Revolutionary Forms: Unsettling Dance Through Site-Relational and Transformative Aesthetics

Reflecting on ways in which site-specificity in dance reproduces settler colonial logics, this thesis seeks to address questions about relationships of embodiment and land in screendance, remote interactive performance, and the proscenium theatre. Through close readings of work by Indigenous artists Dana Claxton and Michael Greyeyes, I consider ways in which these artworks enact decolonial aesthetics of embodiment and land. Through practice-led research creating short screendance works House, Bed Effigy, and Garden, I shift my improvisational approach from site-interactive to site-relational. Stretching or transforming aspects of the form, I develop ways to use screendance and online performance to account for my actual, emplaced location as a settler. I explore kinesthetic learning to help me to grasp and transform aspects of my choreographic process that reproduce settler colonial logics. Finally, through the production of a dance theatre work, Golem, I explore decolonial possibilities for dance in the proscenium theatre.