Four-Plus-Dimensional

Beyond the immediately recognisable spatial and temporal dimensions of choreographic work, a much broader range of matter co-produces its over-determined materialities. Energetic orientations and affective temperatures, architectural programmes and infrastructural echoes, entrained repetitions and experiential durations invariably coalesce into clusters that animate extended, porous and inherently malleable milieus of resonance, and overlap with all sorts of other forms of shared reality.

To call these materialities four-plus-dimensional is to regard and treat the fabric of the choreographic as committedly composite and variously unstable and unbounded. In line with what Mel Y Chen calls animacy, the aim is “not to re-invest certain materialities with life, but to remap live and dead zones away from those very terms”, and to stake the viscosity of matter as a marker for what André Lepecki calls the kinetics of now.

Mel Y Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 2012

André Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, 2016