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Research in Dance Education

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Embodied writing: choreographic composition asmethodology

Jasmine B. Ulmer

To cite this article: Jasmine B. Ulmer (2015) Embodied writing: choreographic composition asmethodology, Research in Dance Education, 16:1, 33-50, DOI: 10.1080/14647893.2014.971230

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14647893.2014.971230

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Embodied writing: choreographic composition as methodology

Jasmine B. Ulmer*

School of Human Development and Organizational Studies in Education, University ofFlorida, Gainesville, FL, USA

(Received 28 May 2014; final version received 19 September 2014)

This paper seeks to examine how embodied methodological approaches mightinform dance education practice and research. Through a series of examples, thispaper explores how choreographic writing might function as an embodiedwriting methodology. Here, choreographic writing is envisioned as a form ofvisual word choreography in which words move, pause, gain emphasis, and flowas if dancing across the open page. To explore writing as choreography, thispaper primarily draws from three theoretical perspectives on embodiment:phenomenological, new materialist, and Deleuzian. For each of these perspec-tives, this paper describes its approach to embodiment, provides choreographicwriting examples, and discusses the implications thereof for dance educationpractice and research. Given the increasing importance of practice-as-researchand creative arts inquiry, this paper finds that choreographic writing provides analternative mode of communication for dance writers and qualitative researchersalike. Significantly, choreographic writing also offers new pedagogies for danceeducation researchers. In so doing, dance provides a venue for written arts-basedresearch.

Keywords: choreographic writing; embodiment; writing as inquiry

Introduction

Dance practitioners-as-researchers and dance scholars continue to explore howone might write dance. I wonder how dance might reshape writing. I situate thesequestions within the editors’ invitation to explore how differing embodied meth-odological approaches might inform dance education practice and research. Bycreating examples of choreographic writing, I engage practice-based and academiccomposition through the lens of embodied methodological writing. Given the sig-nificance of embodied knowledges within dance education research, the develop-ment of new writing methodologies might help practitioners and researchers findnew ways of not only writing about their practice, but also write in a style thatperhaps is more aligned with the creative spirit of dance. Additionally, alternativeapproaches to writing might increase understanding of how theories and philoso-phies are increasingly relevant within the context of practice-as-research (Barrettand Bolt 2007).

To work within the tensions that exist between writing movement and dancingmovement, I follow Stinson’s (2006) call for scholars to approach writing as

*Email: jasmine.ulmer@ufl.edu

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

Research in Dance Education, 2015Vol. 16, No. 1, 33–50, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14647893.2014.971230

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choreography and research as a ‘a way of sensing, generating, exploring, and form-ing, as if it were widely known that research involves both a passion and kinestheticsense’ (2006, 208). In so doing, I discuss approaches to methodological embodi-ment, intersections between choreography and writing, and the implications thereoffor dance education practice and research. In the process, dance provides a vehiclethrough which writing continues to explore its potential as a form of creative andartistic expression in research.

Why choreographic writing?

The practice of dance has informed my own thinking as a research methodologist,even in unanticipated ways. While writing, I often find myself wondering what itwould be like to

write using more

space.

This causes me to reflect upon my own dance practice, where movement andexpression were differently available than they are in the practice of writing.

Dance choreographers, musical composers, and film directors control the flowof time, space, and energy; the motions in each range in tempo and intensity.Sometimes within dance performance there is silence – stillness – emptiness –pause. Yet, the same choices are not readily available within the mainstays ofacademic writing: journal articles, book chapters, and books. Consequently, Ihave been contemplating how the movement, creativity, and exploration in dancemight become a part of the academic writing process, as well. For example, whatif writing danced? What if words embodied movement? How might writing beinscribed as a material, kinaesthetic, visual process? Moreover, given howembodied approaches to dance produce openings through which the unexpectedmight emerge, where might similar creative openings be located in relation towriting? I present responses to these wonderings through a series of examples

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from my own writing practice, as well as through a description of choreographicwriting.

Choreographic writing: a definition

Though dance itself could be viewed as a manifestation of the dancer’s body writingvisual choreography (or choreographers writing visually with dancers’ bodies), Iimagine choreographic writing as visual text in which words move, pause, gainemphasis, and flow as if dancing across the open page. Or, written as an example ofchoreographic writing:

I imagine

CHOREOGRAPHIC WRITING as

visual text in which words

move, pause, gain emphasis, and f l o w

as if

dancing across the open page.

