‘Resonance, reflection – a wave across the space’ / Self, movement and electroacoustic sound: a transdisciplinary approach to developing a practice of the ‘in-between’ / Diane Didenko (2021)

The performer is the composer is the mover. This transdisciplinary research thrives on an ambiguity where ‘both’ is also ‘neither’; sound and movement practices address and undo the idea of limit and distinction between disciplines, and therefore, in performance art.

This places the creative self in an unspoken territory which demands to be listened to as much as it is being watched. In the darkness of intuition, that is shifting grounds, blurry lines, diffuse sounds, elusive traces, and the suggestion of an ‘in-between’ that flickers and reverses.

‘Resonance, reflection – a wave across the space’ is a transdisciplinary study that grew from the intuition that ‘something’ resides between sound and movement, beyond the boundaries of disciplines, the tyranny of tangibility, and the fixation of identities. At first a mere intuition, it was soon encountered that sound and movement, as artistic manifestations of oneself, were both thriving in diffuse realms of ‘all-pervasive ephemerality’ (Gholson, 2018; Voegelin, 2016): ‘ever-present yet almost imperceptible’ (Toop, 1995/2018), ungraspable, flashing in the fleeting present moments (Lepecki, 2006). This engendered the beginning of a cycle of studio investigations and research which aspired to transcend disciplines, and implied that I, the researcher, would be requiring to simultaneously invoke self, composer and mover in the development of the practice, in the experimental pursue of concepts and their application in the studio.

On the basis that arts and creative practice contribute to the achievement [or production] of knowledge of the self (Leavy 2017, p.195), I draw on philosophy, performance phenomenology, feminist theory, transdisciplinary artistic Practice-asResearch and personal artistic practices in music and dance to address the intuition that there could be an artistic ‘in-between’ thriving in the fleeting vanishing visions of its momentarily brilliance (Lepecki, 2006, p.124), between sound, movement, and self.