Doll house: a feminist rewrite of familiar narratives

The performative and choreographic investigations reflected in this process and product of thesis research are situated inside projects of autoethnography and embodied knowing. I, as the choreographer and performing subject, follow an agenda of re-entering archival pasts of lived experience in search of latent possibility. These investigations in potential pasts pointedly dialogue with theories of inscription and gendered performance brought forth by Butler, Foucault, Jones, Noland & Ness and others – and in feminist impulse, negotiate caveats of power accrued through trained excellence in culturally specific codes. In positioning my contemporary body against moving images of past movement-specific chronicles, I aim to open a portal for rewriting them in the present. I question what might be unlocked, known, or understood in difference, when re-viewing, and re-animating personal video archives made visible through my storehouse of VHS tapes and my body alike. In curating and arranging select capsules of past lived experience and projecting them for viewership adjacent to my Self, in the here and now, I hone a capacity to exercise agency over past narratives – overriding them in fictive spirit or juxtaposing them with the impulse of an instigator. The audience, as witness to my body/mind/soul across dimensions of temporality accompanies me in a project of breaching constructed meanings and messages. In the spirit of reckoning and futuring, I will to re-situate myself in a past that is simultaneously hosted in a present Self – leveraging this duality toward agency while maintaining cognizance of my boundedness.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25820/jdps-pd03