Dancing-with : A practice of resistance
Emma Starkey – live art Ireland
Assimilating is a form of self-destruction and the school system teaches us to do just that.
Dancing-with
Formerly called ‘dance with and in’ (2016, 2023) I have developed my understanding of dance-with during my PhD. Dancing-with is made from an intersectional space between methodology and pedagogy. It's an accessible mix of both. A methodology that encourages personhood and agency. It is a framework and structure anyone can use to produce unique results, a producer of knowledge rather than a product of knowledge.
“Dancing‑with” embodies a loop between practice and reflection, a space between the two, where each movement, gesture, or interaction is simultaneously an act of inquiry. It views experiential knowledge as just as important as discursive knowledge systems such as the Rankean model or colonial technologies such as the camera.
This methodology removes the action‑based framing of practice‑led research and leans instead into practice as research. The method is produced through the practice itself, functioning both as a mode of inquiry and an in-motion knowledge that evades catalogue systems of knowledge production. No interface or translation is required, and any such move would serve only as a colonial gesture. This is not to state that writing is inherently colonial, but that having the right to one's own voice denied is.
Research Questions:
Can research be free-flowing, unbound by documentation NOT as a separate research activity? But the activity in which it is a producer of plural knowledge/s rather than a product of knowledge? Can it be an entity that lives and transforms within the encounterer rather than strict separation between viewer/audience and artwork? Is an artist not already a bundle of knowledge – a person that can express this knowledge through various artworks/mediums or even bodily expression/movement?
What dancing-with, live, unscripted, non-rehearsed art might offer is a poetic, nuanced expression of theory; a practice that aligns with postmodern refusals of fixed meaning and post‑structural challenges to stable epistemic structures. As post‑structuralist thinkers remind us, the “call to subjectivity is understood also as a call to subjection and subjugation” (Moten, drawing on Hartman and Butler, oral discussion of In the Break, 2018). In Black studies, fugitivity is described as “the black thing that cuts the regulative, government force” of whiteness (Moten & Harney, The Undercommons, 2018) , and as an “ongoing irruption” that resists capture (Moten, In the Break, 2003) . These refusals resonate with dancing‑with, which is a non‑captive yet intentional research method — one that resists the colonial demand for documentation, mastery/'refinement' and fixity. In this sense, dancing‑with produces knowledge/s rather than being a product of it, opening space for relational and ever-evolving emergent inquiry.
This methodology is built with accessibility at its core. I wanted to create a methodology anyone could use, regardless of schooling. Dancing‑with does not refer to physical dance, nor does it require technical training. Instead, it reconsiders what movement means within a research encounter. It describes a way of working‑with materials — moving, sensing, discovering, and investigating with — without hierarchy or mastery. In this sense, dancing‑with is a relational method that resists colonial expectations of expertise, discipline. It expresses a 'knowing otherwise ' that resists eurocentric colonial aesthetics and opens space for accessible, embodied, working‑class and neurodivergent ways of knowing.
Two PhD supervisors directed me to document my work in image form, failing to recognise the strength of ephemerality within my project. My advice to any student working with vigilance is that supervisors can inadvertently undermine the work by imposing disciplinary expectations incompatible with the methodology. Dancing‑with is the refusal - the refusal to be pinned down, cleanly categorised, or made legible through colonialistic logics and tendencies. This methodology was born out of the necessity to dismantle whiteness and leave it dismantled without re‑centring it. The project is not interested in a “reinterpretation” of the aesthetic or symbolic order. Ephemerality is an integral epistemic proposition.
Different way of thinking about knowledge, rather than an object transmitted, its a catalyst for thinking.
Time & no rehearsal
Working in real time, without rehearsal, produces a breakdown in hierarchical positioning between artist and audience. Real-time practice allows the event to shift, leak, and reconfigure itself, dispersing agency across the room rather than locating it in a single authorial figure.
This raises a central methodological question: can knowledge be unbound? Not as an activity that produces knowledge as an external outcome, but as an activity that is itself a form of inquiry and knowledge-sharing. In this sense, the work does not illustrate knowledge; it generates it. Real-time practice disrupts linear time and unsettles authorship, allowing knowledge to emerge relationally, contingently, and collectively rather than through fixed, pre-determined structures.
Attention
Real-time practice cultivates a mode of close attention, as Peggy Phelan argues in Unmarked, where she writes that performance “disappears as it is happening.” This disappearance demands a form of attention that cannot rely on visual mastery or the stabilising force of representation.
This close attention also resists projection — what Frantz Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks as the moment when the racialised subject becomes “an object in the eyes of the other.” Fanon’s formulation is foundational to what later theorists call the white gaze: a colonial mode of looking that fixes, categorises, and objectifies.
bell hooks expands this in Black Looks, noting that “the gaze has been and is a site of resistance,” and that Black subjects have historically been denied the right to look back. Her analysis exposes how the white gaze operates as a structure of power, not simply a visual act.
Sara Ahmed further describes whiteness as an orientation that makes certain bodies “disappear from view” while others are hyper‑visible, showing how the colonial gaze shapes who is seen, how, and under what conditions.
To avoid objecthood and the visual regimes that produce it, this PhD project will not be shown in images. The work must be encountered in its temporal unfolding, not flattened into a visual artefact.