Intersensoriality and emplacement / The cornerstones of my choreographic practice

In my field of practice I seek to find and implement formats that decline the conventional restrictive and power structures, otherwise inherent in traditional performance formats. My approach to audience as heterogeneous group, with various ways of perception and attending, moves away from the notion of ‘attention’ as traditionally conceived, as well as from the attention-versus-distraction binary  model of conventional theatrical reception. My practice facilitates a high level of commonality and conviviality between performers and audience, and promotes intersubjectivity, empathic responses and playfulness of relational aesthetics. With my performances I create sensuous ecologies that embrace individuality, aiming for empowerment and shared vulnerability.

Choreography of attention

Throughout my choreographic practice, I aspire to introduce a broader understanding of dance and choreography in the context of both artistic and social experience. I situate my artistic practice within a field of choreography as expanded practice. I explore spatio-temporal aspects of choreography, extended beyond dance, bodily expression, representation and style, applied on dancers and audience movement, scenography/installation, sound, light, scents and objects. Using the choreography as a general referent for any structuring enables me to observe and examine the ‘choreography of the attention’ that emerged as an interface generated by the interplay of audience agency, dancers actions and agentive capacity of objects/installation. The approach based on the idea that choreography is impossible without the performance of all the bodies gathered within, enables events that were co-choreographed till the certain extent by the audience presence and choices.

Interrelational ecology and immersion

My choreographic strategies are devised on the basis of a phenomenological approach to perception and the primacy of movement. As such, they are directed towards first-hand, direct, immersive experience of the audience, heightening their awareness of perception as embodied and interdependent with its surroundings. Immersive environments decline spatial division between audience and performers, enabling the interplay of audiences physical movement and sensory input, and proposing the multiple perspectives of the single situation. Audience is able to freely explore - in accordance to their abilities, satisfy their curiosity, and follow up their instinctual desire to participate, with no judgment on eligible and ineligible behaviors. This approach engenders audience's’ sense of belonging without having them directed by an outside agency.

I conceive safe and stimulating performance environments in order to generate an interrelational ecology, providing unique conditions for a wide variety of interchange and communication. By foregrounding pre-discursive and pre-reflective dimensions of the experience, I am devising potentially equalizing and inclusive environments that neurodivergent and neurotypical audiences can enjoy together - an open-ended experience that does not set fixed goals but rather creates the conditions for the audience to explore and discover a new form of being-in-the-world. With this approach, I am aiming for a multi-modal and affective experience of both child and care-taker. The role of the care-taker is emphasized as adults are invited to support and follow their child and to share the experience. This approach strongly challenges the theatrical conventions of hierarchy and control of relationships between performers and audience and assigns an emancipatory role to audience activation

Intersensoriality and emplacement

My practice is problematizing socially limited sensory hierarchy and exploring of non-western sensory profiles in relation to extents of audience involvement in the constitution of their own experience. I am exploring the extents of interplay between agency and participation in correlation with multi-directional interaction of the senses and sensory ideology, and sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment (Howes 2005). This approach relates to increasing evidence from neuroscience on the interconnectedness and interactions of sensory areas of the brain, which is proving that nothing is “purely visual or purely auditory, or purely anything' (Howes, 2005). Such approach to multi-sensory experience encourages audiences’ imaginative engagement and attentiveness and contributes to heightened awareness of both child and adult.

Kinaesthetic affect

With the primary interest in practices that can establish and encourage this sensual relationships between all the bodies and the space, the research places at its core kinaesthetic response and empathy, and affect. Kinaesthetic response as a mode of relating to movement in performance can be described as engagement with kinaesthetic intentionality, operating as a micro, intercorporeal exchange between performer and audience, resulting in kinaesthetic empathy. Through kinaesthetic response, the audience is engaged with the medium of dance, rather than its representational content. The embodied intensity that impacts the audience kinaesthetically is linked with affect, rather than emotion. To be affected is to be moved in an embodied sense rather than in a cognitive sense, which impacts both child and adults on the same level and consequently equalizes them in the experiencing process.

Agency

The structure and the content of my work insist on decentralised spectatorship in order to raise the audience's awareness that "there is no one 'right' way of looking at the world, nor any privileged place. By proposing multiple perceptions of a single situation, it denies the viewer an 'ideal' place from which to contemplate the work (as defined by the artist) and instead assigns an emancipatory role to their activation. I share the perspective of some installation artists who see ‘psychological rigidity’ in 'seeing things from one fixed point of view', relating a single-point perspective to patriarchal ideology (Bishop, 2005). Therefore, I see agency and the 'idea of activated spectatorship as a politicized aesthetic practice', as noted by Claire Bishop (2005). Moreover, as she formulates it, 'this type of work conceives of its viewing subject not as an individual who experiences the art in transcendent or existential isolation but as part of collective or community' (2005).

Sensuous and responsive performative practice

The performative practice implemented in my performances concerns the ongoing, mutually influential exchange between the performers and audience - open to and informed by the environment, aiming for an active and shared role in the ecology of the event. It is based on the high level of the interchange between performers and audience with the emphasis on the perceptiveness of the performer - the practice which is in constant negotiation with all the information in the space. By investigating the nature of sensory perception and the choreographic opportunities it affords, my methods are focused on practices which direct attention within and across the senses, not only for the audience but also for the dancers.

Durational format

Essential for my work is the durational format. The audience has a unique opportunity to enjoy the installation upon their personal therms - to arrive at the time which suits them the best and stay as long as they like to, ideally, within the 3-4 hours running time. This format acknowledges and considers the heterogeneous nature of the audience and utterly respects the individual needs of both child and adult, as well as the time needed to process this multifaceted experience. The performance environment provides the conditions for active exploration, social exchange, exhilaration, as well as for intimate moments, falling asleep, etc. The fluctuation of various modes of attention is most welcomed and essential for the constitution of audience experience on individual basis. By providing resistance to an ever-accelerating pace of life (Shalson 2012) durational format has a capacity to transform both performer and audience, affirming the sensation of “simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming.” (Bergson, 1997).