For my doctoral dissertation, I developed an experiential poetics of American choreographer Deborah Hay’s solo work At Once, through a practice-as-research approach as a performer of the work. I have come to understand her solo choreography and practice as a distinctly linguistic braid of three strands – score, questions and tools. Taken into movement practice, this linguistic function operates on intention, attention and action to effectively choreograph these processes into dynamic suspension. I have characterized this experience, of paradoxical simultaneity, in the concept of “somatic anacrusis”. Practicing performing Hay’s enigmatic words and phrases pulls at the integrating processes of meaning-making, unravelling sedimented structures such that meaningfulness almost but never quite coalesces.
 
In the performance of At Once, I move Hay’s text-based score containing very limited movement information, buoyed by a series of questions such as “What if every cell in my body could perceive time passing?” and prompted by a set of verbal tools such as “Invite being seen” or “Notice the feedback from your body”. These three linguistic strands choreograph my intention, attention and action respectively, into what I describe as somatic anacrusis – the body-space-time of “at once”.

The work, for me, is a quiet provocation. It asks: What if we attempt to release or subvert pre-existing forms of meaningfulness and identity? How does this experience shift our understanding of self, world, other? How might we then move into encounter, relation? My research with Hay’s work has been a generative process in many ways and has prompted the development of an experiential research method for emergent choreographic analysis. With the support of a yearlong Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2017, I undertook a practice-based research process engaging with these questions and further exploring this method with other choreographers’ practices.