Practices of Rooting & Spaces of Performative Becoming: An Exploration of British Caribbean Diasporic Identities through Dance

This thesis is concerned with how identity forms within the movement of British Caribbean Diasporic artists. The study focuses on how this occurs within the work of H Patten, Greta Mendez, Jamila Johnson-Small, and Akeim Toussaint Buck.

Using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, the thesis offers the notion practices of rooting as a cultural process that British Caribbean Diasporic people engage in to negotiate their identities. Through reading the case study artists’ work, the research determines that practices of rooting that are choreographic form what it conceptualises as spaces of performative becoming through which the case study artists (re)create, affirm and establish their identities.

The research reads the choreography of the case study artists through observations that it has made from live and recorded performance. Further insights into each artist have been gained through engaging in conversation, performance, movement, and through a methodology created by this research called embodied exchange sessions. Embodied exchange sessions are a process that uses movement and conversation as a form of knowledge production that both artist and researcher participate in. The thesis utilises embodied knowledge with information gained through the aforementioned processes and places them in critical dialogue within a framework of analysis that draws upon the work of theorists within Caribbean Studies, Cultural Studies, Dance Studies and Postcolonial studies, including the work of Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, W.E.B Du Bois, Rex Nettleford, Yvonne Daniels, and Susan Foster.

This thesis reveals how choreography can function as a means of establishing multiplicitous, complex, and transnational British Caribbean Diasporic identities when it is engaged with as a practice of rooting. The analysis of choreographic work created by British Caribbean Diasporic artists gives insights into British Caribbean Diasporic identities as they continue to expand, shift, and grow, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of the nuances present within such identities.