Throughout October and November Daniel P. Jones, artist and researcher in the Moving Bodies Lab at the Institute for Medical Humanities, is undertaking a dance-based artist residency at Dance City Newcastle. The residency expands upon Daniel’s ongoing research into Tourette Syndrome, offering space to investigate how involuntary movement, impulse, and rhythm can shape creative practice, and how tics might be used choreographically to translate lived experience into dance.
Building on Daniel’s wider research, which calls for a more critical and person-centred approach to the study of Tourette Syndrome, the residency asks how Tourettic experiences might offer new choreographic insights rather than challenges to be overcome. Working with Dance City, Daniel is developing movement material grounded in tics and the impulsivity of Tourette Syndrome.
In particular, the residency explores how dance and choreography can express the affective potentials of urban environments and their influence on the Tourettic body and its experience of impulse.
Through regular studio practice and reflective documentation, the residency poses questions such as
- What happens when we choreograph with tics, rather than against them?
- How can the impulsivity associated with Tourette Syndrome become a source of insight into affect, environment, and embodiment?
The work developed at Dance City will continue to inform Daniel’s research and creative practice, building connections between academia, disabled communities, and the arts. Culminating in November, the residency will be followed by further phases of research including a second artist residency at The HopBarn, Nottinghamshire, exploring rural affect and its impact on Tourettic, impulsive experience.
For more information, please contact Daniel at daniel.p.jones@durham.ac.uk.
