‘The Expression of a Familiar Vessel’ is an investigation into the affective potential of emotional expression. Through the interdisciplinary composition of voice and dance, I am going on a journey through many expressions of varied affective states. By playing with the vastly contrasted physical qualities of voice and dance, there is the opportunity to inspect the latent qualities of emotive meaning within performance.

The conceptual framework of Affect theory offered valuable insights into experience, emotion, and expression. The value systems of affective discourse favour the varied spheres of experience by rejecting linguistics and challenging the traditional academic convention by enforcing that language is not our primary way of understanding the world.

I utilised and elaborated upon Tomkins’ list of categorical affective expressions in my performative works, using them as a performance score and building upon them. Therefore, this text is a behind-the-scenes insight into the creation of an affective toolkit of expression and the corresponding performance work that utilises those tools.

Writing about the non-linguistic enactment of emotion is somewhat contradictory, yet it reinforces the notion of porousness whereby the alternate rationalities of feeling, creating, writing and performing merge through the body’s approach and experience. Still, bodily experience and expression is paramount, and will never be fully captured through text.