Anne DUBOS

Anne Dubos is an anthropologist and a transmedia artist. She conducts a double research project between social anthropology and performing arts. In 2013, she obtained a PhD from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) on the gesture transmission in contemporary theater in Kerala (South India). After Marcel Mauss (1963), Adam Kendon (1997), and Marcel Jousse (1974), the objective of her research is to question how gesture can be defined and transmitted.

Both as a visual artist and a researcher she writes and directs performances and art installations in search for new theoretical paradigms. Between theory and practice, her aim is to understand creation process. From the morphogenetic analysis of a gesture in performance (that is, either on stage or in a rehearsal context) to a global understanding of body culture movement, her work aims to show that gesture could be perceived as a form that follows the transformation theory (D’Arcy Thompson: 1917). She therefore works at developing a “morphogenetic theatre theory”, where motion capture helps to show the modification of the shape of the body in time and space. Moreover, based on the assertion that there is an “ecology of practice” of the gesture (Bateson: 1983), her work includes the notion of “drama-diversity”. As such, she argues that there are necessary factors that allow the growth of a form and, consequently, she tends to generate maps of body movement. She has founded a multidisciplinary group : the Little Heart Movement, composed by dancers, theatre artists, martial artists, geographers, digital artists and software engineers, biomecanicians, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists. They help her capture body movement and map it in 3 or 4 dimensions. Her research aims at revealing new theories of gesture transmission.