Sinais de Cena (Jan 2020)
Were we better in the future? The criticality of storytellinh in Kat Válastur's choreographic work
Abstract
This article explores the potentiality of storytelling as a choreographic tool in Kat Valástur's work The Marginal Sculptures of Newtopia (2014-2016). Storytelling, in the path of Benjamin and Haraway, can be explored in deconstructing established linear meanings and narratives and ultimately in questioning political concepts anchored in the substratum of Western critical theory, which in turn condition discursive practices and knowledge production. Wandering in fictional historical and geographical timelines, choreographer Válastur proposes dystopian futures tangential to science fiction and "speculative fabulation" (Haraway, 2017) in the three choreographic worlds that constitute her trilogy The Marginal Sculptures of Newtopia. As a choreographic instrument, how does this contamination of storytelling translate into the discursiveness of gesture and movement? What is the choreographic potentiality in the destabilization of linear temporality that subverts material historical conditions, of the fictional coexistence of parallel realities and dimensions, and of the imagination of possible physicalities for dystopian futures?
