We move together or not at all: Consent as choreographic practice and its flourishings

This thesis explores consent within the frame of choreographic practice. It is also a text that works to imagine the possibility of a consent-based choreography coming into the service of multi-species care. Drawing on conversations with five Canadian dance artists and my own dance and choreographic praxes, I consider how consent can be expressed through unison with difference. The practices described generate knowledge that is relevant to developing a nuanced approach to consent in the choreographic field. I posit that consent can facilitate the development of a corporeal solidarity and movement practice that celebrates rather than effaces the proofs of a dance artist's labour. And that this labour can generate material traces that counter normative understandings of the archive in choreography, that the embodied leaky self can lead to vegetal flourishings that can become a counter-memory of a dance. This research's insistence upon not just the right of the body to sweat and to overheat, but its absolute necessity as part of a choreographic process, speaks to the right of the body to labour explicitly in a consensual context