Dancing an Expanded Habitual: Attuning to the More-Than-Human World

This interdisciplinary thesis explores dance creation-as-research and phenomenological methods to articulate an embodied dialogue with the more-than-human world. Drawing on original phenomenological writing generated through embodied research, the work argues for dance practice as a salient tool for reimagining traditional forms of knowledge production and enacts the speculative possibilities of our communicative capacity between human and more-than-human bodies. The project imagines and articulates how we can bring relational, responsible thinking and sensing to our everyday movements while navigating the ruins of the so-called Anthropocene. Using research-creation as a frame, this project posits that dance-based systems of improvisation have the potential to interrupt and inhibit our habitual modes of attention, expanding our capacity for interspecies dialogue and collaboration. The work engages with the fields of dance studies, research-creation, phenomenology and posthuman feminist theory, to create definitional anchors in dialogue with original, phenomenological writing. The research expresses a process of discovery through the lived body and articulates a practice that enlivens bodies and builds worlds, where thinking, practice, and theory can come alive inside everyday living. The research moves off the page and into the body, in the form of a site-adaptive soundwalk, as an embodied call to action for fleshy, earthly survival.