Abstract
Operating in the here and now, as well as in relation to the past and future, artistic researchers in the choreographic realm elaborate the potentials of sensuous address, revealing ‘less visible, less legible’ moments to offer ‘productive disciplinary and discursive interventions’ (Joy 2014: 4). Generated through corporeal-material-discursive apparatuses they question what bodies in-motion can do and become, rather only than what they are. Multi-faceted and multi-registered, choreographic researchers reach away from any singular or normative associations of movement as a set of language possibilities, procedural matrices or production protocols, reframing choreography as an epistemic practice, structured by, and productive of, knowings and knowledges that find many modes of articulation in the world.
Such research has the potential to influence within and beyond the field of dance-making, playing its part in opening up the very nature of artistic research and how it is perceived in academic and artistic domains. In reaching across and beyond conventional academic and artistic frameworks, artistic researchers make spaces for their curiosities that do not always fit into producers’ visions, university paradigms or funders’ criteria. Through connecting, instead, across established (but nolonger helpful) boundaries, they intervene into ways of doing and making, opening up conventionally defined dissemination routes for knowledges generated in universities, to diversify (art) practices, make a difference to people’s lives and address transdisciplinary issues.
Here, focusing on the Doctoral space, I ask how might these rich potentialities in turn reframe doctoral studies? How might we reconsider and enhance the capacity of these degrees? How can the potential to make a difference, be realised? How are we making spaces for a new breed of movement artist, a new type of academic, a new kind of cultural mover and shaker?
Link to the recording of the keynote presentation:
Slides included in the presentation: https://sites.uniarts.fi/documents/16257/462727/Vida+Midgelowe.pdf/456c94f7-e700-4bcb-a7e3-5883a368611e.
Vida L. Midgelow
Vida L. Midgelow, Dance Artist/Academic, joined Middlesex University as Professor in Dance and Choreographic Practices in 2012, where she leads the doctoral provision for the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries. As an artist-scholar she works on PaR methodologies, improvisation and articulation processes and has published widely in these areas. Her practice includes somatically informed improvisational works, performative lectures and installation/experiential performance practices/video works. She is editor of the Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance and is the principal researcher for the Artistic Doctorates in Europe project www.artisticdoctorates.com (Erasmus+ funded). Selected public works include: Skript (NottDance Festival), Scratch (In Dialogue, Nottingham Contemporary), Some Fleshy Thinking (Oxford University Press), Creative Articulation Process (CAP) (Choreographic Practices), Improvisation as Paradigm for Phenomenology (University of Illinois Press) and Practice-as-Research (Bloombury). With Prof Jane Bacon, Midgelow co-edits the hybrid peer reviewed journal, Choreographic Practices and co-directs the Choreographic Lab www.choreographiclab.co.uk and is currently an associate research artist at i4C4/ Dance4. mdx.ac.uk.