In this post I’m sharing an excerpt from one of my most recent essays for my MA Performances Practices at the University of the Arts in the Netherlands. It responds to a specialisation module on Expanded and Embodied Choreography. It might also be helpful to see yesterdays post. Thanks for your interest.
Expanded choreography – discourses, practices, challenges
My current question for my masters research is: in what ways can the embodiment of multiple alter-egos operate as a collective performance making method. To do this I have started working with other artists, not inhabiting but generating versions of my alter-egos, and to see the alter-egos as a shared methodological and aesthetic resource. I began using transmissible personas and improvised scores, which I am already expanding and adapting after the specialisation. In this new context, I am choosing to see the alter‑egos as choreographic agents: embodied configurations that actively organise temporal, spatial and affective relations, shaping how time, space, attention, and connection unfold within a performance situation.
In addition to collective performance making methods, I am now thinking about collective relations. By which I mean the evolving configurations between my internal community of selves, collaborating performers, audiences, and the non-human materials and environments we engage, which co‑produce the relations. This understanding extends Bacon’s “internal communities” into the expanded choreographic field described by Ingvartsen and Peter, where movement and events are shaped by networks of human and more‑than‑human forces rather than by a single author. This is also in line with Peter’s accounts of performance as an ‘action unit’ or network of human and non-human agents, and with expanded choreography’s emphasis on movement shaped by multiple human and more-than-human forces (Peter 2023 web).
Building on this, I am considering a refined research question: In what ways can phenomenologically distinct alter‑egos function as choreographic agents that organise collective relations between internal selves, collaborators, and environments in small-group improvisation settings. I currently situate my practice within the fields of performance studies and expanded choreography. I am developing embodiment‑based artistic research with an interdisciplinary approach that engages philosophical, phenomenological, and choreographic approaches to explore alter‑ego multiplicity. I see my practice moving towards the transdisciplinary because I hope, during the next phase of research, to create hybrid methods in what I describe as a Performance as Selves lab.
Expanded choreography – discourses, practices, challenges
In my research I draw on Mette Ingvartsen’s definition of expanded choreography as extending movement “where choreography becomes a territory of physical, artistic and social experimentation involving human bodies, non-human materials, environments, and discourses” (Ingvartsen 2016, ). Further, Xavier Le Roy addresses authorship distribution through his practice of questioning hierarchical structures in choreography and emphasizing shared responsibilities over singular control. In discussing collaborative processes, he states: "the way of working in a group and how the responsibilities are distributed is questioned during the rehearsal process for the work as well as during the performance and it always challenges the established hierarchies" (Packs 2007, 17). By highlighting distributed agency as a core relational dynamic, where authorship emerges through collective negotiation rather than individual ownership, Le Roy’s approach sees resistance against affective capitalism's extractive individualism – connecting to the urgency for my research.
In Retrospective (2014), Le Roy handed over solo works to a diverse group of interpreters who selected excerpts, learned material, and infused it with their own histories, emphasising autonomy and collective evolution. I am now planning to experiment with this thinking and method to create non-hierarchical multiplicity, where my alter-egos are potentials that are actualized diversely, generating emergent “we’s” (internal and external) without fixed versions and testing phenomenological interactions. Instead of persona transmissions, I envisage sharing and testing alter-ego seeds, embodied scores / cues / descriptions, that other artists could hybridize with their own histories. This could help avoid replication problems and foster Deleuzian assemblages where porous embodiments with entangled histories co‑produce new versions (Przedpełski 2022, 45). Unlike Le Roy’s more abstract redistribution of solo material, these alter‑ego seeds retain phenomenological specificity at the level of lived self‑states, linking Bacon’s internal communities of SELF/s with Le Roy’s distributed authorship and Deleuzian assemblage thinking.
Akin to this is Juren’s shift from “the body” to “anatomy” as an ongoing messy practice of blurring, cutting, fragmenting, and reconfiguring relations which resonates with Le Roy’s redistribution of material and Bacon’s internal communities. I am working on how I might translate this into a hybrid collective‑embodiment approach that adapts Juren’s soma‑poetic tools. I hope to test a method where my alter‑ego work could be developed through spoken scores and “lessons” that mix phenomenological description, speculative anatomy, and the collaborators’ own histories, inviting participants to assemble ego‑elements, other bodies, and environmental cues into shared, fantasmical configurations rather than fixed personas (Juren 2021, 23) . In performance studies and expanded choreography, a persistent documentation crisis arises from ephemerality's resistance to capture and multiplicity's evasion of fixity. As Peggy Phelan argues that performance "becomes itself through disappearance," rendering any record a betrayal of its liveness that risks commodification (Phelan 1993, 146).
