Blog

Ileanna Cheladyn, our very first Scholar-in-Residence, gives us a look into her research and process in part two of her blog series.

LISTENING AT THE EDGE OF WHAT FAILS

Introduction:

This Scholar-in-Residence role is the container for the fieldwork I’m doing as part of my PhD in sociocultural anthropology.

For those who are not following the rhythm of Instagram, anthropology (for me) is the study of what people care about, and how they care about it. Doing a PhD in anthro looks like spending many years reading and writing and thinking and practicing, to develop a set of questions that then send a researcher (me) into the field to explore these questions. And the field is a loosely defined place or peoples or practice – my field is dancers in Vancouver, my own community. Fieldwork, what The Dance Centre is supporting, is a prolonged period of time – usually a year or two – hanging out with the people I care about, getting curious about the things they care about.

My fieldwork looks like noodling around in the studio, moving with people, taking classes and workshops, going to shows, chatting with people about their practices, as well as deep reflective work to find patterns and connections around how people make meaning through and with these things they care about. This fieldwork time will ultimately, eventually, culminate in a dissertation – a book-length piece of writing that touches on these care-filled things as filtered through the questions that have hooked us (both me as researcher, and the incredible artists I’ve been hanging out with – remember, I care about their/your care).

It is an ambiguous venture because, as anthropologists joke, you go into the field thinking you know what you want to research, and how you’ll go about researching it… but things change! You can’t know in advance – no matter how much reading, writing, thinking, practicing – what you’ll find. The questions I came into this research with were orbiting how dance practice is a form of activism, where “activism” is defined as world-changing activity. This has shifted through the inherent friction of shedding assumptions towards a set of questions still emerging.

Through all the meandering beauty of fieldwork, this is my draft distillation: I’m curious if the bodily practices of dancers, the sensed knowledge, in movement, of dancers, can tell us something about how bodies body. But what of this ambiguity? What of this shedding?

THE SLOW DEATH OF EXPECTATIONS (and other phase shifts):

I want to carve through this trope – not to escape it, but to pierce it differently. “The slow death of expectation” can sound like a cliché. But it speaks to something universal and vulnerable: a pattern of surrender and shedding ideals that once held promise, of learning to be with what is already here on its own terms and not on mine. I’m gesturing towards failure and grief – formations of unraveling and life lived past the arc of a fantasy. This is raw material, not for confession, but for a field report from inside the undoing.

This project was an uncertainty held within an uncertainty.

I began not with a hypothesis, but with a willingness to be porous. Part of me knew that it all had to change, that I would be changed in the process, but it’s hard to prepare for change. I held myself as soft as I could at the start – open to sensation, to misalignment, to not-knowing. Still, the unravelling came. Still, the dissolution. Layered ambiguity (the kind that resists capture) became the condition, not the obstacle.

There are no hard findings here. No firm conclusions to report. But that, in itself, is something I want to name: that sometimes research (academic, creative, choreographic, whatever) is not a destination but a field. A field of listening, of tension, of drift. I’ve been circling a method I might now call oracular; a way of attending that lets meaning arrive sideways, symbolically, through the grain of gesture or the heat of a moment. The oracular doesn’t explain; it invites. It doesn’t resolve; it reveals textures that can’t be smoothed out.

This season of work hasn’t offered answers so much as it has sharpened my ability to stay with the questions – longer, slower, more honestly. I’ve come to understand this not as failure, but as fidelity: to the people I’m in dialogue with, to the movement practices I’m entangled in, and to the ethical complexity of sensing into a world that won’t sit still for definition.

THE BODY AS SENSOR:

This is dance research. I’m not working on making a choreography, though sometimes choreography shows up. Rather, I’m moving with questions; an inquisitive pulse that takes the time it takes. The thinking happens through bodies, with bodies, between them. It’s choreographic in its method: responsive, iterative, attuned to rhythm and pause. I follow what shifts, what resists, what yields. There’s no separation between sensing and knowing. The studio, the field, the page – they blur.

This is research that breathes, that gets sweaty, that sometimes falters in the middle of a phrase or inkling. It holds space for the ephemeral, for what doesn’t crystalize into findings but moves through as feeling, pattern, residue.

This, too, is the glory of dance. To improvise with what is rooted in how bodies body – without needing to explain or defend.

Dancers are really good at describing experience. They spend their lives developing this skill through a loop of doing and noticing, sensing and refining, practicing and shaping. I am lured by this dancerly skill to think with and about dance – its own loop of generous attention. Working with dance in this sensitive, cracked-open way means “body” itself cannot be taken for granted. The body bodies in unexpected ways. I do, I notice; rinse, repeat.

THE BODY AS SENSOR IS JUST ONE PORTAL:

These months, I’ve been worming, writhing, moving, dancing with four concepts as quiet anchors: slowness, disorientation, sensitization, and magnetism. All four have been my sweet obsessions carrying me through academic, anthropological, relational, choreographic endeavours for the better part of the last ten years. They are not categories, but tones – frequencies I keep returning to. They offer a loose constellation from which to sense the depth of what this research is doing and undoing.

Slowness is not waiting, it’s not missing a step, it’s not anti-fast. It’s thoroughness. It’s a shift in how attention organizes itself. It’s the refusal to rush into legibility. It asks what becomes sensed, palpable, noticeable when we move at the pace of relation rather than the pace of production or the pace of expectation. Slowness is to not know in advance what is becoming.

Disorientation is a generative state. It unsettles habit, loosens sense-making. It is not a problem to be solved, but a site of emergence. In disorientation, new perceptual logics can arise. It is a practice of staying with the trouble, reaching into the otherwise.

Sensitization is a process, not a trait. It’s a cultivation of responsiveness – physical, psychic, ethical. It’s about becoming available to the subtle, to the nearly imperceptible. It’s the body (in all its formations) learning to listen differently and expansively.

Magnetism suggests attraction, charge, pull. But also mystery. It’s the invisible current between bodies, ideas, events. In this project, magnetism names the inexplicable coherence that sometimes appears through feeling, not through proof. Or the proof comes late, once things have already stuck together.

These concepts are methodological for me. Sometimes they tell me what to do, but they primarily shape how I attend – to the field, to the data, to the practice of dance, to the thresholds where knowledge stops behaving. They remind me that my research is not only a gathering of material, but a tuning of perception.

This work is gentle – though sometimes violent in how it requests shifts in perspective – accumulating concepts, values, tropes, and feelings over time and through the delicious devotion of lots and lots of practice, experimentation, and inquiry.

UNFOLDINGS:

The slow death of expectation isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet, cumulative. It’s a shift in how I hold the work, how I recognize what’s happening. Letting go of clear outcomes has made space for something more honest: attention, fidelity, staying-with.

In the next few months, this final half of my Scholar-in-Residence time, I’ll keep listening. I’ll keep moving with what reveals itself through practice – on the ground, in the studio, in conversation, on the page. The research is still unfolding. Maybe some answers will come, but I’m just trying to stay present to what’s here and what’s changing.

The process itself is becoming the point. Not what I extract from it, but how I move through it. Expectation is dying, and something else is gathering. Quietly. Magnetically.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Learn more about The Dance Centre’s Choreographic Projects and Partnerships.

Photos: David Cooper; courtesy of the artist