SNDO Graduation thesis.
“Show the method in our madness”, but preserve “the madness in our method”
(Richard A. Ingram, Doing Mad Studies: Making (Non)sense Together, 2016)
Man, u & the scripts. follows an ongoing attempt to understand the scripts through which I have learned to move, perceive, relate and make sense of myself. Rather than treating these scripts as problems to be corrected, I interrupt them through my opposite score: “do the opposite of whatever you perceive.” It deliberately places the self in situations where its expected response can no longer be taken for granted: to reject without leaving, to approach without arriving, to repeat without resolving, to sit within discomfort without immediately transforming it into something else. The opposite isn’t the new answer. It’s the interruption that reveals there was an answer being imposed in the first place.
The thesis shifts between personal reflection, documentation, theoretical writing and analysis, sometimes allowing fragments, repetitions and unfinished thoughts to remain. I have chosen not to smooth these shifts into a single, consistent voice because this fragmentation, and the shifting between modes of address, are part of what I am investigating.
It draws on theories of perception and space (Perec, Bachelard, Rancière, Schivelbusch), gesture and experience (Manning, Dewey), dance philosophy (Cvejić, Pouillaude), mad studies (Ingram, Wolframe) and feminist autotheory (Fournier, Jones).
My practices as an artist have helped me both contain and expose my ‘madness’. They have facilitated both my closeting of it and, eventually, my coming out.
Its eight chapters:
Madness: What dance has done for me? / What dance has done to me? / What dance has done to me! / What has dance done to me?? Contemporary dance resists saneism in its incomprehensibility. Oh, to be scoreless. To live a scoreless life.
Moment: I’ve sent myself to a little house in the forest alone to write. I will interject myself, counter myself, repeat myself. I have been thinking about a sort of literary masking: by the time you are reading this, the form of this text will be a far cry from the haphazard amalgamation of interjected sentences.
Mother & Father: My origins with dance stem from adjustment: to close a gap, to correct, to better align, assimilate and appease. Ballet in place of the absent father, later finding mothers through somatic bodywork. The loss of both these alt parents- through the rejection from a famous ballet school as a child and the witnessing of a suicide during COVID- the psychiatric hospitalisations that held and harmed me following both instances.
Mapping: The rings of reckoning traced through my works: rescripting through space in my architectural practice (avoiding), coming closer to the self (confronting, Torn), then expanding back out towards the psychosocial (this is the truth). Practising destabilisation under controlled conditions can assist in stabilising under unstable conditions.
Methodologies: Attempt to do the opposite of whatever you perceive. The zones of perception, the antidote score (sit at a point of perpetual climax, but never climax), and mode switching: how many times can you reposition yourself in relation to your current context? Ending with the diagnostic criteria I was once given: I could almost map them onto my own methodologies.
Misdiagnosis, misunderstandings, masking & mad awakening: How making performance and receiving feedback led me to be (mis?)diagnosed, and how making further work led me to realise the misdiagnosis. What happens to a person’s sense of self when they spend their life being interpreted by other people: partners, parents, psychiatrists? The gap between intention and interpretation.
Movement (dance): Instead of asking what dance has done to me, perhaps I should ask what I can do for dance.
(another) Moment: A rebellion that is extraordinarily sophisticated and intellectually productive, but it still bears the fingerprints of what I claim to hate so much.
FULL THESIS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST