Speaking Dancer In-Residence: Speaking, Dancing, Residing-In
Abstract
'Speaking Dancer In-Residence' responds to notions of belonging through the question, 'what can dance do in the world?' Speaking Dancer is a persona who embodies my practice of movement and words; a fictional construct that performs a back and forth between first and third person. This interplay between narrative points of view is to address the role of imagination and vocalisation in my research. Situating my practice of choreography and performance in a school of architecture led to the emergence of in-residence as key dance practice-research methodology. Commonly used in artist-in-residence programs offered worldwide, in-residence was re-purposed in my practice as a self-organising spatial-temporal arrangement. Moving through different environments and communities in-residence was a test-site for exploring choreographic thinking, writing through moving and performance making. Speaking Dancer was in-residence in a cargo ship, a rehearsal room, a dance studio and a shipping container. Each of these sites proposed certain physical and conceptual constraints, giving rise to residing-in: a choreographic, performative and relational approach. The preposition 'in' is an active passage between residence and residing working my practice of choreography and performance into a social, kinaesthetic and energetic weave. The overarching aim of 'Speaking Dancer In-Residence' was to explore 'dance' as a wider mobility, and thereby position belonging as movement and words that draw on inheritance, iteration, memory and myth. This doctoral study offers in-residence and inventing fictional constructs as choreographic tactics inside and outside the discipline of dance, reaching out to broader audiences and pushing dance in multiple directions. It calls forth residing-in as a relational approach that engages in and with a specific site and milieu in order to recognise, and remember, that belonging is an activity, contingently produced, in a mutual-making with other bodies, spaces, temporal frames, and environments.
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