Dancing at the End of the World: Choreographies of Time and Uncertainty

• In Event: Dancing the Anthropocene: Envisioning Rituals, Bodies, Environments and Political Situatedness through the Lens of Dance - II

Abstract

This paper advocates for choreographic thinking as a significant method of researching the relationship between failing infrastructures and the precarious material future of the world. I use phenomenon of diffraction patterns in both a literal and metaphoric sense to look choreographically at the entangled web of relationships between human and nonhuman agents, including the role of the nonhuman in subject-formation practices of self and environment. This research argues for dance practices an invaluable means of unearthing strategies for how to negotiate moments of uncertainty, contradiction, failure, and confusion. Looking choreographically towards the world I question whose labor is designing and building infrastructures, and who benefits from their being here? More importantly, who doesn’t? How do we care for the world inside of the inevitable onslaught of capitalist, racist, and ableist technology during the mess of the Anthropocene? In what ways are science and technology always already entangled with racialized, gendered, and capitalist ideologies? This research aims to make visible the often-unseen existence of technological infrastructures so that we may learn to participate with them, and build them, more ethically and thoughtfully. I argue that thinking of infrastructure as choreography can produce new possibilities for engaging-with and thinking-about technology with care and difference as fundamental design components. Central to this project is the foundational belief that dance and choreography can be used as both a method of doing research and as a method for sharing research (via performance). Thinking choreographically reveals the complex and layered ways in which bodies, objects, and information move and get moved through time and space, and what is that if not dance?

Author

• Charli Brissey, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor