Alien Bodies: Choreographic Worlding toward Unfamiliar Corporeality

Alien Bodies is a research project that contributes to performance studies by investigating the persistence of deeply embedded cultural inscriptions on performing bodies. This practice-based PhD explores how choreographic methods can cultivate novel or unknown corporeal experiences through performance work, addressing how gendered stereotypes remain sticky even when subjected to choreographic transformation. Drawing upon phenomenological, contemporary feminist, and posthuman perspectives and guided by the key research question: How might choreographic practice explore unfamiliar corporeality in performance? In a bid to circumvent ingrained patterns and unspoken norms through radical unfamiliarity and corporeal estrangement. This study develops two interconnected approaches: choreographic worlding and alien embodiment. It examines how a hybrid human-alien perspective may generate transformative experiences that broaden conventional frameworks around identity, agency and embodied knowledge. Underlying the major performance work Alter Edith that forms this study is a methodology that proposes perspectives and practices to expand choreographic applications beyond traditional hierarchies and institutional models, suggesting alternative modes of experience and subjective self-determination through alien embodiment. The experimental methodology constructs layered performance experiences through four interconnected method pools: Moving, Making, Performing, and Reflecting. Experimental techniques—including bodily distortion, sensory saturation, temporal warping, and spatial disorientation—culminate in Alter Edith, a surreal exploration in which an alien protagonist navigates cyclic simulations of human tasks through strange, episodic gestures. Alter Edith examines the idea of subjectivity as contingent and relational, where identities are actively constructed and reshaped in real-time with an audience. Alien embodiment is posited to offer a compelling means of engaging with human experience from a position of radical unfamiliarity. The findings open a model for exploring ethical and communal approaches to performance-making while interrogating Western heteronormative structures through an approach that centres embodied knowledge as a primary form of inquiry. The synthesis of choreographic worlding and alien embodiment generates new possibilities for multisensory performance environments that suspend normative reality, enabling emergent forms of embodied knowledge.