Statement of Interest Concordia University PhD Proposal, 2019
Danielle Garrison
Concordia University Humanities Ph.D. Application
Statement of Purpose
Ethered and Tethered: a liminal space/Locating the body suspended between physical and virtual “materialities”
Project: MAPS (Multicultural Aerial Performance Stories) A Collection of Embodied Responses to Global Events
suspended body
What role can the perform
in
screened media?
Photo by Circusögraphy
Aerial dance took flight as a radical, post-modern dance experiment on shifting the vertical perspective. The notion of horizontality interests me in how I can broaden aerial experiences to include participatory social practices and how academic thinking can embrace disorientation through the perspective of the suspended body.
My doctoral project MAPS asks: How can I animate aerial fabrics to record, store and exchange movement responses to news stories? MAPS is simultaneously an aerial production on disconnection and reconnection, addressing the dissonance between what global communication is and what it does. More specifically, my concern is to confront the problems of: mediation (immediacy), distances (transversality), archiving (anarchiving), translation (cross-linguistics: the corporeal, verbal, preverbal and postverbal) and aesthetics (body-politics). This interdisciplinary research engages aerial somatics, body-politics of aerial arts (agency/spectatorship), immersive environments, sensorial research (biometrics and haptics), the archive, and art activism with the intention to generate cross-linguistic environments and exchanges. By involving a postcolonial lens, my ambition through MAPS is to make space in academia for an evolution of participatory exchanges within aerial arts, news media, text, digitality, and embodied knowledge that stimulates a complex an intercultural and interdisciplinary spectrum of expression.
By experiencing a plurality of collaborative and international approaches to artmaking since 2014, I have decentered the categorization of my work and challenged the cultural power structures that have dominated the writing of my body. My research as the second U.S. MFA dance graduate and first Fulbright France grantee with an emphasis in aerial dance, a nascent field dearth with scholarship, compares how cultural expectations shape aerial arts—spanning aerial dance, cirque and circus—in the U.S. and France. Expanding this research to include Montréal, which hosts a diverse cirque scene, I can scaffold my aerial research with more complex practices and dialogues.
My doctoral research is an interrelation between interactive installation (MAPS), experimental performances, and a dissertation with layered experiences that interpret, complicate, and transfer, with minimal convolution, the experience of what I call suspended-embodiment. I am eager to
cultivate innovative experiences that intersect the physical and virtual body––suspended by aerial fabrics, time and distance––through the interdisciplinary, research-creation methodology of the Humanities Ph.D. at Concordia University (HUMA). If invited, I would situate my research within the histories and contemporary practices of aerial arts, “new” media, and process philosophy while addressing the problematics of archiving and translating the ephemeral.
Accessing the rich plurality of ways of thinking about how the suspended body is positioned in the interdisciplinary dialogues offered within Concordia will scaffold my encounter with unanticipated curiosities that encourage the texturization, orientation and destabilization of my ever-evolving “scholartist” journey. I hope my doctoral process fosters more questioning that continues to guide me beyond my horizon of knowledge.