Browsing by Author "Johnstone, Kristina"

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    Articulating a Movement Pedagogy in Retrograde: Mapping an Embodied Research Process
    (Arts Research Africa, 2022-09-16) Johnstone, Kristina
    This paper discusses an artistic research project that challenges representationalism in South African contemporary dance. The author argues against the use of discursive methodologies that reinforce colonial scripts and instead proposes an alternative approach based on embodied practices. The paper explores the concept of choreography as embodied research and its potential to align with a decolonial praxis. The research project involves tracing embodied practices and creating a digital cartography to capture and explore these practices. The author also discusses the emergence of a movement pedagogy that unfolds in retrograde and disrupts conventional understandings of time and pedagogical continuity.
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    Movement Improvisation and Real-time Composition as a way to Discover Decolonial Ethical Research Methods
    (Arts Research Africa, The Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 2020-07) Johnstone, Kristina
    The purpose of this workshop is to offer a view on how the body and movement function as places of inquiry. We explore the question of “what is ethical?”, and by extension, can an “ethical research method” can be discovered by working with one’s own body in relation to other bodies?
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    Pathways towards embodied technique: disrupting representationalism in South African contemporary dance praxis
    (2022) Johnstone, Kristina
    This thesis and cartography form part of an artistic research project that seeks to disrupt representationalism in South African contemporary dance praxis. The study argues that discursive methodologies risk recrafting colonial scripts and tether contemporary dance practices within a framework that perceives such practices as responses to the aesthetics and practices of Western theatre dance. To open up the possibility for an alternative logic, the study proposes a shift from representation and spectatorial methodologies to the embodied practices that circulate across the bodies of practitioners (Spatz, 2020:98-99) in experimentation, performances and workshops. By tracing the pathways toward embodied technique in my own artistic work, which includes a series of contemporary dance works and performance projects created in 2017 and 2018, the study positions contemporary dance practices as epistemic. The writing and assemblages of research documents that form the thesis and the cartography search for ways in which the dances propose repeatable and transmissible instances of embodied technique that contribute towards decolonising notions of embodiment, dance technique, choreography and training. The study troubles representationalism as a framework that upholds hegemonic structures of knowledge and offers the notion that when contemporary dance practice is conceptualised as embodied research, it may become part of a decolonial praxis. By turning towards practices as knowledge-generating and ways of knowing, the study proposes that a decolonial choreographic praxis is structured by technique that is aesthetic and ethico-political, traces and questions orientations towards whiteness, humanism and universalism, and offers a logic outside of representation. Chapters One and Two contextualise the main research questions and the theoretical framework of the study. Chapters Three and Four re-visit and re-iterate the creation of three dance works: Monsters and Fossils (2017), Extreme Subjectivities (2018) and Before Naming (2018). Chapter Five concludes the study.