Emma Cocker is a writer-artist whose research focuses on artistic processes and practices, and the performing of thinking-in-action therein. Cocker’s language-based artistic research comprises a matrix of writing, reading and conversation practices, including diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. She was a key-researcher within the project Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2017) for exploring the thinking-feeling-knowing between choreography, drawing and writing. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2024. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. She is Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University.

Choreo-graphic Figures: Performance Lecture & Workshop



12 November 2017
Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, London
Independent Dance Workshop
On Sunday 12 November 2017 Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line will give a one day workshop (11:00 - 17:00) hosted by Independent Dance at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, London, UK. Key researchers Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil ask: How can we develop systems of notation for identifying, marking and communicating the barely perceptible micro-movements at the cusp of awareness? How can we communicate the instability and mutability of the flows and forces within artistic practice, without ‘fixing’ that which is inherently dynamic and contingent as a literal sign? This workshop seeks out the choreo-graphic traces of translational processes, exploring the shifts of attention and modes of engagement happening at the passage from one medium – writing-drawing-choreography – to another. We will investigate somatic practices and compositional decision-making within a collaborative creative process based on embodied gestures. 


14 November 2017
Crossing Borders Talk
On Tuesday 14 November 2017, 19:00 - 20:30 Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil will present a performance lecture at the Crossing Borders Talks in the 2017 series at Independent Dance at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, London, UK launching their recent publication Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, De Gruyter, Berlin/Boston, 2017.