Dancing Scores Between the Lines: Suspension in Choreography
Movement scores and notational systems attempt to make the ephemeral visible, offering a written archive of choreography that parallels language. Historically, choreographic notation has proliferated into more than a hundred systems, as enumerated by Ann Hutchinson Guest, a testament to the urgency to inscribe movement into forms that can be remembered and transmitted. In this project, I understand the archive not only as a repository that preserves fixed material, but as an active system: one that produces movement through its activation. My proposal focuses on choreographic scores that function as active archives, which do not merely preserve movement but also produce it. Choreographic scores emerge through embodied engagement and can function as structures enabling movements.
This project focuses on how gaps within choreographic scores operate as generative resources. I specifically examine how indeterminacies invite interpretation and shape movement production. Scores can therefore be understood as archives of potential and of not-yet-realized movement, whose meaning emerges through embodied engagement.
Drawing on choreographic practice and written scores, I investigate how transmission through notation refers not to the faithful reproduction of movement, but to the capacity of a score to provoke embodied responses across different performers and contexts. Speculation becomes an intrinsic mode of reading, through which performers negotiate what is written and absent, generating movement from what is left open and activating the score’s agency beyond what it prescribes. By attending to the suspended relations between score and body, I propose an expanded understanding of the archive as a dynamic system of transmission and an active, generative methodology rather than a passive record.