Im/possible Choreographies: Diffractive Processes and Ethical Entanglements in Current British Dance Practices

Abstract

Introduction: Choreography and Im/possibilities in the PresentOver the last decade, governmental instability and widespread financial crises both in Britain and in continental Europe have been the background of bewildering events through which problematic political and ethical conjunctures have become day-to-day realities: the refugee crisis, exacerbated by the Syrian civil war and by the measures and legislation implemented in a number of countries to control the flow of migrants; the 2016 British referendum and the civic turmoil and protest marches provoked by the vote to leave the European Union vis-à-vis the xenophobic sentiment it unleashed; London's Grenfell Tower fire on 24 June 2017, which killed over seventy people and injured an equal number among the occupants of this working-class housing complex, leading to public outrage and to demands for independent investigations into building regulations and fire safety. These are but few of the most emblematic events that have brought the question of borders and the issue of difference and discrimination to the forefront of political discourse in the United Kingdom; events that speak of the dangerous unpredictability of contemporary politics and of its increasingly uneasy relationship to ethics. I propose to consider these events as im/possible realities1insofar as they materialize as situations that are ethically and politically precariouswhich demand positioning, and ultimately also action. This article aims to address the question of what choreographic forms such positioning and such action might take, beyond and/or alongside direct political engagement.September 2019 version, before final copyediting 2 How might choreography attend to the ongoing differentiation and increasing complexity of today's socio-political environment in ways that escape the dominant logic of fear and envision new spaces of commonality? How might dance practices intervene in how causality and agency are conceived of, mobilizing a response as well as a sense of responsibility to the specific configurations that are produced in each spatio-temporal conjuncture? How might choreodramaturgical processes engage with the paradoxical tensions between doing and undoing inscribed in the world's becoming, and grapple with the entanglement of the possible with the impossible? This article approaches the choreographic as a mode of relationality that acknowledges the shifting nature of boundaries and the exclusions implied in any particular encounter, in any specific configuration; it interrogates dance as a site for reorienting horizons of possibility and materializing the workings of the world's ongoing historicity. I propose to think of the precariousness and ambiguity of the events that I sketched above from the perspective of new materialist thought, and specifically through the lens of Karen Barad's notions of indeterminacy and intra-action, which, in dialogue with Donna Haraway's (2004) concept of diffraction, compose an onto-epistemology that is inextricably linked to ethical discourse...

Towards Decolonial Choreographies of Co-Resistance

“…This we worked to accomplish by creating a difference-affirming space that could foster and support a deeply felt-sensed engagement with ITL through responsiveness, connection, and accountability. To explore and theorize the three examples of ITL's "choreographies of co-resistance", we draw on research team discussions, personal correspondences between Stonefish, Rice, and Kelly, and we apply a decolonizing (Jimmy and Andreotti 2019) and Anishinaabe philosophical (Simpson 2011(Simpson , 2017 lens alongside a feminist disability-informed neomaterialist (Barad 2006;Rice et al 2021aRice et al , 2021bRice et al , 2022, and dance and performance studies one that disrupts a focus on conventional western theatrical notions of dance and performance (Foster 2011;Perazzo Domm 2019;Schneider 2015;Larasati 2013;Kelly 2019). Ultimately, our methodology prioritizes lived experience in our moving together as kinetics or doings that generate transformative and decolonizing learning within an ethic of non-assimilation that affirms differences and why they matter.…”