AUTO_CHOREO_GRAPHY: ARRANGING AND REARRANGING SELVES THROUGH/AS DANCE HISTORIOGRAPHY 

The dissertation examines narratives of stage dance choreographies of the 1970s to the 2000s and their embedding in exemplary socio-temporal upheaval (dt. Umbruch) discourses; such as e.g. the fall of the Berlin Wall from the perspective and positionality of (post-)GDR-dancers or the implementation of professional working conditions for ‘independent’ contemporary dancers in Switzerland in the 1980s. In these narratives, author, protagonist, and narrator often coincide, resulting in multiple perspectives and sometimes contradictory life stories. The author, or dancer-subject, that artists and audiences seek to capture, is staged as an unstable one, since it eludes final determination. The performativity of this ‘disrupted subject’ gives rise to a spectrum of questions about subject formation and authorship in the artistic production process. Autobiographical grounded stage dance choreographies –– _Auto_Choreo_Graphies, the conceptual proposal of the dissertation –– operate with different media such as language, movement, algorithms, spatial and visual formats. The autobiographical access takes place through borrowings, allusions, and quotations, so that a multilayered interplay of the arts is created. This requires a parallel and complementary reading of Auto_Choreo_Graphies. According to this claim, the research interest of the dissertation is based on three approaches: First, exemplary autobiographical narratives in texts, choreographies, installations, films, and performances from the field of contemporary dance will be examined comparatively for their differences and similarities. Second, a focus is placed on the life stories favored or rejected in each case and their relationship to subject formation. And finally, thirdly, possible entanglements between a fragile (self-)understanding and a critical relationship to the social conditions under which the respective works were created. This results in a second focus on upheaval narratives or dislocation, which are treated as discursive contexts in the analysis, just like autobiographical narratives.

Keywords: Autobiography, Choreography, Dance History, Dancers, Historiography, Performance, Source Criticism