Michaela Gerussi (she/her) is a dance artist and researcher based between London (UK) and Tkaronto (CA). Her practice is based in movement and extends into writing, performance, teaching, podcasts, video and image-making. Michaela is particularly engaged with improvisational scores, attention, affect and the complexities of how we sense ourselves. Her choreographic work considers shifting relationships between people, places and materials, layering subtle perceptual detail with a functional, dynamic approach to movement. Her collaborative performances, intermedia and site-specific works have been presented in London, (UK), Montreal (CA), Toronto (CA), Sherbrooke (CA), Buffalo (USA) and Berlin (DE). Beyond her artistic work, Michaela supports performance in a range of professional capacities; as a curator, performer, producer, stage manager and lighting designer. Along with Julia Pond and Laura Columban she co-founded Dance Outside Dance, a podcast of interdisciplinary conversations. Her writing and images have been featured in The Dance Current (CA). She holds an MFA in Creative Practice from Trinity Laban/Independent dance, and is currently undertaking a Practice-based PhD at the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, UK.

My artistic, practice-based doctoral research project investigates affect in the context of solo improvised dance practice. Considering the notion of affect from multiple perspectives, it is treated here primarily as the dynamic, bodily sense of feeling which permeates all aspects of human experience. The research builds on the foundational work of artists, scholars of improvisation studies, affect theory, and affective neuroscience, adopting an interdisciplinary framework through which to consider the following research questions:

How might affect operate as a type of artistic material in the context of solo improvised dance practice? How might it be possible to cultivate agency in one’s own affective experience through artistic practices in dance improvisation? These questions adopt and extend Chrysa Parkinson’s articulation of ‘perception as material from the point of view of the dancer’, an idea which she attributes to post-modern dance pioneer Deborah Hay (Conquet & Perkovic, 2016).

While I draw from sources who take both academic and scientific interests in affect, mine is primarily an artistic one from an embodied perspective. As such, my work explores and reveals affect as a material in and through dance improvisation practice, rather than defining or dissecting the notion conceptually. Through this approach, I offer qualitative insights to a varied landscape of perspectives on affect.