In considering not only what choreographic writing is, but also what it couldbe, choreographic writing becomes a form of word choreography that exceedsbasic tenets of graphic design and textual formatting. Typesetting regulationstend to determine textual font, size, color, organization, and effect within aca-demic publishing. The regulation of words on the page seemingly prioritizesconformity and economy over expression, and space can be a scarce commoditywithin academic publishing. Consequently, elements of meaning and aestheticpossibility may be lost in the process of submitting to stylistic and space-basedexpectations. This is particularly the case within academic writing, which hasbecome a highly specialized form of technical communication both within andacross disciplines. Yet, like dance and even poetry, writing also is a form ofartistic expression.

Though departures from conventional typesetting practices are rare within aca-demic writing, the poetry of Mallarmé and Apollinaire is of special interest tochoreographic writing. French poets who respectively wrote in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, each experimented with written form andrepresentation. As a result, expression in their writings often derives from the

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ways in which their poems are visually formatted and structured. For example,Mallarmé worked from a complex

palette of poetic textures, combining hesitation, discontinuity, motility, and stasis …His expansion of the verse category to include any language in varying degrees oftightness or diffuse-ness indicates how important to him as poetic tools are theconstraint and the release of fluidity, air, and blank space. (McCombie 2006,xv–xvi)

In ‘A Dice Throw,’ Mallarmé uses not only capital letters to emphasize words, butalso places words within asymmetrical arrangements and clusters. In so doing,Mallarmé adds varied dimensions of time, space, and movement to writing, therebyallowing the reader to flow along with the text. Apollinaire (1918/1980) similarlyexperiments with poetic form through concrete poetry, which frequently assumes theshape of the poem’s object(s). In ‘It’s Raining,’ lines of words stream downward asif falling from the sky, and in other poems, Apollinaire employs a mixture of italics,horizontal and vertical text, fonts, and occasional drawings. Though choreographicwriting is not poetry per se, it is perhaps poetic. Moreover, like the poetry ofMallarmé and Apollinaire, choreographic writing shares an affinity for expandingvisual aspects of expression.

Importantly, written language is already a system of visual communication thatfunctions through the depiction and arrangement of graphic symbols. Within aca-demic writing, however, style guides and other formatting guidelines tend to limitthe potential of writing as a form of visual expression. Like writing in general, aca-demic writing largely serves to record speech expressions (Derrida 1976) rather thanto serve as an additional forum for artistic visual expression. This is not to suggest,however, that the genre of academic writing would be improved by simply forgoingall convention. In contrast, consistent expectations for academic writing provideclarity of meaning, promote rigorous argumentation, and facilitate the sharing ofknowledge. These certainly are important components of scholarly communicationacross academia.

New modes of academic writing, however, potentially are important for severalreasons. By changing the ways in which we write, we might also change the waysin which we think. New forums in which to think, therefore, could create new possi-bilities within the research enterprise. It could be argued that this is particularly sig-nificant within practice-as-research, which may call not only for additional modes ofcommunication that draw from personal experiences, but also address the challengeof writing about bodily experiences. I hesitate to draw firm parameters around whatsuch modes of writing might offer to scholarship and artistic practice, other than tosuggest that choreographic writings provide fresh venues in which to experimentwith embodied methodologies. For me, choreographic writing expands creative pos-sibilities within academic writing – possibilities that not only reflect dance as a crea-tive practice, but also provide opportunities for visual expression that seemappropriate within this technological age. In this sense, embodied writing methodol-ogies are the venue through which research may be produced. What is produced,however, likely will be specific to the individual author in content, meaning, andpurpose. Some might produce knowledge of the dancer’s body or the dancer’s expe-rience, which then might be written for others in an effort to create shared under-standing of the experiences and phenomena in question. Others, as I later discuss,might use embodied writing as a pre-writing activity or pedagogical tool. Yet, others

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might remain within the realm of experimentation to see what is produced. Though Ilocate myself largely within this last category, I invite readers to explore these possi-bilities, as well as other possibilities that they may find.

