intersect/surface/body: A Choreographic View of Drawing

This practice-based research project explores how a choreographic view of a physically informed drawing practice can serve to articulate and generate new understandings of material relations between moving bodies and static, receptor surfaces. Using task-based studies and other systematic structures of working that activate the horizontal plane of the floor, the research reveals how different configurations of relations between bodies, surfaces, and materials such as charcoal and paper, can mediate and extend a reciprocal touch between body and surface. Rather than on the production of finished artwork, emphasis is placed on processual activity and the working conditions from which material and visual residues emerge as evidential remains of reciprocal touch.

The research is organised around the key terms intersect, surface, and body that operate as working concepts and facilitate a way of organising the observations and findings of the practical investigation into distinct areas of enquiry while recognising that these areas increasingly overlap and complicate one another. The thesis is extended through a critical engagement with ideas of non-human agency and materiality developed in the work of Harman (2013), Bennet (2010) and Barad (2013) and a reconsideration of horizontality through Steinberg’s notion of the ‘flatbed picture plane’ (1972) which informs a choreographic view of drawing in relation to orientation and surface distribution. The thesis is further contextualised through a consideration of the choreographic conditions presenting in performance works of choreographers Trisha Brown, La Ribot and Janine Antoni that extend across choreography and visual art contexts.

The thesis aims to contribute to recent discourse in the field of choreography concerned with how a co-presence of human and non-human forces can be incorporated into choreographic processes and how drawing can present as choreographic knowledge through a consideration of material agency in approaches to performance-making.

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