Wanderlust in screendance

: the body in landscapes

Abstract

This PhD by completed works draws together a portfolio of creative pieces that have been published in the last ten years and are submitted via a website including links to videos, images of installations and performances, credits, publication details, programme notes and posters. The supporting statement accompanying the artefacts, pursues several lines of enquiry. By responding to current scholarship and discourse about ways of knowing and artistic research (Borgdorff, 2012; Greenfield et.al. 2018; Ingold, 2013) it recognises the specific format of this submission via artistic practice and the way in which the supporting statement and creative works communicate with each other in this thesis. The background and key influences of my artistic practice are identified and situate the work as interdisciplinary practice, that draws on contemporary dance and somatic movement practices (Stemmer- Steckelbröck, 1995) walking practice (Lagerström, 2015), site-specific choreography (Hunter 2010, 2015), screendance (Fildes, 2018; Mc Pherson & Fildes 2013, 2015) and choreographic editing (Fildes, 2018; Pearlman, 2013, 2016, 2017). The main body of the statement illustrates the iterative development of my artistic screendance practice which has led to the development of the proposed Wanderlust method as a site-specific approach for the making of landscape screendance, where the somatic encounter of the body in landscape is utilized as the source of all stages of the creation. The concepts of site-specific screendance performance, the Wanderers method for the gathering of footage in screendance, the somatic camera, and somatic editing, are proposed as strategies of screendance making. The artefacts of this portfolio are defined as visual-aural poems outlining a new genre within the screendance discipline, as somatic landscape screendance. By exploring the romantic themes of Heimat, Wanderlust, Embodiment of Place, and the particular composition in romantic landscape art, the creative process and the practical outcomes are considered in relation to artistic and philosophical aspects of the early German romantic landscape artists (Koerner, 2014; Rigby, 2004; Verwiebe & Montua, 2018) and it is argued that the screendance works present a re-occurrence of romantic art in the 21st century (Saul, 2009; Stone, 2014). The key theme of the self-reflective encounter with nature is discussed illustrating how embodied accounts of place can be seen and felt in the artistic outcomes. As a final outcome of the reflection on the practice, the visual Wanderlust model accompanied by the Wanderlust scores are presented, offering a practical guide to explore the Wanderlust method as a holistic way of screendance making.

Date of Award	18 Jan 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Supervisor	Emilyn Claid (Supervisor), Efrosini Protopapa (Supervisor) & Bob Whalley (Supervisor)