Arts, Culture, and Museums TIG Week: Choreographing Space: Bringing Embodiment as a Kind of GIS Innovation in Evaluation by Lela Aisha Jones and Marcel W. Foster

Date: Saturday, October 3, 2026

Lela Aisha Jones is a movement performance artist and Director of Dance at Bryn Mawr College, and Marcel W. Foster is the founder of Performance Hypothesis and a published enthusiast for culturally responsive evaluation. Together, we explore how dance and choreography can transform the way we map and evaluate our world.

We believe that traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS)—the science and technology used to map and analyze our environment—too often prioritizes cold productivity and “Western enlightenment science” over human impact. To challenge this, we advocate for a “warming up” of our professional muscles, grounding evaluation in the social, spiritual, and historical nuances of the land. For us, this begins with intentionally acknowledging that the lands we occupy belong to the Lenni-Lenape and Muskogee peoples, and that these lands were made fertile through the forced labor of enslaved Black and African peoples. When we evaluate space, we must also evaluate how we hold ourselves and each other energetically within these histories.

Lessons Learned

Our collaborative work centers on the idea that movement is a practice of internal cartography—a way of investigating intimacy, proximity, and vulnerability. We have utilized the Mining Witnessing Archiving (MWA) method to bridge the gap between physical experience and spatial data.

• Mining is the first step of discovery and “digging up” truths through the moving body.
• Witnessing involves a dedicated partner embodying that journey to reflect the “miner’s” testimony back to them.
• Archiving is the capture of that movement—through video or live embodiment—for ongoing reflection and knowledge generation.

We applied this method through Dancing for Justice Philadelphia (DFJ Philly) to evaluate racial and gender consciousness. We learned that movement becomes an indicating map of our relationship to space when navigating oppression or seeking liberation. By centering somatics (the internal physical experience), evaluators can proactively interrupt default settings of power and privilege that often lead to inaccurate, “twisted” representations of people’s lives.

Rad Resources

For evaluators curious about integrating these arts-based methods into their own practices, we recommend exploring these concepts:

• The Equity Evaluation framework helps practitioners navigate oppressive structures within their work.
• Choreotopography is a method where participants use movement to relate their identities to a specific geographic setting.
• Kinesthetic mapping integrates physical and topographic terrains with social and cultural experiences.
• The Arts, Culture, and Museums Topical Interest Group of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) provides a community for those using dance as a means of documentation and analysis.
• Choreographic Interviews offer a qualitative approach to integrating movement into standard interview processes to expand a participant’s expression.

Ultimately, we hope to encourage a shift toward frameworks that emphasize honoring one’s body and space, as well as the communities’ with which we work, as part of continuing to share and understand one another.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Arts, Culture, and Museums (ACM) TIG Week. The contributions all week come from ACA TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please do so using the form on our website. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.