Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2011

This article demonstrates that ‘dancing bodies’, ‘space’, ‘place’ and the ‘senses’ cannot be accepted as universal concepts since they are embedded within typically western understandings, and argues that all corporealities and spatialities are socially and culturally mediated. Wanting to engage with dance as a complex holistic, polysemic, multi-sensory and socially/culturally rooted practice, dance scholars need to be aware of cultural variations in conceptualizations of dancing bodies in space. The article offers a cross-cultural perspective, presenting different corporealities, sensoria and spatial orientations of dancing bodies using a variety of examples, ranging from Balinese dance to Josephine Baker, from Namibian to Australian Aboriginal dance.

Proximities in the work of F. Matthias Alexander and Mabel Elsworth Todd are examined for the first time. There are close geographical proximities in their location and to those in their respective circles during the period 1914–1937. Both Alexander and Todd drew on ideas prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. There are historical proximities based around the intellectual hub of New York City, notably to the philosopher John Dewey, the historian James Harvey Robinson and the pioneer dance educationalist Margaret H’Doubler. Alexander’s and Todd’s ideas and practices are considered in their time from a starting point of the idea of the ‘psycho-physical’, a term used by these practitioners in their writings. They both used it to try and speak about the self in a new way, and what they proposed had major ramifications. The article concludes by suggesting that we might reconsider how we think of dancers and dance students in the light of this historical reconsideration of Alexander’s and Todd’s ideas.

This article presents an ongoing artistic research project that constructs a somatic approach on the basis of character analytic body psychotherapy to support independent contemporary dancers in working with what is here termed performative choreography. In this framework, dancers work with collaborative forms of immediate performance, and are required to possess heightened sensory, perceptual, reflexive and interactional skills. The article links the evolving somatic approach to the context of proto-performance, underlining that somatic work, which transforms the embodiment of the dancer, is already a starting point for performance. At least in this sense there is no clear distinction between artistic process and artwork. It is suggested that character analytic body psychotherapy shares interests with performative choreography as it fosters personal and interactive skills that support the regulation of the reactions and actions of an individual in the actuality of the here and now. Therefore, it might likewise enhance dancers’ ability to embody current trends in contemporary dance. Finally, the article discusses some initial steps in applying this form of body psychotherapy to artistic practice.

Located in philosophical enquiry, this article considers ways to theorize and articulate the political significance of embodied encounter with the environment. Underlying this discussion is an interrogation of the relationship between presence, embodiment and intersubjectivity, with specific reference to Fisher-Lichte’s proposition of ‘the radical concept of presence’. In doing so, an affinity is proposed between Deleuzian inflected corporeal feminism principally through the work of Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, and somatic-informed movement practice in the environment. It is suggested that both offer a critique of the ‘mind/body’ dualism implicit within humanist understandings of subjectivity. Accordingly, each can be argued to recast subjectivity as an always embodied activity, an inter-corporeal exchange between ‘self’, recast as shifting and multiple, and ‘otherness’. In arguing this point, the article proposes an alternative model of the audience – performer relationship theorized around notions of witness and transformation. Noting the political dimensions of this for issues of difference in performance, the article seeks to elucidate the extent to which existing approaches to performance studies, or that which Melrose terms ‘expert writerly registers’, themselves rooted in a disembodied spectatorship, arguably lack the apparatus to accommodate such understandings.

In discussion with his co-collaborators, dance artists Natalie Garrett Brown and Amy Voris, this interview explores the photographic process of Christian Kipp, landscape and dance photographer, as he reflects on his experience of working on the Enter & Inhabit project. The questions asked by Garrett Brown and Voris were generated through movement and reflective writing in response to the photographic collection exhibited as part of the 2011 Dance and Somatic Practices Conference, Coventry, UK. In particular, the article explores the interrelationship between the somatic-informed movement practices and performance score creation of Garrett Brown and Voris and the sensorial play of Kipp’s photography. Co-authored by Garrett Brown, Kipp and Voris, this collection of questions and responses seeks to continue rather than merely document the Enter & Inhabit collaborative process.

This article examines new methods and practices for the performance of interrelational spaces and perceptions in choreography and sound technologies. The series of works discussed, strategically solicit somatic-informed choreography to question attentiveness to space, time and body in intermodal arrangements. The critical spatial practice examines the potential for ubiquitous technologies to disrupt perceptions of time and place in live performance situations towards new methods of performance encounter.

This article reflects upon the psychophysical patterning and layered nature of phenomenal experience, and the interconnectedness of bodymind and environment. These are conceptualized as ‘bodyscape’ and ‘tensegrity schema’ and explored by engaging the principles of tensegrity (tensional integrity) with reference to dance, performance and somatic practices. In some performance environments, performers may be called on to bring in and out of focus, or simultaneously hold in attention, multiple layers and shifting perspectives of bodily experience. Giving examples I suggest that such situations, together with some choreographic and somatic practices, may facilitate an attitude of embodied reflection and skills of perceptual alertness. These can develop awareness of and capacity to ‘navigate’ bodyscape and tensegrity schema, and support the performer to better cope with the often conflicting multisensory and polyattentional demands of complex environments, whether highly specialized performance modes or everyday. The discussion derives theoretical flavour from dance and performance studies, phenomenology, somaesthetics and cognitive science, and is informed by my current practice-led Ph.D. research in dance and choreography enquiring into notions of embodiment.

