Isabelle Choinière
Isabelle Choinière is an international artist, researcher, author and teacher of the new contemporary performative practices.
Isabelle holds a Ph.D. in the philosophy of Integrative Arts from Planetary Collegium / Center for Advanced Inquiry in the Integrative Arts (CAiiA), Plymouth University (U.K.) (2015).
Her interdisciplinary and integrative research looks at the development of new models of performativity emerging with technology and alternative approaches to dance involving the somatic. It deals with the development of emerging cognitive, aesthetic and expressive-communicative paradigm in the performing arts by defining a new paradigm of interfaced intercorporeality (intercorporéité). Addressed through practices of the body (somatics), her research reintroduces the body and its specific intelligence into an understanding and construction of these proposed relationships. She works on how an ontological transition of the body – through its contact with technology – lead to two emerging concepts : that of the ‘carnal collective body’ and of the ‘sound body’. Her main research-creation strategy is the development of a specific relationship between the body and technology where technology becomes the activator of a process of sensory-perceptual reconfiguration. Her methodology involves a process of collective and collaborative research that implies empathy.
Her main works to date include Communion, Le partage des peaux II (1994-1999); La démence des anges, La mue de l’ange (1999-2005); Meat Paradoxe (2005-2010); and Flesh Waves (2013), productions that have toured in Europe, Latin America and North America in major festivals, exhibitions and art institutions. Her last research-creation project: Phase #4/Flesh Waves has been presented for the official opening of Cynetart13_Areale as well as in the E.U. Research Project METABODY in November 2013 in Dresden, Germany. Her works have also been referenced as case studies for research groups in universities around the world. In 2014, she was awarded the Prix Reconnaissance Desjardins 2014 for her “remarkable career, her innovative work of high artistic quality and to encourage her to continue research in this unique way of creating” (Conseil des arts de Longueuil).
Alongside her work as an artist, Choinière's research has been published by Intellect Press, U.K. (2006, 2013, 2015), the Journal of Transdisciplinary Knowledge Design, Korea (2009) and Cambridge Scholars Publishing, U.K. (2009). More recent research includes a chapter in The Point-of-Being (ed.) Derrick de Kerckhove, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, U.K. (2014), and activity as a guest chief-editor for a double issue of Technoetic Arts, Intellect Journals, UK, (2015) which examines the consequences and impact of “moistmedia” in the emergence of new artistic practices.
Since 1995, she have been giving seminars and lectures as a visiting professor, visiting researcher-artist and lecturer in Canada, Europe, Latin America and the United States.
She is a member of international research groups such as “Pratiques interartistiques et scènes contemporaines”, led by Marie-Christine Lesage and “Performativité et effets de présence”, led by Josette Féral and Louise Poissant – both at the University of Quebec in Montreal. She is also an active member of the Planetary Collegium Research Network.
