Scoring the Ineffible

I am a second-year PhD student in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University (CA), researching nonverbal communication and consent in interspecies relationships, with particular attention to the co-languages that emerge between humans and nonhuman animals. My work investigates the relational and material poetics of the ineffable—forms of communication that exceed language yet shape everyday experience and bind humans to the more-than-human world. Animal studies and dance studies are two fields that hold expertise in forms of relationality and non-verbal expression. My research will bring these fields together, with the aim of contributing methodologies towards more responsible forms of communication between humans and nonhumans, including whom and what is listened to as a valid source of knowledge. With this presentation, I will explore a key precursor to my doctoral research: 'Telepathic Landscapes', a two-person visualization score exploring the embodied, sensorial aspects of telepathy. Initially conceived as a choreographic tool, the practice shifted my focus towards the qualities of relation generated between participants. How is communication occurring within the oblique territories of the unknowable? What happens in the field that speaks? From this field of research I became drawn to horsemanship as a practice in which the application of telepathic communication is a given. Drawing on over a decade of experience in contemporary dance and somatic practice, I am developing relational scores based on what emerges in my field work with horses. Through these scores I am interested in the power dynamics at play and I wonder how research in non-verbal forms of communication might shift relational dynamics towards care and consent oriented relationships.