Fragmenting cripistemology: Gap movement and choreographic practice

Abstract

This article attends to the creative process of our choreographic video essay, Mourning Movements (2023). Between the distances of Tkaranto (Toronto) and Lenapehoking (New York City), we explore approaches and methods for choreographic practice through gaps of space, time and differing corporealities. Theorizing our creative collaboration within these gaps, the methodological framework of fragmentation emerges as a network for disjointed choreographic sense-making. Refiguring our ‘gap’ movement as crip choreographic practice, we consider fragmentation as a basis for a choreography that embraces disability, distance, pauses and non-cohesion. We reflect on our practices of score-work, dance improvisation, audio-description, poetry, storytelling, theoretical provocation, text messaging, Zoom meetings and Google Doc harbouring to reveal our collaborative and care-full labour of creation. We offer a proposal of ‘fragmenting cripistemologies’ which considers fragmentation as reciprocal with disabled knowing and questioning or cripistemology. Our proposal imagines disability as a source for fugitive choreographic practice through which we can potentialize, refuse and reinterpret movement.