Echoes, resonances, interventions: Between movement, speaking and writing / Amelia Zhou (2020)

This thesis investigates how language is carried through movement, speaking, and writing. It frames the pathways in which language moves in, across and through these different registers of expression as one founded on pathways of transmission and translation. These reciprocal flows of transmission and translation between movement, speaking and writing are taken as unpredictable and plural in nature, coming into contact in resonant and frictional combinations. I investigate how these registers of expression, when placed in kinship with each other, produce manifold, interweaving possibilities for meaning to arise. These meanings are other and besides semantic, representational or intellectual knowledge, deriving from the ends of experiential knowing, to sense and sound, and poetic modes of perception.

I investigate these enquiries through several improvisation-based research practices: speaking-moving improvisations, embodied listening exercises, and writing as a mode of embodied production, reflection, and documentation. These practices are discussed in how they create an open field of possibility for movement, speaking and writing, to threshold into another in both resonant and resistant ways. This investigation then extends into how the arising improvisational material from my research practices are taken into the compositional realm. I analyse and reflect upon my performance work CHORA, which combines movement, voice, writing and objects filtered through the improvisational parameters of my practices. I also discuss additional questions that were considered during its making, including how language and meaning is mediated by objects, and the destabilisation of presence and representation through language in the performance space.