Rebecca Schneider counters this by reframing remains—gestures, bodily memories, re-performances—as enduring across time, challenging the ontology of pure loss while acknowledging how multiplicity fractures coherent archival fixity (Schneider, 2011, 12). Equally, I am conscious that practice as research requires metrics (rigor and replicability) and that this is a clash with multiplicities refusal of fixity. To address this in my alter-ego research, I hope to adapt choreographer Anne Juren's Living Index from her Fantasmical Anatomies research. So that my documentation follows an atlas and inventory model – with an “Index of alter‑ego Practices” mapping times and places where different egos clustered or interacted, an inventory of objects or boxes associated with each ego, written scores, poems, and reflections that operate simultaneously as archive and generative notation. This registers multiplicity, allowing the alter-egos to be fluid and neither dissolves, affirms or collapses it into a single definitive version.
Omissions and limitations:
There are many key debates that my practice does not address at this stage. For example, as noted with Ingvartsen’s definition, expanded choreography fundamentally embraces the non-human, but it has also been accused of retaining human-centred hierarchies, despite these non-human ambitions (Leon 2022, 28). I understand that my practice could also be considered as anthropocentric, as my alter-egos risk re-centring human and objects over truly de-centred ecologies. Choreopolitics represents a major theoretical development, with André Lepecki examining how dance and choreographic practices enable freedom in the social realm while resisting the policing of movement (Lepecki 2006, 9). I am aware that my Performance as Selves lab could be read as productive individualism despite my anti‑neoliberal aims, and I address this risk in my Advanced Performance Studies essay. A further limitation might be Eurocentrism, as my older white feminist canon centres Bacon/Butler / European thinkers and scenes and I acknowledge that decolonial choreographies remain peripheral at this stage. Rather than claiming to address this within the current project, I treat this as an acknowledged blind spot and a future direction, remaining attentive to how my methods and questions might eventually be re-situated in relation to non‑European perspectives.
Contributions and future questions
In this practice-as-research, Bacon’s phenomenology of SELF/s provides the conceptual ground for multiplicity; Deleuzian assemblages offer a language for how alter-ego seeds entangle with others; Le Roy’s distributed authorship suggests how these seeds circulate in rehearsal and performance; and Juren’s fantasmical anatomies inspire a living index that documents these processes without freezing them. Building on Bacon’s argument that selfhood is always multiple, and Bromberg’s account of self‑states, this practice helps me imagine and operationalise phenomenological multiplicity as a method that bridges psychoanalytic models of internal communities with live, relational embodiment (Bromberg 1998, 57; Bacon 2024, 35). It also offers anti‑neoliberal praxis tools, such as pedagogical scores for training multiplicity and providing metrics for altered subjectivities under achievement‑society conditions. I am interested in how these transmissible alter-ego seeds could extend Butlerian performativity into collective assemblages of intercorporeal emergence; what this would look like in practice is a question for the next phase of the research.
As I move towards trans-disciplinary practice-as-research I would also hope to contribute to expanded choreography by operationalizing alter-ego embodiment - Doris, Donnah, Tatyana, and The Little One - as a collective method that contributes insights to key tensions for example: between distributed agency and phenomenological specificity, between decentred and situated authorship, and between ephemerality and the institutional demands for documentation. Drawing from model practices like Le Roy's Retrospective and Juren's Fantasmical Anatomies, my research proposes transmissible alter-ego seeds. Where Deleuzian assemblage theory thinks about subjectivity as a shifting constellation of forces, my alter-ego seeds apply this at the level of concrete practice tools, extending Le Roy’s redistribution into a phenomenological register. I hope that hybridising collaborators' histories into Deleuzian assemblages will foster "more we," against neoliberal identity fixation (Han 2015; Lepecki 2006). Methodologically, the idea of the Living Index - an atlas of ego-intra-actions as Karen Barad might describe them (Barad 2007, 15) , object-inventories, and mutable scores – seeks to contribute to the Phelan-Schneider documentation crisis by generating remains that evolve through further re-activation (Phelan 1993, 146; Schneider 2011, 12; Juren 2021, 35).