Schedule Guide

INSTALLATIONS

Dr. Kim Sargent-Wishart, "Postcards from Home" 

Postcards from Home is a collection of postcards created for the conference by Kim Sargent-Wishart (Melbourne, Australia). 

They are composed from photographs, drawings and text contributed by participants in zoom classes in Body-Mind Centering® and creative practices, including photography, writing, object arranging and sound mapping, during 2020-22. The postcards exist as an analogue archive of long-distance, digital connections, and evidence a particular kind of intimacy and depth of practice that playing-from-home allows. 

This project is an attempt to gather some of the fine, often quiet, creative work that many of us were doing in our loungerooms, kitchens and yards during the pandemic.  Sharing this creative archive of practice through tactile objects is a way to continue the experiment in creating intimate connections across long distances – continuing to practice alone and together at the same time.

Conferees are invited to take a postcard home with them, with a small invitation to take the prompt into further practice and play – into movement, sounding, drawing or writing. The postcards and accompanying text will also be archived in digital form at kimsargentwishart.com. 

Bio: Kim Sargent-Wishart (PhD, RSME) is an artist, researcher, educator & writer specializing in somatic education, physical practices, somatic writing & contemplative photography. Research interests include experiential embryology and physiology as models for creative practice, and modes of presence and perception. A Certified Teacher of Body-Mind Centering® and Registered Somatic Movement Educator (ISMETA), Kim has practiced movement education and bodywork since the early 1990s. Her arts practice is influenced by Miksang contemplative photography and dance/movement improvisation. Kim is a co-editor of The Art of Embodiment (2021), co-founder of ASTER Association, and co-director of Somatic Education Australasia (SEA), offering the Body-Mind Centering® licensed Somatic Movement Education program in Melbourne. kimsargentwishart.com 

FILM EXHIBITION

To view online - Click here

Patiyod Chansuwan (Performer & Creator of "Goodbye my body"), Panadda Imsaart (Performer & Creator of "Me-Memory"), Rathakorn Pawalee (Performer & Creator of "Feeling"), Taranitorn Sinthao (Performer & Creator of "Meaning"), Tanatchaporn Kittikong (Supervisor)

"Bhen Yu Khue: The Journey of Self-Discovery through Meditation, Body and Site"

"BhenYuKhue (Being): The Journey of Self-Discovery through Meditation, Body, and Site" is a video performance project that delves into questions of identity, one’s place in society, and the meaning of existence for individuals in their early twenties. The project serves as a reflection of the journey undertaken by four young performance practitioners. These individuals have undergone training in Meditation/Mindfulness-based movement (MbM), which is a research project conducted by Tanatchaporn Kittikong. Through MbM, they embark on a quest to discover the self and explore the essence of existence through movement and mindfulness meditation. This exploration encompasses various dimensions, including the body, space, memory, and emotions.

The project features four artworks that are part of the video performance:  

1. "Goodbye my body" by Patiyod Chansuwan: This piece explores physical imperfections from the perspective of a transgender individual. The video performance consists of two episodes: “Care” (6:49 Minutes) and “Change” (10:07 Minutes).

2. "Me-Memory" by Panadda Imsaart: This work revolves around the search for self-discovery through personal experiences and memories shared by others. The video performance consists of four episodes: “Grandmother” (5:54 Minutes), “Father” (6:43 Minutes), “Mother” (5:48 Minutes) and “Grandfather” (3:50 Minutes).

3. "Feeling" by Rathakorn Pawalee: This piece delves into the artist’s vulnerability and fragility through personal experiences of loss. This video performance consists of three episodes: “Fragile” (10.34 Minutes), “Fear” (12:09 Minutes) and “Miss” (12 Minutes).

4. "Meaning" by Taranitorn Sinthao: This artwork aims to comprehend the expression of love through objects. The video performance consists of two episodes: “Give” (8:35 Minutes) and “Get” (9 Minutes).

These young artists have incorporated the MbM approach into their performance practice as a means of creative exploration, utilizing it as a tool for performance creation and embodiment techniques. Through this approach, they are able to reflect on their authentic "being," embracing their true selves and delving into deeper layers of self-discovery and expression. The MbM approach allows them to explore their personal journeys, engage with their bodies, emotions, and surroundings, tap into their unique experiences and perspectives, and create performances that are deeply rooted in their individuality and authenticity.

Group bio: Patiyod Chansuwan, Panadda Imsaart, Rathakorn Pawaree, and Taranitorn Sinthao are Thai undergraduate students enrolled in the Performance Practice Program at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Khon Kaen University. Their collective works presented under the project name "Bhen Yu Khue" serve as their senior project. Assisting and supervising them is Assistant Professor Tanatchaporn Kittikong, Chair of Performance Practice Program at the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Khon Kaen University, Thailand.

