It's a kind of magic: Choreography as an Occult Practice

This practice-as-research project takes choreography as a site for examining this turn to the occult; defining
'choreography' as the artistic practice of making dances and 'the occult' in both the philosophical sense as that
which is hidden, and in the cultural-historical sense as a set of practices encompassing witchcraft, tarot and
divination. Offering a reconsideration of choreography's ontology, the project explores dances as phenomena
containing hidden dimensions, possibilities and powers, as well as drawing on magic as a choreographic tool which
attunes both dancers and audiences to altered states of being in and envisioning the world.

The project focuses on specific dance practices in the US and Europe from the 1960s onwards, a turning point in
the inclusion of improvisation scores in dance works, which made space for unprecedented levels of spontaneity,
altered consciousness and collective transformation. I trace the institutionalisation of these practices during the
7 / 42
neoliberalism of the 1980s and 90s, when scores became codified into somatic techniques for the improvement of
the individual, through to their recent re-emergence in avant-garde choreography of the late 2010s, as fresh waves
of capitalist crisis fuel a renewed concern with the collective, the transformative and the mystical. Drawing these
enquiries through Marxist engagements with magic, the project explores the becoming-occult of choreography
through its troubling of reality, rationality and possibility.
Two sets of questions unfold across both practical and written enquiry:
1) What happens when dance is approached as a kind of magic? What does this do to how dance is both
practised and perceived? Through the generation of scores - imaginative frameworks entered into by dancers and/
or audiences live in performance, engaging with alternative realities and rationalities - I consider how improvisation-based dance practices engage speculatively with parameters and forces that extend beyond human perception
and agency.
2) In what ways can choreographic practice be considered prophetic? Through both analogy with and
incorporation of divinatory methods such as tarot reading, I ask how choreography might be understood as
generating visions of, or from, the future, suspending the divide between the actual and the virtual and engaging
nonlinear notions of time and causality.
Extending from these research questions, this project distinguishes itself from writing about spirituality in
phenomenological accounts of somatic practices (Batson, Weber, Whatley & Williamson, 2014), as well as
anthropological research into ritual dances of Global South and indigenous cultures (Grau, 2001; Brown, 2003).
While this project follows that scholarship's affirmation of embodied knowledge against Eurocentric, mind-centric
ways of knowing, it draws on occult studies to further affirm the creative and subversive possibilities of
understanding dance as a kind of magic. The integration of Marxist thought also enables a shift from the
transcendent qualities of dance onto its particular material capacities at this sociohistorical juncture.
This project also intervenes in dance studies' dominant understanding of the score as notation, or archival
document, and its attendant notion of choreography as a set of fixed movements. Rather, I understand scores as
live, time-based, experimental practices, akin to magic spells, and choreography as the conditions and processes
that both create and result from them. By shifting attention beyond the immediately sensible aspects of dance,
onto partially-hidden processes which bring dancer and audience into dialogue with the unknown, I will unearth an
ontology of choreography that is itself occulted within existing scholarship, by virtue of its existence on the artistic
fringes; particularly in the UK, where the mainstream of dance is dominated by the practice of choreography as a
fixed set of movements