- Home
- A-Z Publications
- Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices
- Previous Issues
- Volume 10, Issue 1, 2018
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 10, Issue 1, 2018
-
-
A conversation with Gill Clarke
By Sara ReedAbstractIn this interview, Gill Clarke discusses her role as a dance artist, her dance training and background and the influence that somatic practice had on her dancing, teaching and advocacy. The interview highlights the significant contribution that Gill made in exposing and sharing the potential and value of somatic informed dance education. I hope that it also adequately highlights the tremendous contribution that Gill’s work had on the development of independent dance in the United Kingdom and the organization which grew to support independent dance and dancers. Gill Clarke’s discovery of somatic practice changed her whole understanding of the dancing body and dance pedagogy and subsequently her influence on somatic informed dance education in the United Kingdom.
-
-
-
A contemporary dance practice generating ad hoc dances: Inspired by and in conversation with Rosalind Crisp
More LessAbstractDance artist Rosalind Crisp has developed a practice called ‘choreographic improvisation’ and methods of working in which the sensorial body becomes the material for a dance created in the moment; i.e. ad hoc dances. This article discusses how Crisp’s approach is a fine example of the integration of somatic and artistic processes as well as the incorporation of making choreographic choices while dancing. Intrigued by the quality of the teaching and performance works by Crisp, the author describes the methodology of ‘choreographic improvisation’ that is constituent to both the practice in the studio and in performance. This method is set in context with practices from other contemporary dance artists. Crisp’s understanding of material and the process-based interactions of material within itself and the environment prompts the linking to a current philosophical thinking of New Materialism. Creating ad hoc dances is a dynamic process sustaining emerging creations.
-
-
-
Unsettling materials: Lively tensions in learning through ‘set materials’ in the dance technique class
More LessAbstractAn explorative engagement with learning through set materials in the dance technique class enables embodied knowledge. This qualitative dance research, framed through practitioner-led inquiry, reflects upon the experience of a deliberately unsettled process of bodily learning in the studio. Set materials in contemporary dance technique classes are considered through two intertwined strands of learning; exploration and embodiment. A series of ‘lively tensions’ are articulated through the student participant data that reveal the multidimensionality of dance technique practice. The pedagogical considerations and theoretical framing of what it means for set materials to enable rather than restrict dance student agency are discussed. The teacher/researcher reflects on how unsettling the process of learning in the studio might encourage dance students to more thoroughly engage with bodily inquiry. The voices of students as research participants, are quoted in order that their words articulate the nuances of the experience of learning in dance technique.
-
-
-
Employing dwelling to reconsider individual and collaborative relationships to pedagogical practice
Authors: Sara Giddens, Liz Long and Ruth SpencerAbstractThree practitioner-researchers from the University of Central Lancashire begin to wrestle with how they might employ dwelling within their pedagogy. Weaving together images and texts from a diverse range of sources, they invite readers to consider how dwelling, as a practice, has become foregrounded in, and through, their research and professional practice, and how it might support and challenge teaching and learning within a higher education context. And how it might inform and empower new ways of working collaboratively and help us to enable and engage in a more useful and meaningful dialoguing process.
-
-
-
The Porous Body: Cultivating malleability in traditional dance training
More LessAbstractContemporary dance is constantly evolving. Its landscape has transformed and developed significantly over the past 30 years, slowly shifting from a repertoire company scene to a diverse freelance environment. In this idiosyncratic milieu, the breadth of skills that dancers need to master is constantly becoming more complex. Given that emerging contemporary dancers will be encountering the new reality of an increasingly heterogeneous freelance environment, how should training institutions best prepare students for this paradigm shift? To address this challenge, I began developing ‘The Porous Body’, a structure of feeling that promotes the practice of heightened physical and mental malleability by following four fundamental guiding principles: flow, playfulness, metaphor and paradox. Sourcing from my own performative, choreographic and pedagogical practices, and the work of dance artists, movement practitioners, philosophers and psychologists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I will formulate this method while sharing anecdotal feedback collected from dancers with whom I have recently experimented with this concept of physical and mental malleability.
-
-
-
Learning to dance in the twenty-first century: Skinner Releasing Technique as technology of becoming, within a new materialist frame
More LessAbstractThis article considers Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT) within a frame of new materialist thinking and ethics, with particular regard to Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist call for emancipated nomadic subjects to create sustainable futures in the anthropocene. I will draw parallels between this theory and SRT as a process of becoming through dance, uniquely placed to reposition and develop meaning, skills and knowledge within dance for the twenty-first century.
-
-
-
Self-somatic authority: Exploring the cultivation of somatic intelligence through a dialogic approach to self-reflection in dance technique learning
More LessAbstractThis article contemplates the notion of a ‘self-somatic authority’ by exploring the relationship between dialogue, self-reflection and the cultivation of somatic intelligence. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, and specifically his concepts of ‘authoritative discourse’ and ‘internally persuasive discourse’, the author explores whether a dialogic approach to teaching release-based contemporary dance technique in higher education can enable learners to meaningfully reflect on their practice, subsequently leading to a stronger sense of somatic intelligence. To examine the efficacy of this pedagogical approach, responses from a focus group discussion conducted with a group of first year students who participated in a cycle of action research are examined; the teacher’s reflective journal notes are also analysed. Drawing on the data, the author proposes that a dialogic approach to nurturing self-reflection in the dance technique class constructs a particular kind of somatic-informed pedagogy that not only appears to facilitate ‘self-somatic authority’, but also presents unexpected challenges and contradictions.
-
-
-
Butoh’s subversive somatics
More LessAbstractOnce relatively unknown outside of Japan, today butoh is gaining recognition as a movement training and performance genre. In English-language literature it is frequently characterized as ‘somatic’. What kind of somatics does butoh propose? To answer this question, this article places butoh within a larger historical framework of dance and western somatics, noting shared values and points of conflict. The research draws from the author’s co-taught community class in San Francisco to identify several aspects of what the author calls ‘butoh-based somatics’: practice as self-training, choreographic forces and performance attention. The article concludes by posing that to understand butoh’s subversive appeal for dancers and others seeking social change, the practice must be adapted and kept in dialogue with specific locations and contexts.
-
-
-
Reviews
Authors: Brenton Surgenor, Malaika Sarco-Thomas and Rebecca WeberAbstractInternational Somatic Movement Education Symposium, Taitung, Taiwan, 15–18 April 2016
Somatic journeys in Taiwan: Sharing and learning at the International Somatic Movement Education Symposium
Practicing Dance: A Somatic Orientation, Jenny COOGAN (ed.) (2016) Logos Verlag Berlin, ISBN-13: 9783832542139, 215 pp., p/bk, 19.90€
When I Open My Eyes – Dance, Health, Imagination, Miranda Tufnell (2017) Binstead, Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd, ISBN: 9781852731779, 226 pp., p/bk, £20
-