Paper Short Abstract:

This paper draws on the collaborative explorations of three practitioners from the disciplines of interior architecture, choreography, and site-specific dance. The research explores how movement as an expanded form of drawing disrupts and enlivens architectural drawing and spatial design. As a group we use movement practices, architectural materials and tools, as well as new digital technologies, to draw with our bodies. This is done through choreographic processes attuned to everyday modes of inhabitation and to the entanglement of ourselves with materials.

Paper Abstract:

This paper draws on the collaborative explorations of three practitioners from the disciplines of interior architecture, choreography, and site-specific dance. The research explores how movement as an expanded form of drawing disrupts and enlivens architectural drawing and spatial design. As a group we use movement practices, architectural materials and tools, as well as new digital technologies, to draw with our bodies. This is done through choreographic processes attuned to everyday modes of inhabitation and to the entanglement of ourselves with materials.

In this work, drawing activates a con-versation; a way of engaging with and knowing the world through movements attuned to settling into a sense of being. In addition, drawing is employed as a method for thinking through difference and of being present with others and the entanglement of everyday phenomena. In this sense, drawing and movement enable our inhabitation and a gathering of thoughts, ideas, visual and sensual experiences, materials, movements, gestures, to understand how we interact with a site. We engage with ephemeral, mobile substantiations and fleeting contacts with each other and the surfaces, skeins and materials of the buildings we visit to develop new modes of drawing practice within architectural design that are informed by our bodies.

Informed by feminist new materialisms (Barad, Haraway, Braidotti), site-dance praxis and theory (Akinleye, Taylor, Brown), dance improvisation (De Spain, Duck, Midgelow), and architectural drawing practices (Perez-Gomez, Evans) the paper reflects on iterative dialogues that have been developed through inhabiting buildings; corridors, moving through thresholds and dancing with an atrium.