Informal Choreography

Spaces of Moving Bodies Part 1, Diploma Thesis YR6 2011-2012

 

Thesis builds upon the theoretical context on Spaces of Moving Bodies. In an attempt to understand the spaces we inhabit my investigation focuses on the individual to understand how bodies occupy and produce spaces. Informal Choreography engages with themes of dance - writing and performing spaces through embodied movements - to draw on the discussions of 'the process of embodiment through which everyday life is experienced.' The project sets the foundation of how we understand and think of spaces, fundamentally questioning the potentialities of everyday spaces that we inhabit.

 

* Film best viewed in HD

 

 
 

 

 

 

'How and to what extent are human actions and movements choreographed - to diagram, articulate and represent the everyday, event-full, practical embodied actions and movement' (Peter Merriman, Architecture/Dance, 2010, p428).

 

 

 

In an attempt to understand the spaces we inhabit, our everyday social spaces, my investigation has been centered around how human bodies interact and occupy spaces. Focusing my attention on the individual in hoping to understand the larger scale pattern of social practices. Through the readings of Henri Lefebvre and other more recent geographic writings, it has been possible to grasp that, bodies not only occupy spaces but bodies produce and generate spaces along with their motion. The spaces that I produce and the spaces that others produce are in constant dialectical relation; and thereby understood as a relational view, in which a space is a co-product of those proceedings. Through its production and reproduction bodies contribute to the quality of the spaces in which the bodies move.

 

The focus throughout the development of this thesis - what are the qualitative dimensions that the bodies unfold through its production of spaces and in its intersection with other spaces? As mentioned in my thesis paper Performativity and the Event, bodily movements become intrusion of events into architectural spaces, such architectural spaces are enacted upon moments of events, ruptured through rhythmic movements of the body or bodies. Bodies move through space in an affective sense, the affectivity of bodily experience is in constant dialect within and between the spaces of moving bodies. Resonating rhythmically through its varied intensity, the body expresses such emotion through gestures of movement. The conception of rhythmic intensities expressed through bodily movement, is memorable to Rudolf Laban's Effort theory, 'which deals with the theory of expressive qualities in human exertion that are visible in the rhythm of bodily movement.' Moreover, if bodies express affectivity through rhythmic movement, then it is possible to study movement rhythms in order to extract and form a survey of affectivity in bodily experience.

 

So, bodies move through space in an affective sense, affectivity varies rhythmically through the body, articulated as emotion, expressed through bodily movement. Then, what triggers the expressive qualities of moving bodies? The question now shifts from space of the body to bodies-in-space, the inner-body to outer-body. As Taylor Carmen describes, 'as bodily perceivers we are necessarily part of the perceptible world we perceive; we are not just in the world, but of it.' In effect, it is the intertwining of the body and the world, a dialectic relation of us and the world, in which a place, the context of our spatial experience forms how we move through space. As James Greeno analyses James Gibson's Theory of Affordances, 'perception is a system that picks up information that supports coordination of the agent's actions with the system that the environment provides.' Properties in the environment, whether object or subject, provide opportunities for action.

 

Through such discussions in ecological psychology it becomes possible to consider how processes of perception and action support movement coordination and control, specifically, how the body perceives and expresses certain actions through its varied rhythmic intensities. Whereby, the ability for an individual to perform a task is fundamentally dependent on how one perceives information from its environment, thus having effect on ones decision-making process and action.

 

 

 

Act 1 Scene 2

 

 

Act 1 Scene 3

 

 

 

 

 

KID Y preparatory phase, frame 07 [In reference to Rudolf Laban's Bound flow and Free-flow]

At the immediate point where he decides to attack, he addresses the target with his upper bodily posture, his arms swing back in preparation for the push, for forward momentum. This is free flow where the center of the body remains motionless when the limbs begin to move. The flow of movement is suddenly energetically released. Particularly the slashing or swinging of his arms, his upper extremities originate centrally in the trunk proceeding towards the shoulders, the upper parts of the arms, and ending in the forearms and hands. The very last point of this particular sequence of movement is his footstep where the flow of movement is hampered, bound flow. The pressing of his foot for the forward push starts at his foot, the action of pressing spreads inwards, first to the lower parts of his legs, then the thighs, the hip and finally to the center of the body and trunk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For further development visit Thesis Part 2: Movement-space: Inter-activity.

   
  All works © JI SOO HAN 2012. Please do not reproduce without written consent of Ji Soo Han.