Dramaturgical Ecologies (DE) was initiated in 2020 by Angélique Willkie (Principal Investigator, Concordia University) as a collaborative research-creation platform that understands the dancer’s body not as a neutral or empty canvas, but as a site inscribed with personal, cultural, social, and political histories. Privileging the dramaturgy of the performer, DE also theorizes a redistribution of agency within dance, challenging traditional hierarchies between choreographer, dramaturg, and performer.

 

Supported by FRQSC (2019), SSHRC IDG (2020), SSHRC Connection (2022), and Concordia entities CISSC (2022) and ARRE (2022), the project engages in research-creation methodologies to investigate both the concept and practice of dance dramaturgy. Based at Concordia University in Montréal/Tio’tia:ke/Mooniyaang on Turtle Island - the territory now known as Canada - DE explores the creative process as a mode of thinking: a way to examine how various forms of social inscription and agency inhabit the body, are articulated through gesture, and are continually re-performed across time and space; how these gestures give rise to collective bodies and dramaturgies; and what kinds of spaces afford these bodies to emerge and act.

Its most recent iteration is the collaborative research-creation project, Swamp Dialogues: situating B/black dramaturgies, which invites six Black women dance artist-researchers to engage with the metaphoric cosmology of the swamp as a method of unworlding colonial logics and as a way to address the pressing need to complicate and expand dominant understandings of B/blackness.