Science Dances: Choreographies on the Edge of Knowledge
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
American Studies
First Advisor
Dudley, Kathryn
Abstract
Science Dances consists of discrete choreographic objects that entwines stories about science and dance to create new zones of encounter between the disciplines. Each choreographic object is partially submerged in a performance that lies outside of this text, just as those performances I allude to or describe in detail are partially submerged in this research and writing. The experimental form of my writing builds upon my thirty-year career as a dancer and choreographer, and extends from the experimental form of my research, in which I move through creative, choreographic, ethnographic, and archival methods. Providing my throughline, movement research is both my method and object of study. The choreographies I create on the page contain rich stories about moving as a way of knowing, whether it be dancers embodying a classical form enriched by animist beliefs, or dark matter physicists capturing microspheres, or my own movement through laboratories and archives to create original works of performance. I juxtapose science and dance in an effort to defamiliarize the two disciplines, to show they share in common complex embodied aesthetics, as their mediating means of knowledge gathering and representing the knowledge they produce. Taken together, the carefully crafted objects that make up this dissertation argue for the capacities of choreographic imagination to transcend disciplinary boundaries in order to reveal an alternate zone that foregrounds the human body’s ability to generate, hold, and transmit knowledge across time and space, a feature largely sublimated if not entirely written out of the record in the development of Western science and a knowledge-producing power largely under-recognized of dance.
Recommended Citation
Coates, Emily Carson, "Science Dances: Choreographies on the Edge of Knowledge" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1337.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1337
