Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies (Habilitation - University of Applied Arts Vienna)

is a research project led by Mariella Greil. In dialogue with international specialists from the fields of Performance, Philosophy and Therapy, she explores the various relations and intersections between the three research areas with a focus on practices/forms/methods of Being-In-Contact, investigating, reflecting and synthesising the sharings and differences between them.
With ‘practice as research’ at its heart, Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies stages a variety of choreo-ethical, inter-subjective and transdisciplinary encounters and explores the movements, interlinkings and interstices between practice and theory, developing fluency between thinking and doing. The conceptual bearing of choreo-ethical assemblages as highly mobile assemblies bound to singular, aesthetic-communicative situations gets probed in practice. A plurality of dialogue practices and modalities are to hand in the proposed cross-disciplinary laboratories. The hypothesis is that such assemblages arise in art, philosophy and therapeutic settings alike and the proposition is to explore how choreo-ethics – a newly coined term – have the capacity to activate processes, that form the fabric of social aesthetics through creative, performative tools. A variety of techniques, scores and practices of getting in touch, nurturing attention, thinking – through and with – arise as sensorial bodies. In expanded time frames dedicated to studio-experiments, an awareness and the skill to sustain inter-relational, choreo-ethical culture grow based on experiences and acts interwoven with dialogic discourse.
This singular research project works towards articulations and actualisations of politicised practice and immanent ethical forces, emerging specifically where meetings, collisions and generative resistances occur between people, but also between fields of practices (Performance, Philosophy and Therapy). Opening up and closely investigating the non-verbal and verbal methods in the forming of encounters, interactions, traces or speculations within the framework of polylogic laboratories is central, resulting in embodied knowledges and their dissemination through workshops, lab openings, performances, lectures and publications. A rich collection of Narrations of Bare Bodies will be developed – rehearsed and probed in the space of art as a potent social intervention – and findings as well as research processes will be shared with the public.

https://choreoethicalassemblages.home.blog/

Being in Contact: Encountering a Bare Body (PhD - Roehampton University London)

In reference to my artistic work, this practice-as-research project explores the concept of bare bodies and how to encounter them in contemporary choreography. The thesis draws on philosophical, bio-political and ethical discourse relevant to my discussion of the emergence of bare bodies in choreographic work, and creates a critical framework for a self-reflexive movement between affect and ethics, sensuous address and response. Narrations of bare bodies emerge in both the written component of a choreographed book, and in the creative component consisting of the live event of a lecture performance inhabiting an anarchive. The anarchive is a kind of research repository created and accumulated in the course of my PhD project.
Throughout I argue for acknowledging acts of baring and concealing as culturally situated, anchoring my thesis in practices of being in contact and decolonising practices, and unearthing their methodological weight and nanopolitical significance. I explore non-subjective performativity, imply- ing a fluid conception of identity. Furthermore, I introduce the ideations of an-archic responsibility and choreo-ethics for reassessing contact, relation and solidarity as an ethico-aesthetic project of current choreographic performances. These propositions get probed alongside a shift from spectator to wit(h)ness. In the core chapter on bare bodies, I differentiate and untangle the tones and shades of the triplet naked, nude, and bare, each term referring differently to body and performativity. All in all, the choreographic is conceptualised as a complex field of revelatory experiences built on ecologies of aesthetic perception and realising ethico-political agency.

https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/505199/505200

Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (Key Researcher, University of Applied Arts, Vienna)

is an interdisciplinary research collaboration involving artist Nikolaus Gansterer (AT), choreographer Mariella Greil (AT) and art-writer Emma Cocker (UK) in dialogue with a team of international critical interlocutors including Alex Arteaga (ES/D), Lilia Mestre (PT/BE) and Christine de Smedt (BE). Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line stages an interdisciplinary, inter-subjective encounter between the lines of drawing, choreography and writing in order to investigate those forms of ‘thinking-feeling-knowing’ produced within collaborative exchange. The project unfolds through a series of intensive ‘method labs’ where the key researchers (and invited guests) come together geographically in one place to practice thinking-moving relationally and to develop singular and sharable forms of practice-as-research. Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) is funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF/PEEK.

http://www.choreo-graphic-figures.net/

Passenger Diaries – performative research on emergent subjectivities in trans-urban space (Key Researcher, University of Applied Arts, Vienna)

At a time when social media tempt us to keep diaries disclosed on a global scale, the question arises anew: how to share the intimate quotidian life that unpredictably unfolds day by day? How to find our way into the landscape of days (Gegend der Tage)? At the same time, we experience tough and strange days in which all our relationships to our diverse environments (Umwelten) change, and must change. We are already used to calling this change ‘climate change’. But have we yet understood what it really means, and what follows from it? This equally intimate and experimental project Passenger Diaries is a testing ground for a journey into another life in the close neighbourhood that is as personal as it is oriented towards the environment, urban and suburban spaces. To enter this close range is itself the passage we seek and attempt. The Passenger, inspired by Iggy Pop's mythical song, is understood as a ‘cloud’, a ‘state’ that can be adopted by going on a micro-trip, a state one can ‘host’ for the duration of this trip in order to learn, hands on, to experience the ecological density of the diverse worlds and environments in which we move. Passenger Diaires (Feb 2021 – Feb 2022) is realised by key researcher KT Zakravsky, Lucie Strecker, Mariella Greil and research assistant Viktor Fucek, supported by Intraproject/ University of Applied Arts Vienna.