‘The emergence of form’ was an experimental framework that scrutinized ‘the emergence of form’ in the context of an intertwined exploration of different somatic practices and time-space-related reflections for an extended period of time: the duration of the complete conference. The framework was facilitated by the Aesthetic Practice and Embodiment Research Group of the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin – HZT represented by Professor Alex Arteaga, Elisabeth Molle, Katja Münker and Ka Rustler. Whilst the creation and realization of the project during the conference was a collective process, I have individually composed the text while being and moving on the floor. Passing through stages of the experiment and its embedment in the conference, I was listening and bringing into language with, in and from many layers of my living human system. Time-flow and time experience within the long-term experiment was particular not only because it was long, but because time-flow felt multi-layered and overlapping. The writing is trying to give that resonance. The intention behind this writing was to bridge and connect memory, experience, (sensuous and cognitive) reflection and evaluation without separating this subsequent act from the experiential-experimental setting of the framework itself.

This article seeks to consider how and in what ways somatic practice in relation to contemporary dance and movement performance might participate in the telling of truths about the body, and, more precisely, truths about what it means to be an embodied subject.

In this article, we present an action research project conducted over 21 weeks with seven women suffering from eating disorders for an average of 34 years. The aim was to (1) describe the women’s experiences of Feldenkrais classes via a variety of qualitative data collection methods and (2) to identify any possible relationships between changes of their body awareness and their eating disorders. A thematic analysis inspired by grounded theory showed that the action research using the Feldenkrais method of somatic education demonstrated a potential for helping the participants to consciously challenge dominant social discourse by engendering concrete changes in the way they perceived themselves. They reported being able to occasionally change their daily activities and various eating habits, thus revealing transfer of learning from the Feldenkrais classes to their daily lives.

This writing provides a contextualization of ‘Body of Becoming’ as a practice in the lineage of Amerta Movement as well as of the specific workshop ‘Progressing into No-Progress’ offered as part of the conference.

This research began as a response to fieldwork difficulties encountered in bringing somatic practices, particularly Feldenkrais, into the field of social work. The endogenous discourses produced by the Feldenkrais community to describe and analyse the practice proved to be counterproductive in convincing social work professionals of the relevance of somatics to participation in the global support of people living in a cluster of social difficulty, including health (chronic disease), and ethnic and cultural differences (migration). The analysis of endogenous discourses has shown discrepancies within the discourses themselves, and between discourse and practice. This article presents an alternative Feldenkrais description based on Gallagher’s model of body image and body schema, and the relevance of such a model to the Feldenkrais Method, but also to social work, describing the experience of social exclusion as a somatic experience.

This article is an introduction to the possibilities of the field of costume and somatic movement. It is a reflective account of my first stage of research in this area, which culminated in a workshop presentation at the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference at Coventry University. The project centred on costumes created and designed in collaboration with Sandra Arroniz Lacunza and Carolina Rieckhof (visual artists and costume designers with an M.A. in Costume Design for Performance from the London College of Fashion). The aim was to consider how costumes can link internal sensory and imaginary experiences to our perceptions. This article traces the background of the project, its research methodologies and structure, the costumes designed and experimented within the workshops and performances, and considers the project’s potential applications to performance, creative process and dance training.

After four decades of exploring various avenues of exchange, dance science and somatic education (somatics) face new challenges in integrating theory with practice. In earlier decades of interchange, these challenges largely revolved around finding compatibility between the somatic personal narrative and the positivist models prevalent in science. Today human movement science embraces phenomenology, neurophysiology and cognitive science, providing models for embodied learning. These fields of study have forged new pathways for dialogue and have offered new paradigms through which we can revisit and reimage long-held beliefs bearing on somatics and science in dance training. One emergent paradigm – embodied cognition – affords possibilities for integrating somatics with dance science. In this article, three academic educators raise questions bearing on the current potential for advancing the integration of somatics within dance science. They consider embodied cognition as one viable model of rigorous yet flexible study of somatics and science in dance.

Writing an article about a performed paper is a rare version of tautology. This article will be a form of repetition, but may not serve to clarify its original offering. What then can it offer? Perhaps it is a reminder of a stimulus but not a recording of the visual, felt and live events. It provides the words we used and the thoughts we had when responding to Susan Leigh Foster’s words. It was not our intention to refute her words, but rather to use them as an initial provocation to serve a wider dialogue, one that is not solely concerned with a purely conceptual turn or body-centric agenda. The article then describes the creative process of the performed paper and the events themselves.

