The film
Chalk Moves – Body as Teacher and Scribe in a Pandemic
Best experienced with headphones
Shaping the Contour of Meaning
The film and the original sound score are designed to [re]shape the contour of meaning when everyday public choreographies are [re]called, [re]appropriated and [re]located.
Engaging in a multisensorial interrogation and interpretation of the data led to theorizing and writing with the body. This required a flow of experience through the interaction between the living body, data and the public space itself.
The film centers the body as the main text of the research. Communicating the research as an art film is a publishing strategy for embodied scholarship. For the viewer, my hope is that witnessing the body as the embodied expression of the research will open sensory and perceptual channels encouraging your own insight and interpretation of the performed data.
The dance on film explores the metaphor of “constraints”. The metaphor of “constraints” emerged out of my spatial and corporeal experiences elicited by my data collection. Positioned in a COVID context, my research attended to the felt and visual experience of the public space. In the spirit of the metaphor of constraints, rules were also imposed on various stages of my artistic process. These constraints were important in that they created a space for meaning-making, resistance, and a [re]positioning of myself in relation to the data. As an example, one constraint was the performance site. The location of a 100-foot bridge and the visual-spatial chalk score drawn on the bridge defined and constrained the danceable space. As the performer and subject of the film, I responded to those constraints in situ as I performed the data across the bridge.
Informing Fields
“Contemporary theories of embodiment and embodied learning foreground the relationship between sentient and social lived experience [and] – how we experience ourselves and the world around us in terms of material and discursive aspects of the mind-body-spirit and social relations of power” (Batacharya & Wong).
Bodily writing in the context of Buono and Gonzalez’s research, approaches the body as the primary investigator, perceiver, interpreter, and scribe. In other words, the body is re-centered in the research process and reliable as the “written” embodied expression of that research.
“Our conceptual systems are largely metaphorical and enacting metaphors governs how we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people” (Lakoff)
Psycho-geography is a process that explores the everyday activity of human beings in geographical environments and the effects these spatial-temporal experiences have on our feelings and behavior. (Christie)
Research References
You can access the relevant literature and theories that informed my research by clicking on References.