Although many scholars explore the ways in which embodied dance mightmaterialize through choreographic writing (Longley 2009; Pouillaude 2007), incontrast, I explore the ways in which embodied writing might materialize throughdance. Where my approach mostly differs is in the shift from approachingwriting as a means of studying embodiment in dance to approaching writing asan embodied methodology for dance. In this conceptual paper, therefore, writingis both the object of inquiry and the mode of inquiry (per Richardson 1994). Tostudy writing as a form and object of inquiry, I demonstrate how choreographicwritings might be approached as an embodied methodology within each of thetheoretical approaches described in this paper: phenomenological, new materialist,and Deleuzian.

Embodiment

Embodiment has become an important and sustained topic within dance research(see Albright 2010; Block and Kissell 2001; Klemola 1991). Perhaps this is because,as Pakes (2003) observes, dance practices embody many different knowledges.Although embodiment is a commonly used term within dance scholarship, it is aconcept that encompasses many different definitions. For Klemola (1991), embodi-ment is a standpoint of ‘existence as a body in the world’ (71); for Block and Kissell(2001), embodied subjects are ‘body knowers’ and ‘body expressers’ (5). Multipleapproaches to embodiment have created new sets of embodied knowledges andembodied knowers and, in turn, broadened academic discourse (Longley 2009). Inother words, embodiment has been taken up in numerous ways across danceeducation research.

One approach to embodiment can be found in somatics, which broadlydescribes the ‘bodymindthinking’ of dancers and dance professionals (Eddy 2009,5). Though also diverse in history and application, somatics holistically approachesthe body and mind as unified subjects. Frederick Matthias Alexander is creditedwith some of the earliest work in the field nearly a century ago, and it wasThomas Hanna who coined the term in the 1970s. Importantly, Hanna’s somaticsview the body not as a site for objective or mechanical study, but as ‘an embodiedprocess of internal awareness and communication’ (Green 2002, 114). By teachingmovement and awareness side-by-side, somatics educators emphasize process,experiential learning, and individual sensation. As this occurs, somatic knowledgebecomes content, pedagogy, and methodology (Green 2002). Somatics is significantwithin discussions of embodiment because somatics provides a means of centeringthe body in two regards: not only do dancers center the physical and mental pro-cesses of their own bodies, but bodily experiences also are placed at the center ofdance.

Consequently, attention to somatics and embodiment has brought issues ofepistemology, theory, and ontology to the forefront of dance education research. Todiscuss these elements in relation to embodiment, I examine definitions of embodi-ment across several theoretical perspectives. I begin with the influence of phenome-nology within dance research before describing the additional potential of newmaterialism to inform practice. I then explain how Deleuzian philosophy bridges the

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differences between phenomenology and new materialism to create new openingsfor embodied writing in dance.

Phenomenological embodiment

To understand embodiment, it is helpful to begin with the role of phenomenologyin dance. In dance research, embodiment has maintained strong ties to phenome-nology and its related emphases upon experience and perception. Many scholarsspecifically attribute the influence of phenomenology on dance to Merleau-Ponty’stheory of embodiment – a theory that ‘makes the physical (somatic) being thesite of the psyche. The body determines what shows up in our world’ (Warburton2011, 66). Albright (2011) further underscores the continuing importance of phe-nomenology within dance by observing that in recent decades, ‘phenomenologyhas replaced aesthetics as the philosophical choice for dance studies, proddingscholars to think about a broad continuum of moving bodies within the culturesthey inhabit’ (8).

Because theory and epistemology are interrelated, theories of embodimenttranslate into epistemologies of embodiment (e.g. Parviainen 2002) that rely uponbodily memory, experience, and perception as pathways to knowledge. Phenomenol-ogy, like any theoretical perspective, provides a means of viewing and interpretingthe world that ‘involves knowledge, therefore, and embodies a certain understandingof what is entailed in knowing, that is, how we know what we know’ (Crotty 1998,8, original emphasis). Within phenomenology, knowledge is produced through per-ception, intuition, and experience (Moustakas 1994). As a result, phenomenologycreates important openings for epistemological questions regarding how dancers per-ceive, intuit, and experience knowledge through dance. In describing what phenome-nology offers to dance writers, Pakes (2011) observes that a phenomenologicalapproach provides a ‘fresh look at dance phenomena; it proposes a first personaccount, descriptive rather than constructively theoretical; and it focuses on thosephenomena as they appear or are directly apprehended, once preconceptions andprejudgments about the dance have been suspended’ (35). Phenomenology thuscreates a compelling lens for dance practitioners and dance scholars to examine howdance is experienced.

