My brain, in video game mode, loses its ability to refresh itself. My phone is my talisman; it knows my fingers by heart, the comforting object of my intravenous capitalism so deeply ingrained that I no longer realise the gaps in realism. My generation is zombie 2.0. Capitalism owns my time, my body, my thoughts, every second I’m awake. And soon, physical death, because mental death has already happened.
So, while I see extreme importance in marking spaces with scents and dance excrements, I fear permanence. I fear being held accountable for my words. I fear the box of hetero-normative languages that proved to be so violent. So how do I contextualise myself through words in this thinking frame?
So, while I see extreme importance in marking spaces with scents and dance excrements, I fear permanence. I fear being held accountable for my words. I fear the box of hetero-normative languages that proved to be so violent. So how do I contextualise myself through words in this thinking frame?
So, while I see extreme importance in marking spaces with scents and dance excrements, I fear permanence. I fear being held accountable for my words. I fear the box of hetero-normative languages that proved to be so violent. So how do I contextualise myself through words in this thinking frame?
LA CONCLUSION:
If context is a collaborator, then it is not always kind, coherent, or intentional. Sometimes it scaffolds me; sometimes it exhausts me; sometimes it lends me its privileges without asking whether I deserve them. Sometimes it asks me to speak, to write, to translate myself into forms that still scare me. Other times it allows me to stay opaque, to remain bodily, to circulate affects without fixing them. I do not experience context as something I can step outside of in order to observe. It presses on my back while I work. It breathes with me in the room. It shapes my optimism, my fear, my sense of entitlement, my exhaustion, my hope. It collaborates through infrastructures, through habits, through screens, through funding forms, through the remembered violence of institutions and the remembered care of collectives. My choreographic practice does not aim to resolve these forces, nor to purify itself from them. It aims to host them; to let them coexist without hierarchy, to let bodies, images, smells, pleasures, references, privileges, and fractures share a temporary space without being flattened into literacy. If there is an ethics here, it is not one of clarity but of attention: listening to rooms, to bodies, to histories, to my own positioning, and composing with what is already there, in the multiple.
Invent new frames of languaging that go beyond grasping, framing, and reducing. Poetics of writing that allow for the frame to vaguely hold a shape, for the dance to connect to the sensorial. Over the past year, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney has been a huge inspiration in seeing how language could play with my perception of holding. Holding feet, hands, and skins. I am still unsure if I could ever feel as playful with my words, twisting and turning them as much as I twist and turn my body, but I, at least, read that opacity is possible in writing. Poetry encounters academia to give context to thoughts while letting them breathe, while letting meaning change at each encounter with the text. It’s a sense of perception after all.
“When we refuse, Moten and Harney suggest, we create dissonance and, more importantly, we allow dissonance to continue– when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room. Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so, when we refuse the call to order, we refuse order as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and truth.”
These years reinforce my belief that I don’t need to justify my dancing with words. The choreographic work can reclaim body–mind knowledge as an empowering space. Dance, in its expanded idea, stands on its own. Dance does not necessarily need pre- or post-explanations, because the shared moment of bodily interplay is the interaction. Of course, context is sometimes important, and discussions and interpretations are possible (maybe Susan Sontag would argue differently). In the frame of thought I am referring to, I wish to give an opportunity for dance to be recognised as a valued mode of communication, where analysis is not necessarily the primary step of understanding. That’s why playful entertainment has such a big place in contemporary dance for me: it allows dance-making to be a milieu of felt knowledge.
These years reinforce my belief that I don’t need to justify my dancing with words. The choreographic work can reclaim body–mind knowledge as an empowering space. Dance, in its expanded idea, stands on its own. Dance does not necessarily need pre- or post-explanations, because the shared moment of bodily interplay is the interaction. Of course, context is sometimes important, and discussions and interpretations are possible (maybe Susan Sontag would argue differently). In the frame of thought I am referring to, I wish to give an opportunity for dance to be recognised as a valued mode of communication, where analysis is not necessarily the primary step of understanding. That’s why playful entertainment has such a big place in contemporary dance for me: it allows dance-making to be a milieu of felt knowledge.
These years reinforce my belief that I don’t need to justify my dancing with words. The choreographic work can reclaim body–mind knowledge as an empowering space. Dance, in its expanded idea, stands on its own. Dance does not necessarily need pre- or post-explanations, because the shared moment of bodily interplay is the interaction. Of course, context is sometimes important, and discussions and interpretations are possible (maybe Susan Sontag would argue differently). In the frame of thought I am referring to, I wish to give an opportunity for dance to be recognised as a valued mode of communication, where analysis is not necessarily the primary step of understanding. That’s why playful entertainment has such a big place in contemporary dance for me: it allows dance-making to be a milieu of felt knowledge.