Occupational 
Choreographies: PhD Research

How does your job choreograph you? Can you pinpoint specific movements as work-made? Can you find patterns and routines that your job bestows on you? Can you extract and exploit this movement? And can you determine how good you are at your job by becoming aware of your job’s choreography? Often, our careers define us but to what extent? Do we get so caught up in our careers that they mould our bodies and dictate the way we move without us even realising? If we pause to take note of these choreographies, can we utilise them in understanding how to improve our efficiency and productivity in our chosen professional fields?

My research aims to establish how people’s work occupations influence, mould and choreograph their bodies. People's occupations play a major part in their everyday lives and inevitably their bodies form a co-constitutive relationship with their professions. My research explores the ways in which bodies respond to these relationships from a choreographic perspective, illustrating that people’s professions subconsciously and habitually develop unique sets of movement patterns on a person’s body, creating choreography. Here, I address choreography as a standalone entity and not a tool used by a human creator. And with this in mind, my research examines the following questions:-

1. Can choreography be a standalone entity that develops and creates itself in different forms, specifically can it manifest itself by itself within different professions, i.e. can we see choreography as something that happens organically and not as a tool to exhibit a ‘performance.’ 

2. And how does choreography create itself? Is it rational and predictable or more intuitive and creative? Is it based on the individual, collective mass of bodies or the relating environmental factors? 

3. And once this choreography is established, what does the awareness of this choreography help us achieve within that specific profession? To what extent does this knowledge and awareness of choreography improve a person’s productivity? Can we reach our optimum efficiency levels by becoming aware of the choreography of our jobs and in turn analyse our practice to see which specific choreographic elements are missing or are overused?

This study comprises of a three-tiered research approach - encompassing in-studio exploration with practitioners (movement workshops), real-world observations and practitioner interviews, which aim to yield a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between choreography and professional efficiency.

 

For more information or if you would like to take part in my research, 

feel free to drop me a line: alisa.morrison@outlook.com

 

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