Gallery

These videos form part of my PhD thesis, entitled Encounters between dance and digital meaning: discovering potential in the question of movement. As an interactive PDF, my thesis is to be read and to be watched and listened to. Throughout the text readers encounter this series of videos, that are curated from hundreds of hours of session recordings created by Tools that Propel, an edited video document of the performance piece Body of Memory, and a series of semi-structured interviews and studio discussions that were recorded at key points along the research process.

These videos can be experienced as a journey through many of the ideas in the thesis, as they play out through the entangled voices of participant dancers who have used the system for (up to) approximately 33 days each, extended over 2 years of research time. In the thesis itself, they are designed to interweave with the text, sit alongside it, or imbricate it. Sometimes they interrupt the reading, expanding it or contradicting it. Sometimes they rub up against it, sometimes they elucidate it, sometimes they open up other perspectives or avenues of thought or enquiry. They are part of the collective individuation of the work.

Equally, the videos operate in their own right, as artworks and as documents of an entangled, collaborative process of becoming with Tools that Propel. Here, in this gallery, they are a way into the ideas, intentions, and questions within the research, to enjoy serially, individually, in one sitting, or at leisure over time.