lifting the skirt that covered
the legs of an antique chair
I saw to my horror
a head with no eyes mouth or ears[1]
A mounting pressure builds in the bones of the room. It began in the foundations of the house, like a heartbeat reverberating further with each thud. It leaks forth from the floorboards, straddles the space, flips the air on its back and suspends it in a chokehold. A current of rhythm moves through the air, and from within the pulsing emerges a forearm, followed by a rotating hip and the balls of feet that land together, locating their balance. Out of this almost–body curve twin spines that twist around each other in an attempt to strangle and subsume. The beating continues while they encircle one another, the inevitable end being a crawling back inside, a reintegration of what was lost. When I come to see them, they have frozen on a page and I can’t tell if they have merged into one or if they remain two.
In the work of the late New Zealand choreographer, Douglas Wright, a vacuum opens where an enigmatic semiotics and its emergents become visible. In this space, that is built through traces, gaps and the impossibility of presence, drawing fixes disappearances into marks. Amongst his notebooks and personal ephemera — which are held at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington — there are the makings of a world: scraps of poems, drawings, fragmented lists and esoteric notes to self.
Through encounters with these items, a picture of Wright’s semiotic cradle starts to become visible. The drawings transform into photographs and photographs transform into poetry; they transform into each other, are each other. They mimic and are mimicked by that which is played out on the stage and in the notebook. Their mobile bodies grow from within a fertile ground where ontological transformation plays with merging the represented with its representation. As New Zealand Academic Keren Chiaroni writes, ‘a hand moving across a page performs a dance in microcosm’.[2] Often Wright’s figures appear caught in enjambment, their strange limbs straining against the page’s container; their motion is palpable as they stride over each other. Wright’s hand, whilst drawing, expresses the motion; it pulses with the same choric [3] energy as his body in dance.
The word ‘draw’ primarily functions as a verb or a noun: one may draw a card, draw a picture, draw a comparison, draw the curtains, draw attention, or draw their leg up. One may say that the draw will take place at noon, or that the game is a draw. Wright says his figures are ‘verbs not nouns’ — unfixable actors, moving through transformation after transformation. [4] Bodies are drawn through space with no visible mark left behind as evidence; each moment in flux until the next movement arrives. Unlike nouns, his figures resist becoming concrete, fixed or immovable. They are graphic eruptions of the semiotic. Wright’s figures do not have arms that bend only at the wrists and elbows; instead, they are endowed with an impossible limb possessing innumerable joints that bend and dislocate to no consequence.
The space between body and image collapse as Wright’s choreography slips the leash of symbolic order. It is an ephemeral moment that occurs when his figures bring forth what philosopher Julia Kristeva terms the chora — a presymbolic affective rhythm that precedes meaning.[5] The chora brings the body, its representations and the formal structures into tension, exposing the body as an unstable and excessive site of instinctual force. Any meaning is pulled into an incessant dance of différance and play.[6]
Kristeva borrows the concept of the chora from Plato, for whom it is a nourishing, maternal receptacle; not a thing in itself but a condition from which things arise. Like a body, ‘it is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm’, moving as an instinctual pulse, deferring meaning in its attempts to arrive.[7] As observed by Chiaroni, Wright’s work is ‘aligned not only with the khoreia (the dance), but also with the chora’.[8] Imagined through a psychoanalytic and semiotic lens, Kristeva’s chora is a pre-linguistic, pre-symbolic state which is necessary for the emergence of language and subjectivity. It is a bodily affective turbulence of infancy, where sounds, gestures and movements are shaped by primal drives without fixed or nameable meanings; they are the generative events in themselves. On stage, Wright’s choreographies inhabit this primordial soup, the chora taking up residence in his figures, drawing itself up through their bodies in order to speak through their gestures. His bodies writhe through space, their energetic currents of movement leaving invisible marks vibrating in the air. Similarly, in his drawings, his hand acts with the chora, its command tracing movements across a page and spilling out ancient residue.
Biological and societal constraints are constantly being evaded in Wright’s work. Anatomy obeys instinct over rule. His figures, both drawn and danced, escape permanence by crawling inside each other, the alchemy of two transforming them into double-headed beasts who, for a while, move in union.
In moments, the choreographed bodies are pure affect; they move beyond the choreographed into a space of instinctual symbiosis, the chora pulsing through the veins of their limbs. In other moments, they appear as apparitions of drawings, merging until the representation is materially and energetically connected to the thing itself.
In Wright’s book of poetry, The Laughing Mirror (1997), there is a collection of drawings accompanying the poems.[9] In one, a body becomes a road that resembles an ouroboros.[10] But, rather than a head in the process of devouring its own flesh, this circle’s head and limbs protrude from the underside of the loop, waving in signal that a human body is here. I wonder if a second head was devoured in the making of the loop. As it lies fixed on the page, nothing is revealed to me, however, there is the affect of two here. Perhaps a second body rode the road of this one into certain oblivion.
