My doctoral artistic research project examines choreography as reading practice. In the research, the notion of choreography operates simultaneously as an analytical device, problem to be examined, and an artistic outcome. The primary method for the research is choreographic experimental practice that delves into the process of dynamic place-taking in which the human body couples with surrounding movements, from microscopic to telescopic and beyond, without the aim of mastering the movement.

This experimental process examines and develops understanding of how choreographic practice can be understood as an embodied (hyper-)reading practice, which materializes, de- and recodes movements of the situated and contextual transformative circumstances that choreograph my body. Here, choreographic practice processes simultaneous, incoherent multiplicity, which is formed by the relations, interconnectedness, and reciprocity of movement, surrounding material and kinetic condition, human corporeality and embodiment, place, space, and context.

The research practice delves into the conditions of movement and choreography through the following transformations:

  • from choreographer to choreoreader
  • from choreographing to choreoreading
  • from grounded embodied choreographic construction to astroembodied choreostruction
  • from human vessel to human atmospheric organism

In the framework of choreography studies, the research contributes to the shift and expansion from the historical notion of choreography as writing practice, in which the human body masters the movements to a choreoreading practice. Choreoreading explores the reciprocal lived and conceptual relations, inter-dependencies, transactions, and critical perspectives of the movements of a performance environment. This research project also contributes to the genealogies of site-specific and context-responsive practices, extending the notion of site to outer space. In order to bring out choreography as reading practice as art for the viewer, there are various means at hand, which are processed and developed from the fields of performing and visual arts.

Errata

On the cover page of the exposition, the peer review logo of The Federation of Finnish Learned Societes should be ignored as the publication has not undergone anonymous peer review. The logo was inserted by the publishers.