Choreographing events

: demolition, trace and encounter

Abstract

Every generation is challenged by the question of what to preserve, what to alter and what to let disappear and die. In this journey, demolition becomes a critical moment, eliminating built architecture as an erect material object. Focusing on demolition as a phenomenon that resists the passing of time through destruction, my research explores demolition as a concept that has something to offer the present. In Choreographing Events, demolition, as a process of transformation, becomes an artistic method; a choreographic strategy with multiple expressions.
This practice-as-research enquiry (Haseman, 2006; Nelson, 2013; Rendell, 2004) aims to explore the space that lies between the disciplines of dance, choreography, architecture and the screen. In the in-between space (Grosz, 2001) of the aforementioned disciplines, I perform a series of demolitions as transgressions (Jenks 2013) which take the form of dance-architectures (hybrids between dance and architecture),choreographic diagrams (visual tools emerging from the intersection of architectural diagrams and dance scores), unstable archives (spatio-corporeal ‘documents’), choreographic environments and events (spatial conditions for corporeal and performance-based interactions). Through these inter-disciplinary encounters, demolition appears as a dynamic process that allows movement in the liminal space between stability and mobility, trace and disappearance and permanence and ephemerality.
Informed by Bernard Tschumi’s thinking, I draw connections between event-spaces (1996) and the work of choreography to un-do, and thus demolish, fixed perceptions of space. Event-spaces as a triangulation of movement, space and action are applied in the performing space of the theatre -architecture (specifically the Black Box Theatre) and have been expanded in the tracing as writing (choreo-graphing and cinemato-graphing) of architecture as an event-based, and thus spatio-corporeal, and archival practice. Two practice-as-research projects, Choreo graphic Process Architecturally Devised (2015) and Anarchitextures (2016) offer a critique of the traditional forms of dance-making inside theatrical places, proposing an expanded choreographic practice that questions the theatrical apparatus while revealing the performativity of space. This research is relevant to dance artists and architects interested in space-making practices, re-theatricalisations, site-interventions and embodied ways of activating and archiving architecture.

Date of Award	31 May 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Supervisor	Avanthi Meduri (Supervisor) & Carol Brown (Supervisor)