The importance of other bodies becomes evident in Wright’s choreographic practice, where it is possible to observe the relentless merging and splitting that takes place across the stage as they strive towards becoming vessels that may bring impossible shapes into being. This is visible in Hey Paris (1987), a short film choreographed by Wright. In a scene towards the end, he and his dance partner, Debra McCulloch, perform this union.[11] They take turns riding the other in circles around a room that has been dressed to look like a jazz club. They make use of the other, like the endless fission and fusion between two atoms. Like lines left on Wright’s pages, they follow each other doggedly: the drawings follow the dance, as the dance follows the drawings; neither represents the other; rather, the space between them collapses.
In the theatre of his notebook, Wright does not resolve the tension between chaos and order: he makes it dance. Academic Leigh Wilson writes: ‘At the centre of magic is the collapse of identity between representation and the thing in the world being represented’.[12] Wright’s work conjures that magic, his representations are not secondary; they are a part of the same substance as their referent. The drawn antelope bleeds when it is pierced. Ontological productivity is stirred up: his choreography draws forth the chora, both in the bodies of the performers and those of the audience. It is this chora which implants a rich soil within both performer and viewer, through which affect and meaning may arise. Simultaneously, Wright’s drawings are operative, direct interventions in the world’s fabric — they are not inert depictions of bodies, they are acts that summon them into being. They exist on a threshold near to the world of magic, where image and action co-emerge: ‘If it is wished to kill a person an image of him is made and then destroyed…and when it is destroyed, he must simultaneously perish.’[13] The drawings both conjure and are conjured by the choreography.
Whilst Wright’s choreography and drawings open a portal to semiotics that subvert regular engagement, they are still compositions, framed within a page, situated within a practice and produced by a subject shaped by language. They are still in communion with the Law of the Father — a symbolic order into which the child enters by internalising language, structure and societal norms — with its pressure to name, fix and formalise.[14] The Law of the Father insists upon meaning, upon structuring and upon naming that which is being represented. In Wright’s practice, this force is constantly imposing itself and being subverted. His work is caught in a tension between a never-ending ebb and flow.
Chiaroni notes that ‘Wright’s dancers enact the collision between “the archaic rhythms of the body” and the “formal metrics of the Law of the Father,”’[15] a collision that plays out as sustained friction, a pressure that produces movement. This in-between zone is where the chora operates — prior to and underneath fixed meaning — structuring sensation and rhythm without submitting to the nameable. In this sense, the work does not rebel against the Law of the Father; it burrows inside of it, seeding within its measured grids an unruly pulse. It is this pulse — half buried beneath the father’s thumb, half breaking through — that oxygenates the larger struggle his work stages between what can be expressed and what is forced to remain contained.
In Água Viva (2012), the Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector writes:
I write in signs that are more a gesture than a voice…but now the time to stop painting has come in order to remake myself…The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen. [16]
Wright’s work is the embodiment of this perennial remaking — sometimes vanishing into nothing, sometimes persisting. His drawn figures are testimony to persistence: the visible residue of movement, proof that something has passed through. Yet they are not mere afterimages; they continue to unfold alongside the motion that produced them, they continue to breathe. Breath is both origin and remainder: it is what animates the gesture, and what the dancer leaves behind in space. Like the chora breath is rhythm and movement, anterior to fixed form, where signification arises from vibration. Wright’s lines breathe because they belong to this choric rhythm. Breath too dances. As Wright himself observed, ‘You know, I think dancing is basically going on all the time … I think it’s everything.’[17]
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[1] Douglas Wright, The Laughing Mirror, Penguin Books, Auckland, 1997, p. 21.
[2] Keren Chiaroni, 'Choreo-Graph and Sceno-Graph: The Performative Drawings of Dancer and Choreographer Douglas Wright', Theatre and Performance Design, 2017, 3 (1–2), pp. 28–49.
[3] Ibid., p. 43.
[4] Jennifer Shennan, ‘Douglas Wright (1956–2018),’ Michelle Potter… on dancing, 17 November 2018, https://michellepotter.org/news/douglas-wright-1956-2018/ (accessed 27 September 2025).
[5] Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, p. 25.
[6] Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance,’ in Alan Bass (trans.), Margins of Philosophy University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982, pp. 1–27.
[7] Kristeva, op, cit, p. 26.
[8] Chiaroni, op, cit, p. 29.
[9] Wright, op, cit.
[10] Ibid., p 22.
[11] Gregor Nicholas, Hey Paris, short film, 1987. Produced by Trevor Haysom; featuring Douglas Wright and Debbie McCulloch. Black & white, 16mm. 18 minutes. Available at NZ On Screen.
[12] Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2013, p. 56.
[13] James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Macmillan, London, 1922, p. 16.
[14] Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, James Strachey (trans.), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1913, pp. 125–130.
[15] Chiaroni, op, cit, p 30.
[16] Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva. Translated by Benjamin Moser, New Directions, 2012, p. 17.17 Monique Oomen, dir., I Am a Dancer!, television documentary, 1990. Produced by Vincent Burke; featuring Douglas Wright. Top Shelf Productions. Colour, video. 70 minutes. Available at NZ On Screen.