Choreocraftivism: small gestures, gentle action and caring for things

Abstract

I seem to be experiencing a ‘thing turn’: a de-anthropic whirl. Post the ‘affective’ and ‘corporeal’ turns of the last two decades which have given way to the reclamation of matter as agential in New Materialism, my choreographic practice takes up the power, mystery and possibility of things in a gentle form of activism that responds to the climate crisis.  

In this paper, I introduce the everyday practice of choreocraftivism as a participatory form of actions and gestures that cultivate attention and awareness. Through a fusion of expanded choreographic thinking and craftivism, I argue that we can re-evaluate our relationship to the more-than-human with dance as an efficacious bodily site of non-violent and inclusive resistance.

The projects Chairfriendseries and Street Finders focus upon the circular economy’s logic of upcycle, recycle, slow fashion and the right to repair as disruptions to the linear movement of a thing from ‘cradle to grave’. They are pedestrian, non-representational, non-performance events. The choreocraftivist looks for things dumped on the kerb with the mobility of a flaneur. They bind, arrange and fold to encourage adoption and express care. Gestural patterns are documented for distributed action.

In this paper, I propose a theory of Thingism which underpins the practice of choreocraftivism. It draws together elements of Husserlian Phenomenology and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) beyond their epistemological differences to enable fine-grained descriptions of relations between things (of which we are one) and our much-needed movements and reflection to change.