Dear reader,

 

I started this journal two years ago, at the beginning of my MA in Theatre Practices, at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts.
 

The title of my research as it has been shaped after two years, is:
'Language Choreography: Re-imagining autobiographical narratives to creating fictions of mental motion'.

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My research last year started with the search for 'in-between', 'alternative' spaces, seen as spaces where identities are not only singularly defined, by inviting people in different modes of co- existing, through movement, writing, reading and discussing. 

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In the start of this academic year, I made sense and articulated what I do as 'choreography as an expanded practice', and I explored the possibilities of (performative) language and imagination in time and space.

At the same time I worked with the notions of the 'care of oneself'  and with  principles of care-focused feminism, associated with values of 'interdependence, community, connection, sharing, and the body'.

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In this blog-journal, I used writing as a tool to 'store', to archive my experiments, conversations, movement improvisations and thoughts, that were part of my research. Back then, I thought, that for several reasons I might need to go back to my journals in the future, to remember, understand, make sense and reflect on the work I have been doing in any moment during this process.

Initially, I archived almost every talk, every improvisation, every experiment, and many of my internal dialogues, and I used writing, photos and videos, to do so. At the end of the first year of the program, I felt exhausted by this obsessive mode to 'control' my traces, in order not to 'lose' any important information, that could open a possibility to an insight on my work, an insight that every researcher is looking for.

 

Thus, I decided to stop being obsessive about losing or missing  'memory' or 'information' and trust that all I have done and will do is embodied, and therefore written and stored in a different way. I called my process back then 'un-archiving' and from then on, I consciously tried to let my body guide me in what I archive and what not, changing my focus to how I do what I do, and to what my body feels when I write, move and experiment. I therefore started becoming more aware of my actions and the way I do them, rather than trying to capture - in writing, recording, and photographing- what I do.

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During this process I realised that my artistic work was an archive in-itself.
I realised that if I did my research work well, then the reader and spectator could or should be able to follow my processes by seeing my artistic work, that is based on my research which is done through and as practice. I realised that my artistic work, archives within it, whether I want it or not,  the conversations, experiments, internal and external dialogues and main concepts I work with.

I therefore, this last year continued in a very slow pace to include posts in this journal, and most of them were assignments, or samples of my artistic work, or reflections on what I want to do and how I try to do it, rather than entries of the experiments themselves.

 

Today, two weeks before my graduation from the program, I decide to make this blog-journal public.

I see this blog as a process that can possibly contribute and add to the processes of peers and other researchers. I am saying this because for me personally, whenever I have had the chance to read or look at the processes of other researchers and artists, no matter how similar or not our research questions were, it has always been beneficial to my work.

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In this blog-journal, you will find posts that relate to different subjects, such as research and writing assignments, scores, performative texts, movement tasks, speech practices, internal dialogues as well as my readings during these two years. At a first glance, all these elements might seem disconnected, maybe even confusing.It is because they are all particles of a process that one can start to sense when following its rhythm from one point to the other. I don't mean of course, that you need to go through the whole blog in order to make sense of what I have written. 

I invite you, however, to go through the posts of this blog-journal in a chronological order (either from end to beginning or from beginning to end 🙂).

You will be able to see the posts chronologically on the bottom right side of the page 'posts', so you can trace the development of a thought, an experiment or a dialogue.

In order to help you with this navigation, on top of every post I include one or more categories that describe it. (e.g. thoughts on the research presentation, thoughts on the development of my artistic research etc.). If you have an interest in a specific category, you can click on it and see all the posts that relate to this category.

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I hope this reading will contribute in some way to your process my dear reader,

With Warm Regards,

Eleni Mylona

22.06.2019 

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