The basic question of our research is ‘How do we move/think laterally?’ Moving laterally, sideways, instead of linearly and directly, makes possible decentering, incidentalness, inconsistency and opaqueness in knowledge and attention. Our aim is to resist the anxiety of reasserting knowledge, and to suspend knowing by maintaining what is present, we are also searching for ways to move with our research sideways. We take into account, however that in western educational institutions and organizations, moving/thinking is mostly expected to be progressive and quantifiable, and so often laterality gets associated with thinking creatively or ‘out of the box’, which is equally problematic, as it rarely contributes to decentering actions thereafter. 

In September 2022, we held a research event with the support of ATD Lectorate and DAS Choreography, with guest theorist Hypatia Vourloumis. She shared her research on listening as anticolonial practice, by thinking of laterality through the concept of the ‘aside’. In a collaborative and performative talk with drag artist Taka Taka, they knit together different forms of asides. They proposed the aside at once as a lateral movement (to push aside) as well as an impromptu remark made to an audience that goes off script. Drawing on the aside as a queer performative statement and mode of deviant performance that produces different knowledges that are usually sidelined, their presentation explored the questions: What can the aside offer in terms of the forming of surprising pedagogies? How is the aside moving 'from,' 'for,' and 'to?' The aside is implicitly non-linear, improvisatory, fugitive and disruptive, and cannot be predicted or defined in advance. What does the bringing together of different swerving asides do? Their talk followed principles of instant composition, following and merging the lateral (non)structure of unforeseen knitted asides, including those spontaneously shared by the participants in that gathering.

This research continues and shapeshifts in a slow but persistent manner. In 2020, we gave a performative talk in the frame of UniArts Future Lecture Series in Helsinki, inspired by the game of tic-tac-toe. In 2022 we transported this encounter from the live situation in Helsinki onto the page, writing together a contribution to the Performance Research issue “On (Un)Knowns” (2022), where we navigated questions around attention, labour, (in)visibility and, this time, the micro-politics of writing/thinking alongside each other, without the weight of analytical and argumentative depth. After the research event with Hypatia and Taka (DAS Research), we set up a performative panel called ‘The spider and the crab: Dramaturgies of moving laterally’ at the EASTAP conference on ‘Dimensions of Dramaturgy’ in Aarhus (June 2023), with invited guests Eylül Akinci and Tamara Tomic Vajagic. In this panel we worked with principles of instant composition as well, allowing ourselves to circulate around particular thoughts for a long time, and to get absorbed into this while acknowledging how distraction is a constitutive part of the process. With the use of selected material (silk clay, tarot cards, scores with instructions and a cat’s cradle) alongside spoken text that we had written and audiovisual material, we created a performative space that experimented and debated with the ‘asides’ while discussing curatorial, institutional and choreographic cases in an interactive manner.