Abstract

This thesis undertakes the Deleuzian experiment of a conceptual site development of contemporary choreography through analysis of the works of Antonia Baehr, Juan Dominguez, Xavier Le Roy and Eszter Salamon. It examines the way these works transform choreography qualitatively by elaborating singular methods which couple the issue of movement with the creation of aesthetic regimes. As opposed to a representational outline of choreography’s ontology, my thesis investigates the participatory potential of choreography by focussing on the singular relational assemblages that each choreography creates with the audience. These singular relational assemblages defy practical philosophy insofar as they require a methodology which can account for their dynamic complexity without reducing them either to pre-established categories or to a static analysis. On the basis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s transcendental empiricism, my thesis responds to this challenge by establishing contamination and articulation as methodological concepts for an open ended inventory of what choreography can do. Contamination, on the other hand, accounts for the qualitative transformations that concern bodies in their power to assemble and to be assembled. Articulation, on the other hand, names the qualitative transformations of sense that a choreography conveys through its differential composition. Both concepts are inseparably interwoven and specified in the aesthetic regimes of the Retenu and the Dé-lire. While the Retenu scrutinizes the way movements generate a continuous transformation of body images and sensations, the Dé-lire explores the choreography of temporal relations. Showing how these singular assemblages and their implicit methods critically redistribute the sensible of choreography at the turn of the twenty-first century, the four concepts of my thesis form the argument in itself. This argument highlights the ethical impact of qualitative experimental research, specifies the prolific capacities of choreography and forces practical philosophy to rethink their relation.