Decolonial storying : embodied memory in facilitating choreographic composition

Abstract

The study is situated in the field of choreographic composition within the context of higher education in South Africa. It aims to design and qualitatively reflect on the perceived efficacy of decolonial teaching and learning strategies to facilitate movement creation in choreographic composition in a dance programme, at a higher education institute in South Africa. These teaching and learning strategies aim to use decolonial storying as method to access autobiographical, embodied memories that engage with, and contribute to, identity construction in the creation of solo and group choreographic work. In doing so, I aim to contribute to decolonial practices in higher education in South Africa. The call from South African students for quality, decolonised education and to critically engage with the context of decoloniality, provided the motivation for the research. Lecturing in a dance programme at a university in South Africa, my perception is that the dance curriculum is predominantly based on Western, Eurocentric approaches, pedagogy, and modes of thinking reflective of this specific locus of enunciation, and that furthers coloniality. Knowledge must be context-specific, reflect the socio-cultural context from where it emerges, as well as the students’ cultures, languages, and frames of reference to create epistemological diversity. Facilitating teaching and learning strategies for movement creation in choreographic composition, where students can draw from their subjective lived experiences, can potentially contribute to decolonising the choreographic compositional curriculum, in particular, when using memory in relation to identity construction. Designing teaching and learning strategies to access autobiographical memory, specifically embodied memories, acknowledges individual, subjective, lived experiences, socio-cultural contexts and ontological positions. Decoloniality, for me, is about shifting the locus of enunciation rooted in Western, Eurocentric modernity, through engaging in border thinking and epistemic disobedience to delink from the coloniality/modernity collusion. I activate this border thinking and delinking through accessing individuals’ subjective lived experiences and embodied memories through decolonial storying in teaching and learning strategies. Such teaching and learning strategies can significantly contribute to shifting the locus of enunciation of choreographic compositional curricula. This study was located in a qualitative research paradigm, with embodied inquiry as the research methodology, conducted from a phenomenographical frame. Embodied inquiry is an on-going, multimodal process where attention is paid to subjectivity and an acknowledgement of the social construction of being-in-the-world. Embodied inquiry in this research process explored individuals, subjective lived experiences, where the body communicates in interaction with the other performers, a relationality through dancing individuals’ embodied memories. In order to understand how decolonial storying can be activated, I positioned it within the relevant field of study and engaged with the existing literature. I provided the theoretical underpinning of decolonisation, decoloniality, the bodyminded being, memory and specifically, embodied memory. I conceptualised choreographic composition as meshwork towards an emerging trans-ontology. This theoretical underpinning and framework throughout the research contributed to furthering my argument and creating the practical sessions in Chapter 6. This study then mapped the preparation towards the choreographic process from recalling to (re)moving. The theoretical underpinning, framework and preparation towards the choreographic process revealed the strategies for decolonisation. The collective decolonial strategies in the choreographic process facilitated epistemological disobedience and border thinking, allowing delinking and shifting the locus of enunciation, thereby creating my decolonial pedagogy. A decolonial pedagogy revealed strands that interweave, creating the conceptual nodes of this research: embodied memory as a conceptual node; decoloniality as a conceptual node; storying as a conceptual node; and identity as a construction as a conceptual node. These nodes cluster together to construct the particular methodology I used, and which foregrounded the central method of decolonial storying. The conceptual nodes created by a decolonial pedagogy moved my research towards a decolonial choreographic, compositional methodology. I provided the framework of how to re-imagine, re-think and re-model a decolonial choreographic process that engaged multiplicity, diversity and reflexivity within the choreographic, compositional context. The choreographic process allowed the locus of enunciation to be shifted towards a loci of enunciation through multiplicity, an in-between space, a fluid space towards an emerging trans-ontology. Cultures collided and interwove with one another as the moving stories stood testament to participants’ socio-cultural contexts. The choreographic process invited the participants to become the loci of enunciation, as part of the curriculum, which facilitated decolonial processes towards trans-ontology. This allowed an alternative understanding of themselves and their relational being-in-the-world, within their specific, socio-cultural contexts. Facilitating choreographic pedagogy where participants ‘are’ the curriculum, might shift Eurocentric, Western ways of knowing, being-doing in higher education.