Because phenomenology has influenced dance research (per Fraleigh 1991;Rothfield 2005; Sheets-Johnstone 1966, 1979), how dancers and researchers knowand what they may know often may begin within phenomenology as an existingscholarly discourse. Though perception and experience remain pressing scholarlyconcerns – particularly within dance – perceiving and experiencing knowledge aredifferent than determining where we are in material relation to that knowledge. Thisinstead brings us to ontology. Whereas epistemology is the study of knowledge,ontology is the study of being (Crotty 1998). It perhaps could be argued, therefore,that phenomenology has facilitated more of an examination of the former rather thanthe latter in dance research. A focus on methodological embodiment, though,requires a discussion of both epistemology and ontology. To examine ontologywithin dance research and practice, therefore, I turn toward a recent development infeminist theory that locates the body as an ontological site of being (Mol 2002) –new materialism.

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New materialist embodiment

In comparison to the descriptive essences and experiences of phenomenologicalstudy, new materialism adopts a greater focus upon material forces and presence.As a branch of feminist theory, new materialism regularly emphasizes the impor-tance of bodies and bodily issues, particularly in the lives of women. Haraway(1997), for example, advises that feminists theorists move away from deconstructinginequities in discourse and visual images and instead address ontological ‘bodies,and the practices that produce specific embodiment’ (186, original emphasis). Bythis, Haraway prioritizes material realities over discursive abstractions. Other newmaterialist scholars such as Barad (2007), Hekman (2010), and Kirby (2011) com-bine materiality and discursivity. For them, matter affects discourse and discourseaffects matter; each is inseparable from the other. These scholars work across arange of disciplines, yet the new materialisms they espouse are relevant to issuesof embodiment in dance.

Embodiment takes on a different definition within new materialism than it doeswithin phenomenology. Following Barad (2007), ‘embodiment is a matter not ofbeing specifically situated in the world, but rather of being in the world in itsdynamic specificity’ (377). For new materialists, materiality and discursivity are notseparate elements. Rather, they are inextricable from one another and located withina dynamic, vibrant world (Barad 2007; Kirby 2011).

Given new materialist scholars’ emphasis upon vibrant, material-discursiveforces, and open spaces, then, what is the role of new materialism within the crea-tive arts? In posing this question, Barrett and Bolt (2013) write: ‘it may be arguedthat the art is a material practice and that the materiality of matter lies at the core ofcreative practice’ (5, original emphasis). Dance, they suggest, is an embodied prac-tice that engages bodies as matter. What new materialism offers to dance-based prac-tice-as-research, therefore, is an emphasis upon dancers as knowing beings withindynamic systems of movement. By sharpening the focus on dancers as embodiedbeings, new materialism offers an additional approach for embodied methodologies.Furthermore, new materialism perhaps increases the sense of agency for, and legiti-mation of, dancers as embodied knowers. As the dancer’s body becomes an ontolog-ical site of being, the dancer herself gains agency to write dance – to write her body– within embodied methodologies.

Deleuzian embodiment

Before addressing how dancers may write movement through embodied writingmethodologies, however, it is worth discussing how dance researchers also havetaken up Deleuzian philosophy as a means of writing the body. A French post-structuralist, Deleuze remained concerned with issues of the body, affect, andmovement. Just as Deleuze’s writings provide a bridge between phenomenologyand new materialism in philosophy, his writings also provide a similar bridgebetween phenomenology and new materialism in relation to embodied dance. Inemphasizing the significance of both materialism and expressionism, Deleuzewrites that ‘content, like expression, has a form of its own’ (Deleuze and Guattari,1980/1987, 86).

