Embodied storytelling: using narrative as a vehicle for collaborative choreographic practice – a case study of FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY’s 2016 HOMELAND TRILOGY (South Africa and Senegal).

Abstract

This article aims to interrogate and investigate the duel engagement with narrative and storytelling as a methodology towards collective and collaborative choreographic processes, and engages narrative as a theory of making meaning. Narrative theorists study how stories help people make sense of the world, while also studying how people make sense of stories. While narrative theory is generally located in the realm of literature and of words, this article starts to look at the interface of words, meaning and the embodiment of using the physical to tell stories. The article begins to push an understanding of Hélène Cixous’ ‘l’ecriture feminine’ to a feminist engagement that looks outside the word/logos and that turns to dance as a more open, fluid and multiple way of telling embodied stories. Further, this article – taking both the act of storytelling and the act of theorizing through narrative – frames my own autoethnographic engagement with a trilogy of connected dance work that I collaboratively created with Flatfoot Dance Company over 2016 which I refer to as the Homeland Trilogy – two performed separately in South Africa and the third performed in Senegal. The three works are connected by theme and choreographic intention and were made to stand alone but also to be read next to one another. Their connection from South to West Africa also become a point of navigation of meaning and narrating. This article offers a critical analysis/narrative of my own choreography (and the embodied process of making and doing); this is done as an act of one text (the Homeland Trilogy), written on the body with other bodies, being answered by another academic text of words and letters (also arguably embodied), responding to the constructions and play of knowledge and power.