‘Impulsive Body’ is a work-in-progress choreographed performance that reclaims Tourettic identity through autoethnographic practice. It challenges and resists dominant narratives around Tourette Syndrome, which have too often been shaped by fearmongering academics, sensationalist media, and reductive public perceptions. Rather than accepting these external framings, the work takes back authorship of the Tourettic story.

Developed through conversations with the Tourettic community and grounded in the artist’s own lived experiences, the choreography positions Tourettic tics not as objects of study or pathology, but as creative catalysts. By using tics as the foundation of research and artistic expression, the piece pushes back against ableist frameworks that reduce Tourette Syndrome to symptoms or spectacle. Instead, it foregrounds identity, agency, and embodied knowledge as central to understanding and representing Tourettic experience.

‘Impulsive Body’ is both performance and methodology. It exemplifies a research approach that privileges lived experience and collective knowledge-making, offering a counter-narrative to clinical or deficit-based representations. The work embraces Tourettic movement as a legitimate and generative choreographic language that is unapologetically expressive, disruptive, and insightful.

As an artistic and research practice, the performance opens space for alternative readings of Tourette Syndrome. It invites audiences to engage with the complexities of Tourettic life: the support needs, frustrations, and angers that exist alongside the joys, creativity, and hopes for Tourettic futures. In doing so, the performance resists oversimplification and highlights the richness of embodied experience.
Ultimately, Impulse is not only a performance but a reclaiming. It is an assertion of voice, presence, and possibility. It challenges audiences to reconsider how Tourette Syndrome is represented and understood, offering unfiltered insights that center Tourettic people as narrators of their own stories.

Daniel P Jones is a disability scholar and creative practitioner based in the North East of England. His work focuses on translating the embodyminded experiences of Tourette Syndrome, and imagining a future of 'Tourettic Studies' through interdisciplinary and creative methodological approaches.

COI Disclosure: I have/had an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with a for-profit or not-for-profit organization: Employee at Durham University