Notably, Deleuze’s writings have been particularly useful to scholars of bodilymovement. As Braidotti (1999) observes, ‘The Deleuzian body is ultimately an

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embodied memory’ (159). Subsequently, several dance scholars draw from Deleuzeand their own embodied memories to explore dance as a plural form of movement(e.g. Gil 2002; Markula 2006; Vines 2007). For example, Gil (2002) delineates howthe whole of dancers’ bodies dissolve into individual parts that compose dance uponmultiple planes. Through such dissolution, movements multiply as bodies moveasymmetrically, governed by parts rather than by a unified whole. The move awayfrom unification, as Markula (2006) suggests, challenges notions of bodies as stablesubjects with fixed identities. Deleuzian philosophy challenges the idea thatidentities are static, and within her own practice-as-research, Markula accordinglyhas danced non-feminine movements to problematize perceptions of a stable femaleidentity. Vines (2007) similarly demonstrates how dancing movement alongsideDeleuzian theory enables practice-as-research. By grounding emergent andnon-hierarchal movements in Deleuzian theory, Vines emphasizes dance as a non-linear, experimental process. Such research often invokes attention to dancingthrough open spaces (Cunningham and Lesschaeve 2010) and moving through re-imagined topographies and cartographies (Rubidge 2011). Deleuzian philosophies,therefore, regularly inform bodily studies both within and beyond dance (e.g.Braidotti 2013; Coffey 2013) and inspire a broad range of embodied artisticpractices (e.g. Springgay 2008).

The discussion of embodiment through Deleuze, phenomenology, and new mate-rialism are three available theoretical frameworks that raise questions about howinnovation in dance research methodology might be advanced by theoretical per-spectives and epistemologies rooted in embodiment. Such lines of inquiry gainimportance as dance researchers increasingly are called upon to describe their prac-tice (Bannerman 2010; Stinson 2006). For Bannerman (2010), the ways in whichchoreographers write about their choreographic practice and write about writing areparticularly significant because choreographic writing is ‘informed by both kineticand cognitive considerations which arise from a thinking bodily practice’ (474).Moreover, a growing number of researcher–choreographers are finding themselvesas academic writers who continue to ‘search for and to experiment with modes oflanguage to intervene in choreographic practices and to interact with dance’(Bannerman 2010, 485). For researcher–choreographers and researcher–practitionerssearching for such venues, I suggest that embodied writing methodologies mayprovide one such route.

Writing dance as embodied methodology

Across theoretical approaches to embodiment, writing dance remains a persistentchallenge for many scholars. In describing the complexities of writing dance, forexample, Parviainen (2002) observes that ‘knowing in dancing always has some-thing to do with verbal language; nevertheless, it essentially concerns the body’sawareness and motility’ (13). Because oral and written language systems providedifferent templates for communication than does dance, approaches to embodiedwriting systems have been marked by tensions between kinesthetic movement andinscribed language. As a consequence of such tensions, disparate writing systems(drawing from disparate theories of embodiment) have emerged within dancescholarship. Despite attempts to write choreography through scores, notebooks,

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pictographic systems, and movement texts,1 written choreographic notation has yetto be fully incorporated into dance practice (Pouillaude 2007).

As a result, many choreographers today experiment with different ideas of whatit means to write dance. The idea of writing dance, however, is not new. The term‘choreography’ emerged when Feuillet (1701) published the Beauchamps-Feuilletsystem of dance notation in Chorégraphie, ou l’art de décrire la danse (Choreogra-phy, or the art of writing dance). In drawing from this history, Pouillaude (2007)explains that the word ‘choreography’ means composition and that choreographyconstitutes a form of writing in and of itself. For Pouillaude, this raises implicationsfor writing dance in which contemporary

choreographic writing no longer consists of fixing a determined gestural trace that theperformer would have to mechanically actualize from one evening to the next, butrather of setting open apparati that would have to be reencountered and reexperimentedwith in a different way in every instance. (132)

Within Pouillaude’s definition of choreographic writing, therefore, writing becomesa mutation in which ‘writing by matter … constitutes one of the possible modalitiesof this renewed writing’ (132, original emphasis). By emphasizing how writingmight occur through engagements with matter, Pouillaude positions choreographicwriting within the center of new materialist concerns. For Pouillaude, like others,choreographic writing materializes through dance.

Longley (2009) similarly envisions choreographic writing as a venue throughwhich writing materializes out of dance practice. In comparison, she defines choreo-graphic writing as a methodology of practice-led research in which the choreogra-pher simultaneously draws another dancer’s movement. This dynamic partnershipbetween choreographer and dancer produces something new and different in theprocess of experiencing dance through writing. For Longley,

Writing as a choreographic mode is a form of performance practice that aims to feedthe invention and development of dance ideas at the site where they emerge … Itattempts to open out possibilities for dance ideas to form unpredictable openings acrossdisciplines and spaces. (Longley 2009, 8–9)

Like Pouillaude, Longley highlights choreographic writing as an opportunity to cre-ate openings through dance – openings that are not replicable or predictable, butrather involve the singularities and mutations described by Deleuze.

