Embodied writing: choreographic composition as methodology

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine how embodied methodological approaches might inform dance education practice and research. Through a series of examples, this paper explores how choreographic writing might function as an embodied writing methodology. Here, choreographic writing is envisioned as a form of visual word choreography in which words move, pause, gain emphasis, and flow as if dancing across the open page. To explore writing as choreography, this paper primarily draws from three theoretical perspectives on embodiment: phenomenological, new materialist, and Deleuzian. For each of these perspectives, this paper describes its approach to embodiment, provides choreographic writing examples, and discusses the implications thereof for dance education practice and research. Given the increasing importance of practice-as-research and creative arts inquiry, this paper finds that choreographic writing provides an alternative mode of communication for dance writers and qualitative researchers alike. Significantly, choreographic writing also offers new pedagogies for dance education researchers. In so doing, dance provides a venue for written arts-based research.

Keywords:

• choreographic writing
• embodiment
• writing as inquiry

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank the two reviewers for their thoughtful comments and insightful suggestions.

Notes

1. Though a full discussion is beyond the scope of this paper, several scholars have called for and created pictorial codes to record dance. Farnell (1994), for example, advocates for the development of movement-based text as a methodological resource. Farnell instead suggests a ‘script that will provide the means to become literate in relation to the medium of movement just as we have been able to achieve literacy in relation to spoken language and music’ (997). For Farnell, that script is Labanotation, an inscribed system of movement that has been adopted by others within dance education research (e.g. Maletic 1987).