Greta Gauhe, "Memories of Skin" 

"Memories of Skin" is an experimental screendance film that explores our relationship with touch in an era of limited physical contact. Through a captivating digital collage of new and pre-lockdown footage, the film delves into interpersonal connections, examining different aspects of touch and its profound effects.

During the lockdown, the dancers actively sought meaningful tactile experiences to deepen their connection with their surroundings and bodies. Drawing on memories of touch and the power of imagination, they embarked on a transformative journey of discovery. "Memories of Skin" invites viewers to embark on their own introspective exploration.

The film encourages audiences to reflect on personal memories of touch and tap into their imaginative capacities. It serves as an invitation to reconnect with the sensory realm and rediscover the transformative nature of touch.

Bio: Greta Gauhe is a London-based freelance choreographer, dancer, and researcher who has been making performative works since 2015. Her multidisciplinary works focus on political, social, or ecological issues, with a particular emphasis on exploring empathy, touch, and connection through the medium of dance. Greta challenges the traditional separation between performer and spectator, and her works have been performed in both theatres and art institutions. After completing her MA in Performance at the London Contemporary Dance School, Greta pursued a MFA in Choreography at Trinity Laban to further develop her artistic practice. She continued her research as part of a practice-led PhD, investigating gaps in touch-related online practices at Coventry University's C-DaRE department. As the artistic director of the Follow Through Collective, Greta has managed various productions for theatres, museums, and outdoor spaces. Her works have been featured at festivals and stages across the UK and Europe, including the Resolution Festival, NordArt exhibition, RichMix Theatre, Chisenhale Dance Space, V&A Museum, October Gallery, University of the Arts Berlin, Albany Theatre, and the Camden Fringe Festival. Greta is also actively involved in community dance projects, working with people of all ages and backgrounds. She has taught creative dance classes and workshops for both professional and non-professional dancers. Greta is a recipient of the Leverhulme Arts Scholarship during her MFA at Trinity Laban and the M4Cities studentship during her PhD at Coventry.

Polly Hudson, "These Hands"

This short film shares some of the work that I have been investigating in the garden in embodiment and in permaculture. The film responds particularly to notions of women’s labour and to eco-feminism.  It is part of ongoing work as a gardener and dancer, a long-term research endeavour on an inner city urban allotment, entitled And So We Sow, developing since 2017.

Offering one of a series of (dance) films created on site and the work draws on principles from Releasing dance practices, particularly Skinner Releasing Technique, from organic gardening techniques, and from wider embodied engagement. 

Eco-Somatics is described as an area of research and practice that combines the knowledge systems of somatics and ecology to expand our sense of self, and to include our wider relations by re-rooting us back into our bodies, and awakening our sensory perceptions (Cudney & Rozek 2022). If we reflect on how our relationship with the land(scape), plants and nature informs embodiment, this allows a moving towards deeper understanding of Eco-Somatics. Perhaps if we spend more time with and on the soil, and more time with our embodiment, we can have a deepened relationship with our inner and outer landscapes simultaneously, and potentially a clearer and embodied response to the climate emergency.

Bio: A teacher, artist, gardener, and dancer, Polly’s work focuses on process within an artistic practice, ethical approaches to teaching, leadership and interaction, Skinner Releasing Technique, and Eco-Somatics. She has made dance works that have been shown internationally to critical acclaim over a twenty-five year period. As a certified teacher of SRT, the principles of which underpin her approach to her work in all areas, Polly is curious about at what point a practice or an activity becomes art. 

Polly is a Reader in Dance, and currently Head of Movement at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. She is Associate Director of CIPA, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts, at Birmingham City University. 

Registration (16:00 - 18:00, ICC)

Pre-Conference Welcome (16:00 - 18:00, ICC)

For those arriving on Thursday evening, please join us for a welcome session. We will have light refreshments and there will be an opportunity to meet other conference delegates. Diego Pizarro (Federal Institute of Brasília, Brazil) will offer a 30 minute, inclusive welcome warm up in the studio for those who wish to take part. A conference registration desk will also be on site to receive your conference pack.

REGISTRATION - 9:00-9:45 - ET

WELCOME - 9:45-10:15 - ET 101

SESSION 1 - 10:30-12:30

1A - Paper Panel: Social Justice - ICC G21

Sarah W. Holmes, PhD, "Racialized Bodily Grammar: A Case Study of White Privilege in the Embodied Discourse of Somatic Practice"

As valuable as somatics may be, the reliance on individualism, humanism, scientific study, authentic movement, and dynamic processes potentially reinforces and normalizes racially biased behaviors, attitudes, and theorization. At its core, this presentation exposes a dialog between self-reflexivity and critical self-reflexivity both in the immediacy of the action itself as well as after the fact. Throughout, I reflect on the characteristics of my white fragility in the response to the embodied action of somatic practice. I make myself known as an American middle-class white, able-bodied, cis-gender, heterosexual, woman. Somatics, in essence, gives me the space to explore how I make sense of discomfort and ease, uncertainty and confusion often associated with white fragility. Do I expand into, seeking and sensing the stability of whiteness? Or rather, do I actively and unconsciously withdraw from discomfort? Do somatics reaffirm or dismantle my whiteness? These physical narratives when put in conversation with movement forms such as improvisation, Pilates, and ballet add depth to the discussion about race and somatic practice. This is not an effort to collapse whiteness, nor does my subjective experience speak for all white people. Instead, I ask within the intrapersonal, immediate, and ephemeral experience, is my whiteness and fragility revealed through somatic practice? 

