Litó Walkey: Critical Ecologies of Choreographic Practice

The research aims to investigate and diversify modes of dissemination for choreographic practices that develop as durational encounters of exchange and experimentation in relation to devised compositional parameters. Shifting focus away from the single terminus product of performance, the project would activate and reflect on expanded choreographic practices that emphasize ongoingness, response-making, reformulating, re-mediating, emerging, and disappearing to consider the ways in which these kinds of participatory engagements can charge, change and sustain collective ways of learning and living for artists as well as readers, students, audiences, and the public.

The project would emphasize the ‘critical ecologies of attention’ that permeate through choreographic practices. These attentiveness procedures engage lateral and divergent thinking that consider the radical potential of marginal, accidental, and less visible phenomena; complexifying singular authorship and enabling processes to take shape according to all the particulars involved, without dominant narratives or figures. Amidst the global crisis’ we face, these processes offer non-hegemonic strategies to create alternative structures for being connected, resourceful, and response-able.

If expanded choreographic practices emphasize creative manifestations that emerge in the fluid processes of transmission and transformation, what forms of dissemination could enable, contain and convey these manifestations? How could attentiveness procedures circulate between artists and researchers to have a more significant effect on the development of alternate forms of public dissemination?

Fuelled by these inquiries, the project investigates archiving as an interactive tool for writing, reflecting, and negotiating traces of processes. The project will investigate collaborative publishing practices dedicated to books becoming both a document and generator for future dialogue. Using archive publication as a continuation of choreographic processes, this project aims to create public spaces of critical thinking and experimentation to activate a participatory engagement that is not bound to a single discipline.

This project will experiment with processes where the printed page operates as a performative venue. Publication and performance may collapse and performance can unfold as a writing studio. It aims to experiment with books and traveling books as sites of experimentation, exchange and performance and with performances emerging in the space between the printed page and embodied encounters with the public. The project aims to align with and strengthen artistic research initiatives with choreographers activating their practices through alternative forms of publication within and beyond Sweden.