RESEARCH PRACTICE
My choreographic research investigates how bodies are shaped by systems of power, memory, value and perception, and how bodies obey, negotiate, distort, exceed or refuse those systems.
I begin from the premise that choreography starts before a choreographer consciously composes movement. Architecture directs bodies. Sound organises attention. Social codes produce gesture. Myth assigns roles. Political histories settle into posture, behaviour and language. The presence of an audience affects what becomes visible, credible, desirable or valuable. The body is the primary research instrument through which these forces are tested, made visible and transformed.
This research is rooted in the understanding that the body is never politically neutral. It carries the effects of migration, gendered discipline, cultural erasure, surveillance, violence, labour and inherited histories, often before they can be articulated through language. I am interested in how systems of power enter the body as habit, tension, desire, fear, exhaustion and self-censorship, and in how choreography can expose, interrupt or reorganise these inscriptions. I approach the body as a contested site where visibility and disappearance, obedience and resistance, belonging and exclusion are continually negotiated.
My movement research works with daily gestures, pop culture, ritualistic and ceremonial practices, traditional folk movement forms and stylised dance forms, which are isolated, fragmented and distorted until their social, cultural or psychological structures become visible and a raw movement vocabulary emerges. I am particularly interested in the unstable borders between control and involuntary response, virtuosity and failure, legibility and opacity, discipline and refusal.
I frequently create participatory performance situations in which movement, live sound, voice, text, image, architecture and audience behaviour act upon one another. These elements operate as partly autonomous agents within a shared system. Their encounters produce feedback loops, interruptions, contradictions and outcomes that cannot be entirely predetermined.
Across my research projects, research is not a preliminary stage that ends when the performance begins. The performance itself is the laboratory. Choreography becomes a method for producing embodied knowledge: a way of examining who watches, who is watched, who is heard, who is evaluated, how behaviour is organised, whose presence is recognised or erased, and what a body must do to remain visible without surrendering its autonomy.
RESEARCH LINES
