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Thesis defences

PhD Oral Exam - Mayra Morales , Humanities

A Philosophy of Movement: Compositionality, and Compossesssions of a Choreography of the Event, Environmental Bodyings, and its Pedagogies On Thought Experienced, Movement Moving and the Feeling of the Unfelt.


Date & time
Thursday, June 22, 2023 –
Friday, June 23, 2023
8 a.m. – 10 a.m.
Cost

This event is free

Organization

School of Graduate Studies

Contact

Daniela Ferrer

Where

Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex
1515 St. Catherine W.
Room EV-10.760

Wheel chair accessible

Yes

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This research-creation thesis is a improvisation of thought, in that sense, it proposes a writing practice as a dance and choreographic endeavour, in the way that it is made as if making a choreography, in that way it is a choreographic text. It tries desperately to pull aways and de-center dance from the dance studio and a body that continually moves in a space toward a pull that calls a different way of envisioning movement not necessarily only in a body but in-bodyings, and also not only in-constant-movement but also in non-movement and non-location. It also desperately wills to break free from the concept of separated entities and perception located in a human brain-body-mind, in order to move with a more intuitive concept of compositionality and environmentality and to craft practices to move from there. Thus, moving with a childish obsession of always feeling and wanting and needing one thing being another and another and another in potential. The obsession carries the hiccup of the phrase: A text can be a painting, a dance can be a sculpture, a choreography can be the making of an egg.

This research-creation thesis elbows itself with a philosophy of organism or process philosophy, meaning that it improvises, dances in thought, and writes with philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and it is more an ode to thought rather than a descriptive or explanatory text. It is not about, nor it explains anything. It seeks itself as a creative gesture. It produces zones of relevance from flash thoughts and moves from there into the unknown proliferations, repetitions, or insistences, from a dance oriented qualitative environment of thought. It seeks to craft itself with the qualities of the sculptoric, painting, storytelling, architectal, and the pedagogical in its movements; in such way, seeking a transversal relationality, rather than a locality of fields. It won’t fit in pre-demarcated fields, instead, it greets and invents fields anew for an attempt toward the creation of new possible worlds of potential with the appetite of an artful way of living as an imperative urgent task of the world that announces itself as necessary as it unfolded at the turn of 2019 and into the 2020’s with the pains of the pandemic.

It works with the concept of an occasion of experience from Whitehead, departing from the chant: the world is activity and thought is in the world. Like that, it stays close to such chant and builds its own invented quasi-concepts: compositionality, compossessions, and environmentalities. It also invents the term Machines for Feeling and moves with such intensive conceptual fielding. It tries over and over, to move from inter-actions toward infra-actions.

Hopefully it is an intensive work that dives into a profundity under-the-sea-like, that keeps on digging toward infra-activities of mental-actual or non-actual actual worlds dances in the making. It inclines in a small ledge of felt thought of the virtual in the actual and the actual potential in the virtual. Like that, it moves into conceptual architectures made from a delicate choreography of conceptual forces through a written languaging texture.

Its desire is to build enough consistency for a conceptual launchpad as a relational platform in order to be able to jump into a very wanted text on pedagogies and choreographic mode found again and again in what the author calls The Diagram Game.
It moves with the figures of forgetting, starting again, unfinishing, diagrammatic walking, bread-crumbbing, interrupting, loosing, tripping, mundane everyday life, friends, living room, kitchen and shower dances, slownesses and speeds, non-movement, movement, discontinuities, pain and joy. It was written and re-written and has many friend-texts that evented in the lapse of 9 years (2014-2023). It bows itself toward the patience of all the co-conspirators that accompanied the multiple processes it navigated with.

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