What Makes You Move? : Affordances for Movement Research Facilitation in Installation Art and Dance

Abstract

This thesis studies artistic practices which facilitate movement research, building on the idea that they contain significant embodied knowledge which is not traditionally studied within academia, as it is non-propositional. This approach is situated within an epistemology of practice, a theory which advocates for the introduction of tacit knowledge in academic discourse and the development of appropriate research methods.

Through this research I explore how artistic practices of movement research facilitation in dance and installation art can be theoretically explicated and developed through the theory of affordances, a perception theory with action at its centre. Employing embodied and autoethnographical methodologies, the research begins with my own engagement in movement research in two cases: the inflatable artworks Thick, Tree (wt) and Awa by Ludmila Rodrigues and movement classes by OFFprojects.

My experience in the case studies is analysed through mainly Rietveld and Kiverstein’s theory of affordances. I adopt their view of affordances as simultaneously material and social and enrich them with critical remarks related to embodiment, to apply it to the case studies’ analyses. This way, the different types of affordances for movement research employed by the artists are detected, as well as the ways the audience is solicited to engage with them. This results in the compilation of a “toolbox”, a theoretical framework of affordances for movement facilitation. This framework is intended to contribute to the explication, transfer and development of embodied knowledge on movement research facilitation in artistic practices.