School of Performing Arts - Theses
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ItemChoreographing time: temporality in choreography from the perspective of a solo improviser( 2017)Choreographing Time is a practice-led research project exploring how the temporality of improvisational material can be articulated to affect the attention of the audience. The research investigates how the intersubjectivity between performer and audience affects the regulation of time in solo improvisation and contributes to the performance making process. Focusing on developing the performer’s capacity for attention, the two main areas of research underpinning this investigation are Noh theatre and BodyMind Centering® (BMC), a form of somatic practice. In addition, this research combines practical investigation with the theory of ‘self-other’ in neurophysiology and the phenomenological study of perceptual experience to inform the consideration of temporality in the performance of solo improvisation. The methodology includes practices drawn from Noh Theatre, in particular, the application of the temporal concept of jo-ha-kyū in improvisation, movement exploration derived from BMC, together with methods for critical experimentation and analysis of choreographic strategies including reflective writing, reportage and audience interviews. The theoretical and studio research resulted in the presentation of the new solo work "17 Square Brackets" with its improvisational score speculating on the conditions of the body to generate performative material. This research proposes further investigation that will seek to integrate fields of knowledge within Western and Eastern disciplines to impart new ways of approaching improvised performance making. This is aimed to enable a coherent experience, which is mutually shared between the performer and audience.
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ItemAn unfinished mindful body meets live choreographies of solo dance( 2017)My practice-led research that utilises live solo performances of improvised contemporary dance, explores the notion that the body can be considered as unfinished, unresolved. My research shows that such conceptualisations foster productive links between dance and bodily specificity. Furthermore, how somatic attentiveness, a key element in my praxis, links to values such as human development, and social responsibility, is also explored by this dissertation. These explorations consider the socio-political agency of my work with live performance. This dissertation shows how awareness of bodily specificity clarifies understandings of personal and social response-ability. The consistent application of somatic attentiveness throughout my praxis has provided a sense of continuity between experiences of movement associated with personal, political, cultural, social, and academic actions. A theme returned to repeatedly throughout my thesis is that the personal, the social, the cultural, the political, and the academic are enmeshed. No one precedes the other. Phenomenology as a philosophical approach positions lived experience, and the body, centrally. My research has been significantly supported and furthered through exposure to materials from this field. The work of philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Philipa Rothfield, Elizabeth Behnke and others in response to Husserlian Phenomenology has informed my work. Perspectives which have guided my inquiries have also come from autoethnography, dance theory and performance theory, through the work of theorists and philosophers including Carolyn Ellis, Bojana Cvejić, Danielle Goldman, Susan Leigh Foster and Ann Cooper Albright.
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ItemPerformer as medium: connecting past and present in improvisation( 2016)‘Performer as Medium: Connecting Past and Present in Improvisation’, is a practice-led research project undertaken between 2013-2016 at the Victorian College of the Arts as a Master of Fine Arts (Dance) by research. There are two components of the research: a performance outcome and an exegesis. ‘Moths are Calling’ (38min) was performed and documented in July 2014, and is available for perusal via video format. It is accompanied by this exegesis of 20,000 words. This practice-led inquiry explores performer as medium, and more broadly, performance as a practice connecting past already lived experience, and the present. It is centred in the experience of my solo performance practice that is philosophically concerned with the ontology of the everyday and the ordinary. The inquiry adopts an experiential approach in which the creative and performance practice is sustained, while strategically adopting phenomenological, autobiographic, and ethnographic stances to interrupt, problematize and inform the creative work. This bricolleur approach to methods has a characteristically emergent implication, allowing for unfolding, a degree of plasticity and adaption that is further and continuously informed by an on-going survey of relevant practitioners and literature.
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ItemPulse: a physical approach to staging text( 2008)This exegesis articulates the evolution of an improvisational training and rehearsal methodology called Pulse and discusses the outcomes of a practice-based research project where Pulse was applied to the screenplay of Yes by Sally Potter. Pulse is an approach to performance creation, where an ensemble of performers trains to kinaesthetically embed and integrate a selection of performance and compositional principles enabling them to improvise together. This research involved working with a trained ensemble to explore how Pulse could be used to create spatial and visual imagery that would illuminate a narrative text; to create physical theatre based on the spoken word. I used the language of a screenplay for the generative material, as it was not written for the stage. A visceral, physical and aural landscape therefore would have to be created so an audience could experience the different worlds of the narrative outside its realistic, filmic context. The Pulse process demands that the actor thinks with the body and does not work from the mind. This allows for surprising meetings on the rehearsal floor as the body of the actor responds to suggestions of lust, desire, power and conflict implicit in a narrative. I found that the restrained emotional landscape of unspoken feelings in Sally Potter’s film text emerged through action creating a physicalisation of deep undercurrents. The character’s emotional inner world was revealed through physical metaphor. The performer was able to create a score of non-behavioural physical imagery which when staged could run parallel to the spoken word. Where the original medium may have relegated the importance of the body, the Pulse physical translation process prioritised the body in the live experience. The actor’s body painted the space through direct physical experience and memory. The body was content, image and witness. As a consequence our adapted, staged version told a different story to that of the film. This research involved instigating and tracking the investigation and this exegesis describes and analyses the form that emerged.