Re: Sense – A choreographic and philosophical journey through the senses / Iris Athanasiadi (2020)

This thesis is a choreographic and philosophical inquiry; it explores how the different senses contribute to our perception of the world, combining ideas from architecture, phenomenology and the philosophy of cognitive science and integrating them into a choreographic practice. It also examines ways of addressing and awakening our multimodal perception through participatory open-ended performative events, which are interpreted, imagined and felt with the receiver’s full capacity as Umberto Eco suggests (1989), while weaving a method for creating performances to be experienced with the totality of the senses.

Starting with a philosophical framework – drawing primarily from the works of G. Bachelard (1964), M. Merleau-Ponty (1974), and A. Noë (2004, 2012) – the thesis discusses how creative imagination and active perception are essential states within the process of developing our sense of “being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 1996); how we connect and interact with our environment. It continues with an exploration of the main compositional elements of performative events (body, space and time) and the dialectics of their interconnections. It also looks into the senses as perceptual systems through which we experience the world and discusses how they can be heightened through multisensory experiences. In the last chapter, the focus is on interlacing the research findings with the compositional process of the experienced performative piece Re: Sense , thus providing an opportunity to further connect theory with practice.

In this research, the recipients of performative events are referred to as the ‘experiencers’ and are placed in the spotlight; they are encouraged to become active explorers and develop a poetic exchange – one which both generates and searches for meaning – with their environment through their body and senses. The choreographer, in this work, takes on multiple roles; creator, facilitator, co-author, performer. By implementing the choreographic process which is unfolding throughout this thesis, the relationship between the body and the world can be investigated, enriched, and re-imagined.

Open-ended practices which highlight the role of the subjective experience, like the one examined in this thesis, provide us with a multimodal, interdisciplinary and multisensory approach to research which begins with and circulates around the body. Rather than crystallized methods of creating, they are constantly evolving methods of inquiry.