Practice as Research PhD projects

Department of Dance Studies

Title of the thesis:

Inscribing the Body: Feminist Choreographic Practices

'Choreography theory' is situated at the interface between contemporary feminist thought and choreographic practice as an interdiscursive, interdisciplinary practice which seeks to address feminist ways of knowing through the moving body.   The activity of dancing has operated as an enclave of female/feminist endeavour within modern and postmodern dance histories.  Dancers, whose principal significatory mode is their bodies' often silent articulations in space, perform within Western representational systems which historically have constructed the category of Woman as object through the subordination of the female body.  Deconstructive strategies can be critically engaged to work through the legacies of this essentialist tradition within dance.  However, the risks of methods of resistant representation need to be addressed , in particular the "linguistic determinism" which theoretically underwrites semiotic and psychoanalytic analyses;  the erasure of the body as matter and its substitution as a set of codes and signs; and the dangers of deconstructing a tradition in which women have had a degree of control as cultural producers.  The 'tool box' of Foucauldian analysis and Irigarayan philosophy enables the feminist choreographer to envisage transformations of movement and meaning in her practice.  Strategies for reinscribing the body through feminist choreographies engage in the deconstruction of essentialist assumptions about the female body whilst simultaneously seeking to revalue its significance for women dancing.  Two dance theatre works,  the trio, 'Bloodsongs' and the solo, 'The Mechanics of Fluids' emerge as the creative outcomes of these critical explorations.

Date of award: 1995.

Supervisor: Professor Janet Lansdale

External Examiners: Professor Sally Banes and Professor Liz Stanley