‘The Moving Canvas Project’: Exploring choreography and disobedient drawing

These images and supporting paper presented by Hubbard and Keeley offer new insights relating to the relationship between movement, drawing, textiles and choreography. ‘The Moving Canvas Project’ is a participatory research project with an adult community dance company where the dancers explore the act of drawing and moving simultaneously. This emergent knowledge is underpinned by theoretical frameworks, in drawing performance, costume design and movement improvisation. The paper discusses a series of workshops where the process of creating textile design for costume and choreography for performance occurred concurrently. The authors present a balanced evaluation of the outcomes, sharing several observations regarding behaviour, performance and the overall aesthetic that emerged when dancers were asked to wear plain cream-coloured jumpsuits and draw on them whilst moving. It explores what influence the two disciplines had on each other and how dancers played with autonomy and collectivism as they drew on themselves and one another. The transient nature of movement creates a dissonance with the permanence of the drawing, which is left as a mark on the dancer’s disobedient bodies. It is within this dynamic interplay between movement and mark-making that a performance emerged.