Emilie Gallier: Nibbling Wormholes
With this presentation I expose wormholes in my practice-as-research PhD ‘Reading in Performance’ (2021). These wormholes demonstrate my polyphonic approach for this dissertation balancing on an edge between academic methodologies and a more panoramic and choral approach that dance requires. Some wormholes were carved through my practices as dance artist, as spectator, and as writer who uses words, signs, drawings, collages, layout, edible and non-edible papers. Some wormholes were and are still nibbled by readers who write through the act of reading. Building upon Roland Barthes’s thinking (in ‘S/Z’, 1974) I work with the entanglement of texts and readers conjuring worlds. The wormholes in my dissertation are also threads inviting readers to weave the thinking time and time again. What they produce is a reading, which is also a dance, iterative, more or less than linear, with jumps and syncopation. This dance, delicate gesture, might be like turning pages and nibbling through piled papers in order to perceive the unwritten which thrives in the written. This gesture leads us to sense our implication with the texts and with the plurality of others in them. One of my questions in ‘Reading in Performance’ is: how are documents active in performance? My writing chews related questions: how does the writing characterize content rather than explicate? How is my dissertation in action, offering itself as a text to be read and transmuted to the next body to be nibbled upon. One of my peers in Amsterdam, Jennifer Lacey, wrote about my research: ‘texts tread lightly and trippingly through the world as through the bowels: ingestion, digestion, sublimation’ (2021). In my presentation ‘Nibbling wormholes’, I invite attenders for an encounter with texts, creaking documents, scores, jokes, poems, characters and ghosts, for a dance that has never been danced.
Bio
Emilie Gallier is a choreographer researcher based in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Dance Research (Coventry) with the support of THIRD at DAS Graduate School (Amsterdam), in which she developed the idea and practice of reading in and as performance (Reading in Performance 2021, http://post-cie.com/texts.php). Her engagement with artistic research as a researcher, peer, tutor, bookworm and spectator, shapes her attention and experience with forms of writing and publishing.