The materialization of dance into unpredictable events illustrates how inter-sections between new materialist and Deleuzian philosophies might work in tan-dem to create new forms of embodied writing methodologies in dance. Inanother application of Deleuze within choreographic modes of writing, for exam-ple, Vines (2007) suggests that dance and writing should co-exist as a symbi-otic, non-hierarchical ‘dance-writing-machine’ (105). In this respect, Vines,Pouillaude, and Longley all approach writing not only as embodied, but also asa spontaneous, creative, productive experience laced with affect. Rather thanattempt to reflect or explain dance through writing, they focus on producingsomething new when attempting to write dance. For these authors, writing func-tions as what Kirby (2011) describes as an ‘abstracting technology, somethingwherein the process of its ‘draw-ing out and away’ exerts an effective transfor-mation that takes an essential and pure ingredient and manufactures it intosomething else’ (56).

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Choreographic writing across embodied methodologies

To embody writing, therefore, I turn to examples of choreographic composition inthe contexts of phenomenology, new materialism, and Deleuze. By examining exam-ples of choreographic writing within each of these theoretical frameworks, I demon-strate the different aesthetics and topical concerns that might be found within eachin relation to embodiment.

Phenomenological choreographic writing

A phenomenological approach to choreographic writing provides a useful lens forexperienced and novice researchers alike. For experienced researchers (especiallyresearchers who already draw from phenomenological frameworks), choreographicwriting may provide new venues for scholarly expression; for others, choreo-graphic writing may provide a natural foray from practice into research. Ratherthan begin by attempting to learn and understand the various rules of academicwriting, for instance, practitioners instead might begin by tapping into their ownembodied perceptions and memories as the basis for scholarship. Notably, thepotential for experience and perception to inform knowledge are among the basictenets of phenomenology. As phenomenologist Moustakas observes, ‘The mostsignificant understandings that I have come to I have not achieved from books orfrom others, but initially, at least, from my own direct perceptions, observations,and intuitions’ (1994, 41). To demonstrate how this might occur, the followingchoreographic writing illustrates my own perceptions of time and space asexperienced through dance.

Dance deterritorializes and reterritorializes

boundaries. Of time. Of space.

Bypassing uniformity, conformity, -formity, transcending our space-time continuum.

When I dream re-memories of dancing,

my body flies through the air,

momentarily defying gravity.

Here, writing within choreographic frameworks facilitates connections betweenexperiencing space in dance and experiencing space in other settings, such aswriting.

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New materialist choreographic writing

Like phenomenology, new materialism addresses space as issue of perception.Within new materialism, however, space also has material dimensions. Thismateriality extends beyond physical, bodily space into space for composition, aswell.

New materialist approaches to choreographic writing facilitate a re-envisioningof space within academic settings. In particular, an expansion of space may createroom for agency within writing – agency on the part of the writer and on the partof the words themselves. With respect to writers, a new materialist approach maybe particularly useful for scholars such as those described by Stinson and Dils(2008). As they write, ‘Scholars seeking to integrate their ‘dancer-self’ with their‘researcher-self’ often recognize the significance of the researcher’s body as an‘instrument’ even when discarding instrumental language’ (184). By incorporatingthe kinaesthetic body into composition, choreographic writing takes on materialdimensions and allows writers to use their bodies as instruments. With regard tothe words themselves, words move beyond simply serving as ‘instrumental lan-guage’ and become vibrant instruments instead. Imagine, for example, if wordsmoved, slipped through the confinement of expectation, and overflowed onto thepage.

mounting their great e

s

c

a

p

e

.

The agency and vibrancy within new materialism attributed to humans and non-humans alike (Kirby 2011) enable such an imagining.

Deleuzian choreographic writing

New materialist philosophies, however, are not the only theoretical perspectives thatre-imagine creativity, agency, and space. Like new materialism, Deleuzian thoughtalso re-imagines the body within open spaces and creative thought. In so doing,Deleuze might also ask:

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What if writing escaped

the boundaries of academic convention?

