‘Nothing Changed, I Just Said Ok’: Autobiographical Choreography as an Interdisciplinary Practice of Acceptance / Denise Yaacoub (2025)

This thesis centers around my work titled Nothing Changed, I Just Said Ok and shares how autobiographical dance can serve as a conduit for exploring sameness, acceptance, and multiplicity of identity through in-body memory and interdisciplinary practice. The project pulls from performance-as-research approaches to engage movement, projection, and music as intertwined mediums for staging the relation between my past and present selves. By way of this, I attempt to employ autobiographical excavation to not only serve as a personal discovery but also as a shared human condition. The tension between constancy and transformation lies at the core of the project: instead of framing growth as noticeable change, I propose the acceptance of sameness as a valid form of evolution. To do so, the performance juxtaposes my projected, effortful past self with the patient nature of my live body to counter conventional narratives of self-improvement and highlight a form of growth that is rooted in self-acceptance. The projection represents both an out-of-body memory surface as well as a partner that my live body is in exchange with. In addition, the choreography utilizes gesture, stillness, and opposing execution qualities as creative tools that redefine how audiences perceive identity and personal journey. The beginning of the methodological process is marked by the usage of music as a mnemonic and autobiographical instrument. I draw on its ability to induce the remembrance of emotions and locate memory within my body. Practice-as-research, through self-filming and journaling, acts as the base for the development of my movement material. Moreover, publicly embracing multiplicity (the co-existence of past and present selves) as a means of affirming what does not need to change reveals quiet activism as a bolstering for the desired purpose of my project, framing it as a nuanced act of vulnerability. This work adds to dance scholarship by sharing methods in which autobiographical dance can challenge typical tropes of constant self-betterment. On a wider-than-dance scale, it also makes space for audiences to reflect on their individual journeys, identities, and potentials for acceptance by staging constancy as a reasonable kind of growth.