Choreographic Practices - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2022

Nadra Assaf from Lebanon and Heather Harrington from the United States are dancers, educators, scholars and choreographers who believe in the power of the body for communication, intersectional feminism and sociopolitical movement. They came together, virtually and in real life, to create hybrid performances investigating what it means to be a female in the twenty-first century through the lens of their respective countries utilizing a feminist social constructionist perspective. They initiated new ways to choreograph birthed out of who they are, their geographical separation and their sociopolitical environments. Engaging in autoethnography, they analyse their creative process and choreographic work to extrapolate observations from personal and social spheres. Their theoretical application examines connections, reflections and interactions through an intersectional feminist lens. Data collection comes from the retro(in)spection of journals, video recordings, e-mail correspondences, recordings of conversations and interviews with viewers of their work. Their practice-led research opens doors to Jungian dream analytic tools and Barad’s diffraction theory to help reveal meanings behind their choreographic work. They believe their choreographic strategies can be applied outside of their unique collaboration, specifically relating to the present interconnected virtual world thus revealing new ways of creating.

This autoethnographic text describes a dance and personal historical research process during COVID-19 quarantine and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. As implications of a changing planet and unequal cross-cultural impacts and responsibilities become ever more clear, this research explores assimilation into Whiteness in Ashkenazi Jewish American lineage and how that relates to interspecies dancing. What is lost in this story of assimilation? What might interspecies collaborations teach us about relating cross-culturally? Whiteness and Jewishness are considered through histories of speaking and losing Yiddish and the role of Jewish dancers in early modern dance in New York. Interviews about Yiddish and assimilation are in dialogue with an improvisational dance practice with a border collie dog (whose ancestors helped colonize the United States). This interspecies movement practice and others (including complex evolutionary histories) connect to biologist Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing for insights about collaboration across differences. In thematically bringing Jewishness into performance practice, this research unravels layers of resistance, privilege and present racial inequities. The text looks to Audre Lorde and civil rights activist Eric K. Ward for coalition building practices: finding connection and finding ourselves are to be changed by our encounters without losing ourselves in the process.

This article introduces a piece of choreographic writing. It likewise discusses the kind of site-specific choreographic process of opening up to what in everyday life is not apparent and left in the shadows that generated the writing. The objective of the choreographic process was to allow the impact of the bodily sense of being in contact with an urban location to permeate the authors’ activities in writing. To support this intention, they generated a phenomenologically informed performative score of experimental writing that aims at appreciating the vitality of the sensuous. The first part of the submission presents the actual choreographic writing as an evocative piece of choreography that can be read independently of the second part. This latter part contains an exploration into conceptions about choreography and writing. Here, the article draws specifically on Jean-Luc Nancy’s insights to articulate the kind of phenomenological approach the authors engaged in. It aims at establishing their artistic process as a phenomenologically oriented method in expanded choreography and argues that the writing they generated exscribes their encounter with the Hakaniemi bank in Helsinki on a late December day. It likewise details the significance the body bears on their take on choreographic writing and points towards the manner in which this writing contains traces of the inexpressible and non-thinkable.

Review of: Skinner Releasing Technique: A Movement and Dance Practice, Manny A. Emslie (ed.) (2021)

Charmouth: Triarchy Press, 300 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-91374-329-1, p/bk, £22.50

Review of: A Philosophy of Practising: With Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Antonia Pont (2021)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 350 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47449-046-7, h/bk, £80.00