About
Teoma leads a double life as an artist and scholar, slipping between artistic and academic contexts in the UK, Germany, and Canada. Her research is likewise slippery, moving from dance and choreography into the digital and medical humanities, to probe understandings of bodies and movement across disciplines.
As a choreographer and media artist, each hybrid performance-installation that she creates is a microcosm: a site to interrogate the ongoing mediation of bodies and identities in techno-cultures. Through the appropriation of surveillance and biomedical technologies, her artistic work engages with the computational and conceptual machinery of representation. Adopting a wide range of formats, including live, livestream, durational, and 1-1 performance, Naccarato’s work has been presented in theatres, galleries, and film festivals internationally. Recent projects include: III: Once Returned (2022-2023), a 72-hour durational performance live-streamed around-the-clock from an array of 9 surveillance cameras; Im/mediations: 9x9x9 (2022-2023), a series of 9 portraits from 9 angles in extreme closeup, illuminating movement-within-stillness; and Im/mediations: REMAINS (2021-2022), a livestream/dance-film set within the virtual architecture of multiple cameras gazing down at the performer from above.
As a dance scholar, Naccarato engages with feminist, new materialist, and process philosophies to interrogate the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of movement analysis and representation across disciplines. Recent publications are featured in peer-reviewed journals such as Dance and Somatic Practices, Performance Research, Leonardo, Tempo, and Performance Philosophy. Presently, Teoma is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) where she is developing a new book, and continues to present artistic work in galleries and festivals internationally.
In tandem with her artistic and scholarly research, Naccarato facilitates platforms for generative exchange regarding systemic inequality in research methodologies and pedagogies. From 2021-2022, she co-led a virtual reading and discussion group on race, colonialism, and diaspora in practices at the intersection of dance and computing. In this group, as in her own research, the emphasis is on transversal and diffractive readings between diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives. Since 2018, Naccarato has co-run the Provocations Project, launching open calls for provocations and curating dialogues concerning inscribed bias and (in)visibility in cross-disciplinary and collaborative research.
In addition to receiving fully funded fellowships for her MFA and PhD, her work has been supported through artist grants in Canada and Germany, as well as full-time residencies at renowned centers such as the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM, Paris), CLOUD/DansLAb (The Hague), Lake Studios (Berlin), the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT, UC Berkeley), and The Djerassi Resident Artist Program (San Francisco).
Naccarato has held posts at numerous universities in Canada, the US, the UK, and Europe, leading undergraduate and graduate level courses in choreography, contemporary dance, multimedia performance, videodance, and performance philosophy. She received her BFA in Contemporary Dance from Concordia University (2004), an MFA in Dance from the Ohio State University (2011), and a PhD from the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University (2019).
Project Websites
Over the past decade, Teoma Naccarato has developed two main bodies of artistic work: III and Im/mediations, as well as a somatic listening practice called Interstitial Listening. The website for each project serves as a living archive, with documentation and announcements from past and upcoming performances and workshops.
Click on the images below to be redirected to the website for each project, or view the individual performances and installations in the next section.
Each performance in III explores technology as an intervention in ways of looking, listening, touching, and relating. III takes the form of durational performances spanning days, immersive video installations, and one-on-one encounters.
Im/mediations is a series of performance-interventions that explore qualities of togetherness and intimacy in virtual contexts. A key theme in Im/mediations is the interplay between that which is shared on screen, and that which lies beyond the frame.
Interstitial Listening is a multi-sensory listening practice, aimed at tuning awareness of how rhythms emerge in movement and music. It is a technique for exploring and reimagining habits of relation between performers and media in real-time – on stage and off.
Performance/Installation
Click on the images below for descriptions, videos, and images from each piece.
Publications
Naccarato, T. (2022) “Book Review: The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy”. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices. 14 (1), 129-133. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp_00067_5
Naccarato, T. and MacCallum, J. (2020) “Cutting together-apart (une greffe)”. Performance Research. 25 (5), 135-142. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2019.42234
Naccarato, T. (2019) Re/contextualization: On the critical appropriation of technologies as artistic practice. PhD Thesis. Coventry University, UK.
MacCallum, J. and Naccarato, T. (2019) “Collaboration as Differentiation: Rethinking Interaction Intra-Actively”. Performance Philosophy. 4 (2), 410-433. DOI: 10.21476/pp.2019.42234
Naccarato, T. and MacCallum J. (2019) “The Touch of the Stethoscope: Shaping Context in Intimate Performance”. TEMPO. 73 (287), 71-75. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298218000669
Naccarato, T. (2019). “Book Review: Radio Strainer: Part Two of the Kinesthetic Archive”. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices. 11 (1). 129-135. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.11.1.129_5
Naccarato, T. (2018) “Artistic Practice as Research: A Genealogical Account”. A World of Muscles, Bone & Organs: Research and Scholarship in Dance. eds. Ellis, S., Blades, H., and Waelde, C. 435–455. available at: https://bit.ly/3Jdg5jj
Naccarato, T. and MacCallum, J. (2017) “Critical Appropriations of Biosensors in Artistic Practice”. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Movement Computing (MOCO ‘17). London. 1-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3077981.3078053
Kirk, P., Naccarato, T., and MacCallum, J. (2017) “Intimate Listening”. Performance Research. 22 (3), 57–60. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1348589
Naccarato, T. and MacCallum, J. (2016) “From Representation to Relationality: Bodies, Biosensors and Mediated Environments”. Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices. 8 (1), 55–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.8.1.57_1
Naccarato, T., MacCallum, J., Boudou, L., and Pelinka, S. (2017) “Peripheral Encounters”. Leonardo. 50 (3). 240-241. Project MUSE. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/662394
MacCallum, J. and Naccarato, T.J. (2015) “The Impossibility of Control: Real-Time Negotiations with the Heart”. Proceedings of the Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts. London. 184-191. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/eva2015.19
*The full, pre-print version of each article is available upon request. Please email: teomajn@gmail.com