What if writing also took form

outside the lines – outside style guides – outside expectations – and

escaped

into the smooth open beyond (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

Following Deleuze and his creative concepts for movement, then, I wonder howwriting might similarly choreograph within and across what Deleuze describes asnomadic space. I wonder how dancers – who Deleuze might refer to as bodieswithout organs – might move along lines of flight, might move throughoutexploratory, non-linear, rhizomatic pathways, might dance intensities. I wonder,therefore:

how one might

dance Deleuze –

how one might dance conceptual figurations –

and dance within a fluid assemblage …

… bodies without organs dancing intensities dancing lines of flight dancing nomadic space dancing the rhizome dancing lines of flight dancing intensities dancing repetition dancing difference dancing intensities dancing …

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The possibilities of Deleuzian philosophy within dance are potentially infinite.Importantly, embodiment occurs within Deleuzian space through the materializationand movement of words. Embodiment occurs as writing becomes more corporealand the material and discursive intertwine.

Discussion

What, then, does choreographic writing achieve? This paper finds that writingextends across theoretical perspectives to expand and explore how the written textcan be re-written, re-visualized, and re-imagined given available technologies. In theprocess, an unexplored genre of academic writing broadens opportunities for writingto become an embodied methodology. Whereas readers of choreographic writingmight find new methodological venues through which to read dance, choreographicwriters, in turn, might find new forums in which to write embodied dance. Yet, it isboth choreography as movement and dance as writing that enable the embodimentof visual writing. Writing is, by nature, a performative act; the addition of a visualdimension simply expands what is already possible within writing. Moreover, choro-graphical extensions into writing potentially expand into the realm of creativeacademic practice and artistic research. This expansion, as I shall explain, intersectswith dance education, dance education research, and approaches to writing inqualitative inquiry.

As I have discussed, choreographic writing may be a useful means of expand-ing academic writing for expert researchers, novice researchers, and practitioners-as-researchers alike. My illustrations of choreographic writing in this paper thusfar, though, have addressed what choreographic writing might look like in aca-demic publishing. Yet, the potential role of choreographic writing is not limitedto journal articles or books. Rather, choreographic writing also has pedagogicalimplications, particularly with regard to the study and application of embodimentin dance.

Choreographic writing as writing pedagogy

Within dance education, choreographic writing as pedagogy might take severalforms. Choreographic composition could be used as a pre-writing activity withinseveral contexts. It could be used as a free-writing activity to generate ideas for writ-ing. It could also be used to explore students’ knowledge, understandings, and per-ceptions of dance in relation to embodiment or materiality. Further, it could bemodeled or used as an in-class lesson to demonstrate the performative and creativepossibilities of writing. Though I have created illustrations of choreographic writingby using electronic word processing software, dance writers also could sketch cho-reographic writing by hand on notepads, or even use full-body sheets of bulletinboard paper to create larger installations for purposes of pedagogy or performancedisplay. Choreographic writing on large sheets of paper also could facilitate a collab-orative writing process among two or more dancers (and/or researchers and choreog-raphers). Beyond pedagogy within dance and choreography courses, choreographicwriting on full-body sheets of paper could also be used to facilitate improvisationsessions.

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Choreographic writing as qualitative methodology

In addition, choreographic writing may be useful to those with an interest in qualita-tive research methodology. Certainly, there are overlaps between dance and manystrands of qualitative inquiry, both among dance researchers who use qualitativemethods as well as qualitative methodologists who draw from dance to describe theirresearch practice. In describing the relationship between qualitative research anddance research, for example, scholars have performed research through dance(Markula 2006); conceptualized dance as a metaphor for qualitative research(Janesick 1994, 2000); compared research design to choreography (Blumenfeld-Jones2008); and posited that dance is methodology (Vines 2007).

In drawing parallels between qualitative inquiry and dance, however, it isimportant to note that qualitative inquiry is a broad field marked by competingtraditions and histories. Denzin and Lincoln (2005), for example, identify fourmajor interpretive paradigms and eight moments that mark qualitative research todate. Moreover, qualitative inquiry is a dynamic discipline that continues toexpand in breadth, depth, and imagination. Though the nuances particular to eachof these paradigms and historical moments remain beyond the scope of thispaper, I find that choreographic writing is specifically relevant to two relatedmovements within qualitative research: writing as inquiry and writing asperformance text.

