Kinesthetic Strike: Futuring in the Middle

Daisy Thompson’s PhD Defence
Individualized Interdisciplinary Studies PhD
Thursday, August 22, 2024 | 1:30 PM
Room 4650 (Blonde Dance Studio) – 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

In this thesis I enquire into the dancing body’s capacity to counter routine and utilitarian exploitation of the labouring body with a body in motion that produces joyful, positive, and durable relationships. I do this through a ‘becoming’ aesthetic that I am terming kinesthetic strike – a resistant dance that focuses on what releases when we detach from a society that presents only fixed possibilities. I cultivate kinesthetic strike through a multi-modal methodology that combines a theoretical framework, practice-led research, performance, and four case studies, all of which feel in, think in, and believe in unlearning the deficient scope of what our bodies are instructed to be. The theoretical basis of kinesthetic strike is substantiated by theories of affect, particularly as influenced by Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Rosi Braidotti. From this, I develop kinesthetic strike as a method made up of tiny actions that refuse the ‘supportive future’ promised by capitalism, redirecting human energy to more fulfilling social purposes. Within the research-creation of two dance works—Hug and How to Be—I develop kinesthetic strike as a creative method to build immanent structures and scores, and examine how they activate the emergence of continuous combinations of becoming that express how we are a part of the world, how we become with the world, and how we have the capacity to recreate the world we wish to be in. Through four case studies of Vancouver-based dance artists, I widen the application of kinesthetic strike to the frameworks of dance, examining how it is activated in the rehearsal process, artwork, and audience reception of the work of Justine A. Chambers and Lee Su-Feh; and in the curation, programming, and mandate of Matriarchs Uprising festival and the cultural space Morrow. Through the lens of kinesthetic strike, the case studies reveal the capacity for ‘otherwise’ notions of agency that foreground spaces of being together, where creative and collaborative practice re-invest in the individual and collective body through movement.

Keywords: Kinesthetic Strike, Contemporary Dance, Improvisation & Scores, Ethics, Affirmative Politics, Braidotti, Deleuze, Immanent Aesthetics, Becoming Aesthetics

SUPERVISORS AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE

• Co-Supervisor: Peter Dickinson, Professor, School for the Contemporary Arts
• Co-Supervisor: Laura U. Marks, Grant Strate University Professor, School for the Contemporary Arts
• Committee Member: Rob Kitsos, Professor, School for the Contemporary Arts
• Examiner: Thecla Schiphorst, Professor, School of Interactive Arts and Technology
• External Examiner: Erin Silver, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, University of British Columbia
• Defence Chair: Denise Oleksijczuk, Associate Professor, School for the Contemporary Arts