Focus Artistic Research

Choreo-graphic Figures. Deviations from the Line

Projektleiter: Nikolaus Gansterer
Institute for Fine Arts and Media Art
Duration: 01.05.2014 - 30.04.2019
Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR 283 Programm zur Entwicklung und Erschließung der Künste (PEEK)
https://base.uni-ak.ac.at/recherche/e:ieYS3zn339zohTnLJb3BvZ

CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES ? Deviations from the Line is an international, interdisciplinary research project led by artist Nikolaus Gansterer (Austria/Vienna) in collaboration with choreographer Mariella Greil (Austria/Vienna) and artist-writer Emma Cocker (UK/Nottingham), in dialogue with a team of international critical interlocutors. With ‘arts-based research’ at its heart, this research project stages an inter-subjective encounter between drawing (Gansterer), choreography (Greil) and writing (Cocker) in order to:

  • Investigate those forms of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ produced through collaborative, interdisciplinary exchange, ‘between the lines’ of drawing, dance and writing,
  • Explore the performativity of notation (figures of thought, speech and movement) for articulating and making tangible this enquiry,
  • Contribute new knowledge and understanding to debates about the specificity of artistic enquiry and expanded practices of drawing, dance and writing.

CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES ? Deviations from the Line is a unique and timely research project for exploring the nature of ‘thinking-in-action’ or ‘figures of thought’ produced as the practices of drawing, dance and writing enter into dialogue, overlap and collide. Central is an attempt to find ways of better understanding and making tangible the processes of enquiry within practice (specifically within the research area that overlaps between drawing, choreography, writing), and for asserting the epistemological significance of this habitually unseen or unshared aspect of an artist’s / writer’s / dancer’s endeavour.

This research project will excavate and elaborate on the specificity of ‘research in and through practice’, cultivating a sense of the ‘tools’, ‘methods’, and ‘vocabularies’ emerging directly from a dialogue between drawing, dance and writing practices. Through processes of reciprocal exchange, dialogue and negotiation between the key researchers, CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES ? Deviations from the Line will interrogate the interstitial processes, practices and knowledge(s) produced in the ‘deviation’ for example, from page to performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters.

The collaborative research quest is one of tracing and understanding these permeable frontiers, to challenge the assumptions of the clear-cut disciplinary line and produce new articulations of ‘expanded practice’ between the lines of drawing, choreography and writing. The research pressures drawing, dance and writing beyond the conventions, protocols and domains of each discipline: for dance, beyond the domain of the body and space of the theatre; for drawing, beyond the domain of the two-dimensional page; for writing, beyond the domain of language, the regime of signification. By investigating the points of overlap, slippage and shared processes within the disciplines of drawing, dance and writing, CHOREO-GRAPHIC FIGURES ? Deviations from the Line will contribute new understanding and knowledge to the burgeoning discourse on and around the significance of artistic research practice, helping cultivate new vocabularies and forms of notation for reflecting on artistic praxis.

 

www.choreo-graphic-figures.net