AbstractThis dissertation serves as a guidebook, leading readers through scores and embodied inquiries that can be applied to movement practices in a group, in pairs, or solo. The scores and practices aim to help readers develop a bodily knowing and felt sense; engage with the not-yet known; open to an embodied process of relational dynamics; and, ultimately, embrace unique expressions of movement, or what I call a Moving. The experience of sich einlassen, roughly translated to mean a total immersion in a process, encompasses these entangled states. In the first chapter, I present scores to help readers recognize sensations and get in touch with felt sense, which shifts the way we filter information, altering how we perceive our surroundings and selves as we attune to situations. In chapter 2, I introduce the concepts of settling, slowing down, and sich einlassen, as well as the Midline practice. The explorations in chapter 2 build on felt sense scores from chapter 1 to help readers experience a Moving. In chapter 3, I analyze the Rope Practice, and I apply concepts and explorations from chapters 1 and 2 to the practice, including how practitioners can harness attention and use felt sense with an object. In the fourth chapter, I examine the for_rest score and the methods of collision and fragmentation, investigating how they may shape the experiences of performers and audiences. Readers will discover that a Moving is a practice anchored in skill and occurs in a spectrum of expressions. It is transient and non-replicable, and no two experiences of it are the same. Yet, a Moving is a repeatable practice that offers infinite possibilities for experiencing sensations and movement. 

This dissertation is written by a dance performance artist who comes out the context of Russian Contemporary Dance of the Newest Times (RCDNT). RCDNT embraces various artistic forms and practices of contemporary dance, appearing and developing in Russia since the early 1990s. This writing brings attention to regions insufficiently presented in the discourse lately. For instance, among such regional cities, where there is less dominance of cultural nationalism and interesting potential for exploratory change, are Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, and Kirov. The dissertation can be seen as autoethnographic since it synthesizes detailed personal practice as research (PAR) with historical, cultural, and social contexts. In appendices, it includes interviews with the following artists: Irina Brezhneva (Kirov, Russia), Dash Che (Helsinki, Finland), Molly Huey (Richmond, VA, USA), Julian Nichols (London, UK), Denis Perevalov (Yekaterinburg, Russia), Olga Sevostyanova (Chelyabinsk, Russia), Rafael Timerbakov (Chelyabinsk, Russia), Maida Rust Withers (Washington, DC, USA), and Andrei Zakharov (Yekaterinburg, Russia). The selection was designed to symbolically unite practitioners experimenting with dance performance and gesture toward shared values and concerns that cross borders between countries and disciplines.

The dissertation is organized into four chapters. Chapter 1 touches on practice as research (PAR) methodology and autoethnographic writing and attempts to answer the question of why we make/view/document experimental art created alongside the dominant mainstream discourses. It also overviews writings on RCDNT and introduces situations in regional locations. Chapter 2 discusses minor curating in dance with the following case studies: Small-Format (Yekaterinburg, Russia), ZDVIG (Kirov, Russia), and Sarus (Wilmington, NC, USA) contemporary dance festivals that launched in 2007 and have experienced a lot of transformations on their way. Chapters 3 and 4 are dedicated to the author’s PAR experiences and built around four performances: Algorithms. Anamorphoses. Anomalies (2012), Contours of Sound (2013), Inside the Chain (2016), and Multiple Selfie in the Dark (2019). The former two projects explore what is possible in combinations of dance and mathematics, dance and interactive digital technology, and the latter relate to such notions as “stochastic choreography” and “aleatory intimacy.” In these and other works, together with my collaborators, we have experimented with ways different media can prompt the potential for unpredictability and change within larger, less flexible but more recognized, cultural and social frameworks.

Biomedical protocols and cultural metaphors of cancer enact the disease as an individual condition. The individualization of cancer isolates people diagnosed, objectifies certain bodies, hinders physical and emotional variability, centers individual risks while obscuring socio-economic corporate profit or environmental toxicities, cuts ecological relations, limits access to treatments, and detour potential intersectional connections. At the root, the individualization of the disease creates a split between ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’ individuals and serves, among other things, to limit the emotions and alliances that could transform some of the structural settings by which we are all living in toxic conditions and getting cancer., this dissertation starts from the premise that there is no more escaping: we are all -already- living with cancer. In addition to the increasing numbers of cancer incidence in the world, cancer has spread into our existences as a material-metaphor for the worst, a kind of somato-relational technique of horror, and as a mode of engaging health, toxicity, economics, research and all kinds of life on Earth, through fixed notions of hope and/or fear. As a community arts and experimental dance intervention into cancer-relations, this study is an investigation on rehearsal as method through the oncogrrrls project. Rehearsal as method aims at making cancer ecologies, interrogating and transforming how is cancer in the world, and the world in cancer. oncogrrrls is a project I/we launched in 2011 after my own diagnosis to make something about ‘it’ and do it together. oncogrrrls are series of creative residencies with women and queer individuals who, diagnosed or not, care about cancer. Rehearsal becomes a space for collective interrogation of situated cancer relations that extends into the making of a piece. How do we engage individual/collective change through performance making? What would happen if we treat cancer as an art inquiry instead of a biomedical certainty? The study also explores the questions emerging in different oncogrrrls residencies. Moving away from attempts at universal knowing, each question, situated in context, offers a line-through for the inquiry and an anchor to hold the cancer rehearsal as a transformative practice As a Practice as Research investigation the findings materialize in practices and concepts for oncological performance art and activism. To complete this dissertation I facilitated 10 creative processes leading to 5 performance pieces. The writing builds on phenomenological memories, documentation of creative process, close readings of moments, dreams, scores (sets of instructions used in the making of the pieces) and ethnographic notes and stories. The introduction tracks the emergence of oncogrrrls from my own physiological and performative experiences with breast cancer. Score inquiry (not representation)! Cocreate! Start in the Body! are three main principles that enfolded over the years. This study also proposes transposing as a meta-score ‘pick an issue, move it somewhere, notice what emerges.’ Transposing figures a movement practice, a technoscientific protocol where the oncological experience emerges as an intense transit with the potentiality of change, an opening of certain configurations to the richness of the possible. This dissertation proposes rehearsal as a mode of production from the arts to make cancer relations otherwise. Rehearsal, as joint curiosity, enacts the multiplicities already existing within cancer. onCocreation offers tools and concepts for artists, activists, health and social change practitioners interested in making cancer otherwise through somatic art inquiry, experimental dance, and community engagement.

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