Corporeal Dramaturgy: Redistributing Agency in Dance

Corporeal Dramaturgy: Redistributing Agency in Dance” is a two­year, international research­creation project that asks how we can rethink the body of the dancer as a political site of corporeal singularity and an active point of departure for creation, rather than merely an instrument for channelling the creativity of others. The dancer’s body is often thought of as a vessel for the creative input of the choreographer, yet many choreographic processes rely on the improvisational responses of dancers to generate movement sequences and overall themes. Furthermore, the way that an audience reads bodies on stage is never neutral: race, gender, age and movement style are just a few of the many aspects that affect the way a dancer’s body is interpreted. The project proposes new dramaturgical methods for dance creation that acknowledge the corporeality of the dancer in choreographic creation, bringing together artist­-researchers and scholars from Europe and Canada to collaborate on two creative processes (The Netherlands, 2019 and Montreal, 2020), resulting in an evening length performance in Montreal (March 2021) and a Dance Dramaturgy colloquium at Concordia (May 2021). 

This project seeks to fill the current gap in both scholarly literature and artistic practice, around the embodied contributions that dancers bring to the creative process, by articulating precisely what PI Willkie calls the dancer’s “relational body,” naming it as a starting point for choreographic creation. The collaborators view dramaturgy not only as an “instrument of perspective” or a mode of “organizing coexistence” (Noeth 2011), but as a shared body of knowledge with inherent agency, formulated through “kinesthetic feedback” (Noland 2009) that is inevitably political. The two research­-creation processes will involve rehearsals structured around movement and theatrical improvisation, question ­based methods of creation and discussions around the concept of “corporeal dramaturgy,” in order to develop new tools for dramaturgical reflection and articulation that emphasize the political and embodied importance of the dancer’s input in creation and strengthen the position of dramaturgy in the field of dance.