These two types of qualitative writing each mirror the practice of dance as acreative art. Though many forms of conventional qualitative research (such as eth-nographic or interview-based studies) seek to report empirical findings in tradi-tional manuscript form, for example, writing as inquiry and writing asperformance often have separate aims. As I shall explain in the following sections,inquiry-based and performance-based writing in qualitative research may reportempirical research findings in creative form. In the alternative, these types of writ-ing also may be more exploratory or experimental in nature (see St. Pierre 1997;Wyatt and Gale 2014). The aims of knowledge production vary accordingly. Withrespect to the former, creative forms of writing as inquiry become another meansof disseminating research; with respect to the latter, compositions that emergefrom the process of writing then become the products to be reported. Both are ofinterest to practice-as-research in dance, given that dance can be a vehicle throughwhich to perform research findings, as well as a site upon which to conductresearch.

Choreographic writing as a method of inquiry

Writing as a method of inquiry challenges the dominant model for academic writ-ing. According to Richardson (1994), traditional academic writing ‘ignores therole of writing as a dynamic, creative process’ (924). In response, Richardsondevoted a career to writing inquiry in the form of poetry, drama, and scripts,among other forms of creative academic writing (Richardson 1997). In followingRichardson, therefore, this series of choreographic writings form an inquiry inwhich ‘writing is thinking, writing is analysis, writing is indeed a seductive andtangled method of discovery’ (Richardson and St. Pierre 2005, 967, originalemphasis). Hence, choreographic writing in this paper is another example ofwriting as a method of inquiry.

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Choreographic writing as performance text

In addition, many qualitative scholars have experimented with textual innovation inrelation to performance (Saldaña 2003). Because dance and writing are performativepractices, choreographic writing provides a bridge between both. Notably, qualitativeresearcher Denzin (1997) describes performance writing as an embodied process.Writing grounded in textual performance, according to Denzin, involves ‘a continualrediscovery of the body’ (181). Moreover, ‘the performance text always works out-ward from the body’ (181) and ‘interrogate[s] the concepts of specularity, reconcep-tualizing the framing features which define the visual apparatus of the stage’ (182).When the written text itself enters the center stage of pagination (and enables, forexample, additional narrative readings or danced performances), texts-as-perfor-mances facilitate choreographic writing.

Thus, choreographic writing is perhaps a yet-to-be-explored type of performancewriting within qualitative inquiry. Because choreographic writing has implicationsfor qualitative research in regard to writing as inquiry and writing as performance,choreographic writing illustrates the reciprocal relationship between certain branchesof written qualitative inquiry and dance. This relationship can be productive for bothdisciplines, particularly with respect to the shared concern of embodiment.

Conclusion

Given the increasing importance of practice-as-research within creative artsinquiry (Bannon 2004; Barrett and Bolt 2010), as well as calls for embodiedscholarship in dance (Markula 2006), choreographic writing provides an alterna-tive mode of communication for dance education researchers and qualitativeresearchers alike. Though debate exists regarding the ideal role of research meth-ods within dance scholarship (see Bonbright and Faber 2004; Stinson and Dils2008), it may be a reversal of these considerations that is more useful. Ratherthan describe how research methodology advances dance scholarship, imaginablyit is choreographic writing that illustrates how embodied dance can inform bothresearch methodology and dance practice-as-research. In so doing, choreographicwriting creates space for the occasional excess of expression or the occasionalwriter who choreographs outside the line.

AcknowledgmentThe author would like to thank the two reviewers for their thoughtful comments and insight-ful suggestions.

Note1. Though a full discussion is beyond the scope of this paper, several scholars have

called for and created pictorial codes to record dance. Farnell (1994), for example,advocates for the development of movement-based text as a methodological resource.Farnell instead suggests a ‘script that will provide the means to become literate inrelation to the medium of movement just as we have been able to achieve literacy inrelation to spoken language and music’ (997). For Farnell, that script is Labanotation,an inscribed system of movement that has been adopted by others within danceeducation research (e.g. Maletic 1987).

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Notes on contributorJasmine B. Ulmer is a graduate research fellow and a PhD candidate at the University ofFlorida. Her research focuses on the intersection between writing as inquiry, new materialisms,and poststructural theories in qualitative research. She once danced. She now dreams embodiedmemories of dancing. Her work is forthcoming in Qualitative Inquiry.

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