Choreographic Explorations in the Middle and the Excess: Turning habit into potential with Tools that Propel

Levinsky, Sarah (2024) Choreographic Explorations in the Middle and the Excess: Turning habit into potential with Tools that Propel. Performance Research, 28 (8). ISSN 1352-8165 (In Press)

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Abstract / Summary

Examining how the choreographic improvisation system Tools that Propel (TTP) facilitates dancers to excavate their habitual movement for new creative potential, this article questions whether the co-evolution of technology and humans – technogenesis – can bring about new understanding to the nature of habit. TTP enables intra-acting dancers to improvise with their own virtual body, seen moving in two superimposed moments of time; past incidences of movement are folded into present ones (projected on screen) when the system determines them to be recurring in the motion it tracks on the floor. Through an entanglement of the embodied and virtual gesture the intra-acting dancer explores their movement habits; improvising with TTP they can investigate the effects of movements and rewind to their causes, investigating a movement’s centre, its fulcrum, the moment of action (and potential) itself. TTP both reveals and is a process of becoming. It is a diffraction apparatus (Barad 2007) enabling the re-conception of previously perceived entities in its entanglement of phenomena and a system of metastable equilibrium (Simondon 2011 [1958]) repeatedly bringing intra-actors back to the brink of emergence – the preformal universe before the separation of subject and object. This article argues that with(in) TTP the improvisation unfolds in a constant shifting process with no fixed boundary between subject and object – the becoming occurring in the movement between them. It posits that if nothing pre-exists the intra-action between phenomena, and thus the process of becoming, then arguably there is no such thing as habit at all; for nothing is fixed as an object, a thing, an entity, but always dynamically, and intra-actively, emerges as new potential.

Item Type:	Article
ISSN:	1352-8165
Subjects:	Performance > Dance > Choreography Performance > Dance Technology > Digital Works
Courses by Department:	Academy of Music & Theatre Arts > Dance
Related URLs:	Author
Depositing User:	Sarah Levinsky
Date Deposited:	29 Apr 2024 13:36
Last Modified:	29 Apr 2024 13:36
URI:	https://falmouth-test.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/5495

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