“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
— Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī

We are living in a time where society feels more divided. People are separated by beliefs, values, and identities. There is a need to continue dialogue and stay connected, despite our differences. Healthy democracy depends on people staying connected, even when they disagree. Today, this is becoming harder. Many discussions quickly turn into arguments, where people take sides, cancel each other, or try to win. Social media often makes this worse. 

In the research, I am interested in using choreographic thinking to develop a dialogic practice to bridge differences and divisions. I explore how dialogue transforms when we engage not only through language, but through embodied presence, touch, and movement. Drawing on my embodied and performance practices, I attempt to create choreographic conditions to experience dialogue not only as exchange of ideas, but as a lived, relational encounter shaped by shared vulnerability and radical care.

At the core is the idea of “the field” — not as a metaphorical space, but as something that emerges between and through people when they meet without immediately positioning themselves in opposition or agreement. This field is co-created in real time through shared practices of movement, sensing, and speaking. Rather than focusing on communication techniques or debate, I look at experiential exercises that cultivate awareness of how they can be present in relation to others. The goal is to develop a methodology based on simple guided tasks drawn from my movement and performance practice, exploring how perception, emotion, and expression can move dialogue beyond identity politics and ideological differences.

I see dialogic skill not as something we inherently possess, but as something we need to continuously practice and co-create through how we relate to one another. These are the research questions I ask:

• How do we approach dialogue as a bodily and relational act?
• What happens when we engage in dialogue that arise from shared attention rather than fixed positions?
• What tools can embodied and performance practice offer to help us recognise and shift our habitual patterns, even before we enter into dialogue?
•  How can embodied tools help us to stay present with difference without collapsing into agreement or conflict?
• What are the limits of an embodied approach to dialogue?