Dance as a medium for drawing: a practice-based investigation into dance and choreography as generative modalities for contemporary drawing
Emanuele, Rossella (2024) Dance as a medium for drawing: a practice-based investigation into dance and choreography as generative modalities for contemporary drawing. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts.
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This practice-based research project explores how dance can generate a choreographic view of drawing that extends the understanding of the medium beyond the constraints of the two-dimensional image and the horizontal plane, to include the third and fourth dimensions. By approaching drawing via dance, this thesis considers the role that dance and choreography may play in extending the possibilities of drawing, paying special attention to its performative turn. Approaching drawing as a verb and an action, whereby the dancers/performers are identified either as marks or drawing tools, I investigate the relationship between bodies, movement and representation. It is this relationship that shifts the understanding of drawing towards an inter-relational activity between bodies, space and architecture, whereby the dancer’s body in movement is interpreted as a condition in continuous state of becoming that manifests itself through interactions with the world around.
Using dance and choreography methodological approaches such as task- based instructions, the project exposes different relations between bodies and space and reveals how these relations can be reinterpreted and represented as drawing. Rather than focussing on mark-making to trace the dancers’ movement through space, dance and choreography become the mediums for drawing. This approach shifts the emphasis towards a temporal understanding of drawing, raising questions of where drawing as performance, that is dance, resides and the role that choreography plays in this relationship. The theme of intermediality¹ emerges and to an extent underpins each of the three chapters, which respectively examines drawing as marks on paper, indexical signs, traces in the mind, physical actions and archival documentation.
Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the University for the Creative Arts for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
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Footnote:
¹ As a term and theoretical concept, Intermediality refers to the intersections and interconnections between different media, typically in the context of digital media. In 1965 Dick Higgins, crediting an 1812 use of the term ‘intermedium’ by the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, reintroduced the term ‘intermedia’ in the context of art theory to describe works of art that sit between media such as the Fluxus movement in the 1960s.
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