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How might time be experienced in ways that challenge and offer alternatives to classical modernist understandings of time, the subject, and knowledge? This is a question significant to choreographers representing and manipulating time in performance. It is also important to those who have been marginalised through particular temporal regimes underpinned by Western notions of progress and development. There have been recent discussions within queer theory on performance practices which challenge regressive and entrenched temporalities and explore alternative relations to time and history. This discourse has parallels with a concern within performance theory on the potential of suspensions, breaks, and simultaneities in 'digital performance'. Through my practice-as research of looping I think through what it might mean to apply a queer feminist lens to alternative temporal experiences that emerge through looping in performance. This project sits within a context of performance practices exploring digital strategies, post-internet aesthetics, and/or looping temporalities. Its primary inquiry is the question: how can temporalities and aesthetics of looping and its effects on ways of seeing be generative for a queer feminist chronopolitics? This practice-as-research was presented in the performance work The Night is Red (2019). I explore how looping which reiterates a dominant, limiting, non-linear post-modern temporality might also produce the seeds for more generative alternative temporalities. I reflect on my experience as maker-viewer of The Night is Red, and how I am invited to experience a destabilising corporeal experience of stasis and the affective potential of a present brimming with a multiplicity of possible pasts and futurities. I also consider how particular practices of looping characterised by 'temporal drag' and 'retranslations', invite the viewer to look askance and anew at familiar dominant cultural texts and highlight potential queer desires that travel through images; while also obfuscating meaning. I ask, how might these strategies be desirable and useful as alternative modes of knowledge production? I also reflect on the ambivalence and uncertainty I have around my proposition that The Night is Red opens up a space in performance that can generate a queer feminist chronopolitics. I suggest that by proposing that The Night is Red opens up a queer feminist space in performance I call the reader/viewer to take up the invitation afforded by the artistic mechanisms in the practice. I explicitly invite a dissenting reader to this thesis to disagree, make alternative interpretations, or find moments where we may coalesce, as a way to inspire a continuing discussion and continue the multiple possibilities of the practice.

Violence and trauma are significant components of life. They punctuate human existence in such a way that it affects identity, perception and understanding. This punctuation then is recognised and triggered through experiences that are unexpected and uncanny associations. Therefore, this thesis investigates how art creates uncanny associations with violence and trauma, making clear how New York is an ongoing citation of trauma. It achieves this through the intertextual readings of city, body and performance in relation to the violent events of 9/11. The research investigates how the presence of the body in performance, outside in city spaces, creates a weaving of multiple elements of remembered violence that references the events of 9/11 and connects with the subjective trauma response. Through the case studies of dance, sculpture, photography and 9/11, the presence of the body becomes a constellation of gravitational pull. Around which circle and weave effects and relationships of precarity; impossible space; falling; memory and Memoriam; presence and absence; and stillness that intertextually reference violence and trauma perpetuating these associations across space and time. Through the analysis of Man walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) and New Beginnings (2013), it becomes clear how the remembering of violence and trauma can be triggered through performance, perpetuating how violence and trauma continue to influence and impact the social, political, and cultural significance. This research is carried out through an autoethnographic approach that emphasises the cultural and social complexity of human experience related to violence and trauma. This approach incorporates the weaving of auto-ethnographic reflections that have influenced the analysis of the works and the development of new theoretical positions, with existing research in dance, trauma, and philosophy. The research, therefore, aims to address how the subjective trauma response is recognisable in the creative response of others and to understand what effect this recognition has on our understanding of trauma. It will also allow the subjective response of reading texts intertextually, which will clarify what role the city, the body, and performance have in recognising the complexity of the trauma response in the chosen works for analysis.

My practice-informed-research project is a written thesis informed by my experiences as a dance artist performing in and creating work for the museum. Moving past the outdated question of why dance in the museum, my thesis asks how dance is currently situated in the museum and what is its potential there? Through examining different modes of attention of the dance artist and her social-spatial skills we first come to understand dance as a relational, site-based practice in the museum and, later, through evidence provided for by the case studies, discover the potential for dance to play a more significant part of change taking place in the museum. This thesis looks critically at the practice of dance in the museum through the lenses of spatial theory, somatic enquiry, and relational aesthetics. Looking through these particular lenses has value as it re-considers the human body, movement, and the museum as contributing aspects to the production of spatial relations and offers a wider contribution to knowledge vis-a-vis the dance artist's story, a story not yet told in the museum. My research is within a UK, EU, and US context over the last six years (2014-2020) and begins with the premise that dance is a relational, site-based practice. By applying the lens of public practice to dance in the museum and as a form of relation I build on the work of Nicholas Bourriaud (1998). My practice follows in the lineage of Post-Modern dance artists such as Yvonne Rainer who make claims for everyday movement as dance and borrows from Gabriella Giannachi's (2012) theories on presence as modes of encounter to argue for the dance artist as part of and affective to the human ecosystem of the museum. I explore three case studies as ways to understand what seeing, doing, and being in the museum through the detached, absent, and present dance artist can tell us about the potentiality of dance in the museum that has been unexplored thus far. The findings of my research suggest that the spatial relational aspects of dance in the museum provide opportunity for the dancer to engage more fully within the human ecological environment of the museum as a way to contribute to institutional change and policy making and towards more creative, inclusive, just, and sustainable cultural spaces and as examples for our contemporary moment.

This thesis explores the hitherto hardly investigated phenomenon of the national dance platform (NaDaP). NaDaPs are dance festivals in which three elements converge: they raise the claim of representing the nation, they present contemporary dance and their targeted audience is mainly (foreign) dance programmers. Despite the phenomenon being a global(ised) one, it only exists through local iterations. The thesis argues that both local and global dimensions interact and influence each other in the phenomenon. The questions leading the investigation are whether NaDaPs mediate or represent a nation, how they claim national-ness and to what extent this reflects back on the structure and content of each iteration. Using the system of cultural flows proposed by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and called 'scapes' (Appadurai 1990, 1996), this thesis explores the streams of ideas, people and finances that interact at NaDaPs in their local and global dimensions and problematises the contradictory ways in which dance interplays with global(ised) systems of power. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study produces close readings of platforms in Israel, Britain, Germany and Sri Lanka; specifically, 'International Exposure 2015', 'British Dance Edition 2016', 'Dance Platform Germany 2016' and 'Shakti'. A Space for the Single Body, and explores the ideologies that governed the events. NaDaPs emerged in the 1990s, in the context of a globalised neo-liberal economy that favoured the constitution of dance pieces as marketable goods. While the phenomenon of the NaDaP had the positive effect of increasing the visibility and growth of contemporary dance, this thesis investigates the ideologies governing the notion of contemporaneity and questions whether contemporary dance might at times act as the folk dance of hegemonic nations, while NaDaPs act as agents of a neo-colonial system engaged in expanding its markets. Further, under the lens of the 'financescape 'the thesis investigates the situationality of dancers with bodies that are described as 'non-normate' for not conforming to presumptions of the 'non-disabled' dancer. I argue that they subsume both the resistance to and the endorsement of a system that constructs dance as a commodity and propose 'non-normatisable' as a denomination that reflects this complexity. The thesis concludes by discussing the existence of 'Danceland 'as a non-territorial imagined community (Anderson 1983) that presents many characteristics of a real-existing nation and paves the way for further explorations of the phenomenon of the NaDaP. The concept of 'Danceland 'leads to ask what its own NaDaP would reflect and how it would contrast occurrences in other lands. But more importantly, it emphasises the shared responsibility of all actors in the transnational dance community, to co-create their own environments asserting their positionalities with strong political voices.