Choreographies of Writing in Contemporary Artistic and Educational Performance: William Forsythe and Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Abstract

Doctoral thesis Choreographies of Writing in Contemporary Artistic and Pedagogical Performance explores how knowledge (as both theory and pedagogy) is being produced within and through contemporary dance and performance art. Heterogeneous procedures and forms of knowledge – verbal and material, discursive and institutional, embodied and embedded – are identified and analyzed in the corpus of works composed of William Forsythe’s dancerly explorations of the physical act of writing and Guillermo Gomez Peña’s lecture performances, a form of post-pedagogical writing.

Theoretical framework combines Derridean ideas of the scene of writing and event of saying with media studies notions of performative remediation and hypermediation. Thanks to performative re-mediation, the act of writing – historically instrumentalized as text production – turns into a multifaceted event. The notion choreographies of writing aims to take hold of a complex dispositif of writing events, including its discursive and non-discursive elements, as well as material organization and production. Being mutually connected yet untranslatable one to the other, these distinctive elements create a choreographic counterpoint.

The two types of analyzed performances – dances of writing and lecture performances – enact heterogeneous knowledge production, in the form of verbal signification and non-verbal “traces” of the events constituting knowledge cultures. Artistic method is used to explore multidimensional effects of writing and their implications on theory and pedagogy. Common to Forsythe’s and Gomez Peña’s work is that the verbal and non-verbal elements jointly constitute temporary communities of all participants in the performances.

Furthermore, choreographies of writing stand for any type of meta-writing about performative events, such as their verbal documentation, reviews, descriptions, interpretations, criticism etc. Choreographies of writing call for reflection on every act of writing (this thesis included) as a heterogeneous choreography that at once produces discursive content and contributes to a specific knowledge community. Choreographies of writing are a contrapuntal inspiration for self-reflection in this regard.