the magic eye: affect and alterity

In this presentation, titled the magic eye: affect and alterity, I share my artistic, practice-based doctoral research. It considers how affect might operate as a type of artistic material in the context of solo improvised dance. My research builds on the work of artists, scholars of improvisation studies, affect theory, and affective neuroscience. It adopts an interdisciplinary framework and engages Chrysa Parkinson’s articulation of “perception as material from the point of view of the dancer” (Conquet & Perkovic, 2016). Attending to the dynamic present moment through the feeling, dancing body, my research aims to reveal insights into the emergent, relational dynamics that shape how individuals experience and relate to their bodies, environments, and each other.
Orienting this inquiry towards the theme of this year’s ADSA conference, Manaakitanga: Performing Welcome, Care and Respect, I ask: How can bodily practices be cultivated with openness and receptivity to invite the unknown or unfamiliar within one’s own affective experiences? And how might this sensibility towards alterity engender an ethic of “embodied and epistemic multiplicity” (Pitts-Taylor, 2016)? I further propose that generosity, abundance, and inclusivity underpin a practice in which the dance improvisor’s material reflects their dynamic, subjective, sensorial experience—shaped by personal history, identity, agency, and desires. Rothfield writes, “The differentiation of the lived body opens itself to a politics of perception” (2021, p. 73), emphasizing how individual embodied factors crucially shape experience. Her view and the multiplicity named by Pitts-Taylor inform my approach, which acknowledges how embodied difference and subjective experience are shaped by wider cultural and social contexts.