Thesis Outline

Lailye Weidman

Research Interests and guiding questions:

In this dance project, I am looking at how performers determine and challenge choreography through
their individual agency using tools of consensus, consent, and other strategies of communication and
shared governing.
What does it mean to present negotiations of power as spectacle?
How does my position as director complicate or negate the possibility of a dancers authentic

consent?

Collectivity:
communal living: personal stories/memoir, utopias, intentional communities vs. other kinds of
communities
Feminist art collectiveswomanhaus, the womens building, feminist utopias
Mass protest and community organizing: Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, ACT-UP, labor
movements, performance as protest (and vice versa), power in numbers
collectives/collaborations Ive been a part of: the Movement Party/Fleet Moves, Place Maker Space,
Messier Spaces, Earthdance, iLAND, Beaufort, GEO

Collective bodies:
What does a collective body look like and what can it do?
Examples: Synchronized walking competitions in Japan, human towers in Spain, crew teams,
collective navigation of urban architecture (collaborative flow), flocks, lines, people engaged in
collaborative tasks
Dance history: Simones huddle, Trisha Browns leaning duets, circles, ciphers, unison movement, CI
jams
When/how does a collective become something other than human? Busby Berkeley and abstraction/
surrealism, synchronized swimming, groups and crowds seen from distant and close-up perspectives,

a sea of peoplemassive celebrations and humanitarian crises

Shared decision making processes:

consensus processes formal and informal
How do individual choices affect a group? How do group choices affect individuals? What are the
rhythms produced by shared decision making, by negotiation (both verbal and non-verbal)? Draw on
Henri Lefebvrerhythmanalysis

 Interdependent systems: Does interdependency make people more or less stable, more or less able?
Dance practices that rely on elements of consensus: Lisa Nelsons Tuning Score, Nancy Stark Smiths
underscore, group think scoresMomar Ndaiye, CIweight sharing
Other consensus metaphors: telephone game, exquisite corpse, transformation of one movement
through a group
The performer as agentinterpreting and challenging the authority of the choreographer

Consent and non-consent:

A student experienced trauma flashback in one of CI class, and I wanted to find new ways to organize
our sessions that kept her agency more fully in tact.
Adapting language from queer and sex positive communities
Adapting exercises from self-defense workshops
Rape culture and interventions, policies, critiques, i.e. slutwalk, take back the night
Do performers sometimes enjoy being manipulated, controlled, and regulated? How might their ability
to choose be highlighted to shift the signification of this kind of partnering?
Racism and the high price paid for black bodies who do not consentSandra Bland, Freddie Gray,
Michael Brown, and on and on
Queer/trans lives and not consenting to gender binaries, cis-sexism, and punishment of difference,
Normal Life by Dean Spade
Performance strategies of non-consent: Dissidentifications by Jose Muoz, Choreographing Protest,
Susan Foster, CI and civil disobedience
Standing man (Erdem Gunduz) and other individual acts of non-consent for a collective
Randy Martin: Federal funding, coercion, censoring, and consent. Private and public spheres. Forcing
of art back into private sphere. Martins writing on collectivity, presence, and absence, in Bill T Jones

Last Supper at Uncle Toms cabin.

Language and non-verbal communication:

What happens when a mover communicates with another mover about what he or she is willing to do
and not do?
What techniques do dancers use to accept or refuse touch, to change the conditions, rules, or constraints
of a physical relationship with another mover or a group of movers? What happens when we begin to
include verbal communication in these negotiations? Does this affect the dancers sense of agency and
their choices?
Does the vocal body differ from the non-vocal dancing bodies I tend to see on stage? How so?
Does language have power over movement the hand over the body, competitions, who wins?

My past choreographic, performing, and teaching work that has led me to this research:
Derve scores, collaboration with Adam Overton, walking into relational aesthetics
Duet with Kamilla and Catalina, taking risks in trusting their decisions, coaching and creating
parameters rather than setting choreography
Duet with Shayna and Erin, ideas of affecting and being affected by space. Their relationship and
physical partnering as metaphor. Sitting section. moving into one anothers zones. Theorizing a body
that is bigger than just whats inside the skin.
Performing with Teilo Troncy and Hana van der Kolk. Package and cajole. Power differences.
Seduction solos.
Performing Brandin Steffensons score Pentamodes, active/passive/inhibiting/emphasizing/?
Teaching partnering at U of I

Research methods and creative process:

Alongside the content of my research, I want to carve space to be reflexive about my creative process.
Shall I write about it and include it in the paper?
Creative process (practice) metaphors: adventure, journey, derve, falling down the rabbit hole, building a
tower, unearthing, composting, weaving a web
Journal everyday. Ask: what guides me as a maker?