Skins of Light: on the jagged and interrupted practices of choreoluminosity

‘Skins of Light: on the jagged and interrupted practices of choreoluminosity’ considers, from a choreographer’s perspective, modes of interruption through the lens of different collaborative processes in performance making. Taking as a point of departure the embodied experiences of flinching, distraction, and rupture in relation to corporeal conversations with light, this paper reflects on how productive disruptions may allow for shifts of agency within the human and non-human relationships in such processes. With reference to collaborative creative processes between 2018-2022, the presentation also traces strategies for artistic survival, what Aronson refers to as “coping mechanism[s] ... in the face of this forced hiatus” (2020: 312), without losing sight of the specific economical and socio-cultural damage suffered by the sector as a result of the pandemic lockdowns. Choreoluminosity is grounded in multi-sensorial entanglements of doing and thinking with light, resonating with theories of haptic visuality (Marks, 2002; Sobchack, 2004) and embracing philosophies of agential realism within the field of New Materialisms (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2009). As a practice, choreoluminosity adopts a phenomenological approach, a method which recognises the interruption of self as an essential tool for suspension of objective thought, and a way of remaining receptive to the moment and one’s environment. The ‘Skins of Light’ paper considers responsiveness when interruption is incurred in a jagged manner by external events, matter, or other, and questions the possibility of sustaining a welcoming attention. Echoing Derrida’s critiquing of hospitality, which he refers to as a side-stepping or interrupting of self, I suggest that such receptiveness in artistic creative processes maybe lived as “[a]n internal paraphrase” a “yes to the other” (1999: 22). This internalized acceptance intends to operate as a code of practice, an affirmation to openness - an openness to ideas, to other, and to self.