This article discusses the experience of learning dance practice in a UK University in the context of phenomenological hermeneutics. The ironies of dance as an embodied practice against requirements of assessment from a higher education institution will be discussed. The research has been gathered through practice-based reflection and investigation, contextualized with information published on reflective practice and phenomenological hermeneutics. This context is essential to understand the observations made in practice and inform pedagogic developments integral to this research. This article is also informed by research concerned with assessment and autonomous learning in dance within a UK higher education context. The article outlines the particular issues of learning and assessing dance as an embodied practice and considers them in the context of phenomenological hermeneutics as described by Gadamer and Koegler. This consideration has contributed to the construction of an autonomous learning framework that acknowledges the uniqueness of dance as an embodied practice. An evaluation of the framework is presented through an analytical discussion of student feedback. The outcomes produced for the assessment of dance practice in UK higher education institutions are largely ephemeral and embodied; therefore representations of these outcomes are captured though film, discussion and writing to support students’ reflection and personal development of dance practice. However, these representations are unable to capture students’ embodied reflections and experience in their entirety in the context of a conventional, hierarchical position of the lecturer’s subjectivity. Phenomenological hermeneutics is concerned with understanding the process of interpretation and therefore provides an appropriate philosophical framework with which to reconsider the experience of learning dance in higher education as an embodied practice. Philosophical notions of dialectic interchange and temporal distance enable lecturers and students to reconsider their relationship with the ephemeral and embodied assessment outcomes of dance practice in a UK University. Assessed embodied dance practice can then be positioned outside of a subject–object interpretation that is unable to relate to the self that produces the work. The conclusion of the article is that engagement with a variety of dialectic interchange and temporal distance enables lecturers to provide a framework for students to reflect on and develop their embodied practice, approach to learning and knowledge of themselves. This can be achieved by the techniques of questioning and disclosure offered through phenomenological hermeneutics.

This article explores experiences of touch as an embodied form of social interaction and a contributory feature in the generation of knowledge in dance. Touch has a complex and somewhat problematic position in knowledge formation; prized as the parent of the senses and yet increasingly marginalized for its association with pain and abuse causing it to be perceived as unwelcome and in some cases prohibited. This article is the first stage of a larger programme of research that aims to explore what it is to come to ‘know’ and to identify what is known through touch in dance. The intention is to critically engage with an empathetic transmission of information as an integral feature of dance performer training, education and well-being. The discussion necessarily highlights the ethical interconnections that exist in learning, from a mingling of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ experiences that inform our understandings of identity, authority, role and difference.

The issue of how to write the somatic is a recurring one within embodied, practice led research. It relates to the ways in which dancers and somatic practitioners may translate or evoke felt, embodied, sensory and moving experience to the realms of pages. How might concepts, affects, feelings and spaces developed in a specific studio environment reach and contribute to new critical and creative spaces? This article is a collaborative reflection on the Insomnia Poems project, which developed from an eighteen-month studio practice between Alys Longley and Katherine Tate, as an emergent enquiry into the relationship between somatic dance improvisation and language. It purposefully follows an experimental narrative structure, acknowledging that writing can have a sense of dislocation and disruption. This echoes Longley and Tate’s somatic experiences as artists and writers working across continents and time zones. The Insomnia Poems were shaped by somatic practices including Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), poetic methodologies and the boundaries of Tate’s health. As movement scores, they took form in a deck of cards that employed photo-graphs of studio work, journal notes, drawing and poetic reflection, to give readers 52 starting points for considering dance, or 52 starting points for improvisation or choreography. The Insomnia Poems were designed like a body of cells, as poetic blueprints for creative practice, including writing provocations such as ‘waiting/ weighting’ and ‘the world writes the inside of your body with its breath’. The Insomnia Poems will be discussed in relation to the cultural geography of Giuliana Bruno, the social anthropology of Mary Douglas, and arts practitioners such as Fluxus artist George Brecht and the site-specific performance group Wrights & Sites, who work to refine experiences of everyday life into performance events.

This article aims to draw the reader into an interdisciplinary conversation between the co-authors about the use of imagery in dance creation placed under very different disciplinary lenses. The conversation has two points of departure. First, for nearly a decade the choreographer Wayne McGregor has engaged in an interdisciplinary collaborative research with cognitive scientists with the aim to develop new understandings of the choreographic process. A large percentage of this research has focused on imagery in creativity and has resulted in the development of the Choreographic Thinking Tools, currently in use by McGregor and his dance company. One third of this article is dedicated to a description of these developments combined with figures that illustrate the scientific theory lying behind them. The second point of departure and second third of this article brings these ideas into conjunction with somatic practices, as reflected in the writing of an expert practitioner invited to introduce somatics to McGregor’s dance company in the framework of the Choreographic Thinking Tools. The final section that concludes the article reintroduces scientific theory with the goal to articulate some of the contrasts and overlaps between the different approaches represented in this conversation.