UCLA

This dissertation theorizes attention as a choreopolitical practice. Complicating standard Western definitions that describe attention as a neutral cognitive capacity, I reframe attention as a set of culturally and historically specific bodily techniques that reinforce dominant worldviews and social relations. My archival review of military field guides, education manuals, labor handbooks, and medical papers illustrates how dominant techniques of attention require the attending subject to inhibit their responsiveness to phenomena classified as “irrelevant.” In dialogue with critical race, feminist, decolonial, and critical disability theory, I argue that this technique undergirds the unequal apportionment of care among subjects along socially mediated lines of difference. After providing this context, I shift focus to choreographic projects that intervene within dominant regimes of attention: mayfield brooks’ Improvising While Black workshops, Andrew Suseno’s Parcon Resilience/Moving Rasa practice, and Jennifer Monson’s Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance (iLAND). Each of these artists articulate models for choreographing and teaching movement, not by prescribing specific actions, but instead by directing how dancers attend to phenomena. Analyzing over 500 hours of ethnographic participant-observation data and interviews conducted with artists and fellow participants during rehearsals, I show how these artists restructure attention in ways that unmask dominant attention as merely one option among many other possible ways of relating to the perceivable world. From brooks’ use of disorientation to disrupt anti-Black regimes of attention; to Suseno’s decolonial sensitization to multiple simultaneous realities; to Monson’s cultivation of ecological kinship via inter-species attunement, these counter-attentions reshape how participants “care about” and “care for” aspects of their perceivable world and how they collaborate physically across difference.