To the Place that Held Me : A Study of Developing Experiential Knowledge Beyond Language / Amy Mackley (2025)

This paper surveys the research and creative process behind the performance of ‘To the place that held me,’, that took place in July 2025. The research question investigates whether choreographic practice can generate forms of knowledge that extend beyond language-based knowledge, specifically asking: can movement enable deeper experiential self-knowledge? The study is grounded in autotheory and practice-as-research methodologies and situates lived experience as the central source of knowledge and inquiry. I explore my personal history of OCD as the subject. It is an extremely private and subjective process. I engage with phenomenology, embodied cognition, and therapeutic frameworks such as Gendlin’s focusing and Authentic Movement during the practice. This grounds the enquiry in theory as a method of providing academic rigour to the process, aside from its creative explorations. Explored within the thesis is the development of my choreographic methodology ‘moving myself’, which integrates literary research, autobiographical writing and somatic exploration as both research methods and creative practices. I built upon ‘moving myself’ to then create a reflective, analytical practice called ‘understanding myself’. The paper will demonstrate how choreography can act as both a creative process and site of knowledge production. The findings indicate that movement can illuminate the complex nature of embodied experience and allow personal and academically relevant embodied knowledge.