Folding and withholding: writing with and by choreographers

The impetus for the present research comes from questions that arose in projects of collaborative writing by the author with British-based choreographers Rosemary Lee, Kim Brandstrup and Rosemary Butcher. In these projects, the three choreographers differently attempted to word elements of their ongoing choreographic enquiries. The conviction was that such writing might participate in a choreographer's current choreographic research, rather than document research that had already unfolded in the creation of a performance work.
The present research thus interrogates the philosophical implications of asking a choreographer for an account of how she or he works. With reference to recent studies in critical ethnography and ethics, the research proposes the development of practices of collaborative writing by a choreographer and a researcher-observer alert to the motivated and implicated positions of each. Included as appendix to the thesis is a book co-written with a choreographer and a CD-ROM of published collaborative writing and open interviews with Butcher, Brandstrup and Lee, performance
documentation and journals of studio observation. Published instances of writing by other performance makers are additionally drawn into the enquiry as "research companions".
Interrogating relations between writing and choreographers' creation processes, the overall research premise thus concerns the development of writing capable of articulating what matters to choreographers. This research addresses those choreographers who have hesitated when asked about how they work, and asks every dance scholar to hesitate before writing on or about dance-making.