This practice-based PhD project consists of two parts: a novel titled Ecstatic (worth 80% of the overall submission) and a critical thesis (20%). It concerns the connection between verbal and non-verbal forms of expression, specifically the extent to which dance practices can engender or inform prose fiction. I am concerned with the relationship between narrative and the moving body, and with questions of simultaneity and (in)congruence, with a particular focus on ways in which, for creative purposes, the expressive body might be experienced at the same time as the writing mind. To explore these questions, I conjugate different methodologies of writing, traditional and experimental, to find the most effective expression of dance in prose.

I take the dancing body as both theme and narrative for my novel Ecstatic. In so doing I am asking how successfully the contemporary novel as form can articulate the dancing body. This plays itself out most straightforwardly at the levels of narrative, character and location: the setting is an alternative dance community; the story is told from the perspectives of five different bodies/characters as we follow them through a period of social violence and unrest. Short chapters, focused on individuals, are punctuated by extended sessions of improvised dance in which the bodies/characters encounter each other and become entangled in unanticipated ways. Dance itself becomes the activity and the site of salvation, inspiration and destruction.

In the academic thesis, my primary theoretical framework is Nietzschean philosophy and more specifically, those aspects of what I call the Nietzschean “counter-tradition” to dualist thinking. This counter-tradition reflects profoundly on the grounding of experience in the body, on an understanding of the self as multiple rather than unitary, and on the move away from ideologies based in binary notions of self/other and body/mind, rooted in Platonic idealism.

Ideas of congruence and incongruence define my exploration of the ways in which “writing the body” has been practised and theorised, covering performance practices, traditional literary writing, feminist theory, cognitive science, and recent philosophies of consciousness. I assert that Nietzsche’s ecstatic paradigm provides an enabling frame for my research, specifically as his critique of Platonic dualism engages with the splitting of the distinctive creative forces he terms Apollonian and Dionysian. In considering how the moving body figures in Nietzsche’s writing, and the profound influence of Nietzsche on early twentieth century dance pioneers, thinkers and novelists, I explore the proposition that the notion of dance itself embodies Nietzsche’s most persuasive response to the sense of despair, loneliness, and fear implicit in the claim that “God is dead, and we have killed him”.

In the second half of this thesis, I asses my own novel in terms of the English-language novelistic tradition within which I work, offering several “snapshots” of how certain writers have thus far examined the dancing body, and indeed thought with the body within the novel. With Nietzsche as my guide, I assess the results of my experimentation with two specific somatic methodologies: Ecstatic Dance and Authentic Movement. In a series of practical case studies and with analysis of passages from my novel, I explore how effective these practices are for the dancing novelist.

In the conclusion, I summarise my discoveries of this largely Nietzschean approach to the moving body and creative writing, pointing to future research that builds on these discoveries. Alluding to Deleuze’s concept of transcendental immanence, I suggest potential connections with Authentic Movement, a somatic practice in which the mover’s awareness can expand to embrace and bear witness to past narrative at the same time as present movement: the “languaging” of direct bodily experience on consciously different levels correlates to the spread consciousness of the novelistic voice.