Bio: Before beginning her career as a dance educator, Sarah Holmes worked as a Pilates teacher trainer and as a lifelong dancer, believes in the body’s capacity to heal itself through movement and creative expression. She holds a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside; an M.A. in dance from Mills College, Oakland, CA; a B.A. in economics from Scripps College, Claremont, CA and is currently pursuing an MFA in dance at the University of Wisconsin. Working with the locus of control outside of the body, i.e., not entirely an interior exploration of the kinesthetic self, Sarah’s current research ideas investigate the intersection between choreography, self, empathy, technology, transference of labor, and neurological disease. 

Campbell Edinborough, "The Challenges of Somatic Practice Under Neoliberalism"

The field of modern somatics was born in a social and political context in which theories of liberal democracy were being placed in active dialogue with humanist ideology. As the world emerged from the Second World War and the trauma of the Holocaust, many somatic practitioners sought to make optimistic connections between human beings’ natural inheritance as social animals and the practices of freedom and democracy. 

As we move further away from the politics and culture that shaped 20th Century theories of somatics, it seems appropriate to take stock of the ways in which experiences of somatic practice are being recontextualised by new social and political realities. This paper will examine what it means to teach somatic practices in a political context that increasingly limits our freedoms. It will explore the tensions that exist between the experiences of embodiment proposed within somatic education and the experience of living under neoliberalism.  

At the centre of the paper is a question: How do the invitations made within somatic practice interrupt the social and political realities of our lives? This question emerges from the recognition that the social and political circumstances under which training takes place often conflict with invitations to increase our sensitivity, agency and sense of freedom. However, instead of suggesting that we abandon certain somatic principles in order to conform to the politics of the societies we inhabit, the paper will argue that somatic practice can be reframed as a potential mode of activist critical inquiry. It will argue that the invitation to develop perceptual awareness opens social interstices through which practitioners can begin to recognise schisms between hegemonic social norms and felt experience. The paper will conclude by arguing that somatic practices’ invitations to attend to felt experience can create opportunities for recognising and processing the conflicting demands of our social reality – potentially opening valuable spaces for reflection, deliberation and critique. 

Bio: Campbell Edinborough is Lecturer in Writing for Performance in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds.  His research into performer training and performance making is informed by a longstanding interest in somatics and physical education. He qualified as a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method in 2007 and continues to explore a wide range of movement practices - with a particular interest in the martial arts of Aikido and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.  Campbell is the author of Theatrical Reality: Space, Embodiment and Empathy in Performance (Intellect 2016) and the weekly Substack Deep Embodiment. 

Lígia Tourinho (Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)), Aline de Oliveira Bernardi (Master in Dance at UFRJ), Andreia Yonashiro (Master in Dance at UFRJ), Débora Oliveira (Student of the Master in Dance at UFRJ), Flora Bulcão (Student of the Master in Dance at UFRJ), Luana Garcia (Student of the Master in Dance at UFRJ), and Rúbia Vaz (Student of the Master in Performing Arts of at UFRJ)

"The somatic field and its challenges in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil"

This paper proposal brings together dance artists and researchers grouped at the Post-Graduate Program in Dance of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro under the academic advising of Ligia Tourinho. Engaged with Somatic practices and work, they have been exploring solutions to face the lack of infrastructure, cuts in funds, social damages and strong inequality in the southeast area of Brazil. From their experiences with practices such as Laban/Bartenieff, Body Mind Centering, Eutony, enchantments, astrology, performance art, and feminisms, they will bring each person’s research in the field of Somatics in order to raise topics such as class struggles, knowledge from the land, sense of belonging, racial and social issues, fight for rights, archival practices, gender inequality, among others. Nowadays somatic practices are established as a field of research engaging embodiement, its singularities and its arrangement in the world in an performatic, ecological and critical dimension. The somatic perspective is a possibility to develop creative and performative processes in dance. This group of researchers-and-artists will share ideas, practices and strategies with experience reports, bibliographic review and surveys on the field. 

Bios:

Ligia Tourinho is a Brazilian movement artist, actress and dance artist. She is professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, is 44 years old and is dedicated to projects anchored in improvisation, body dramaturgy, somatics and feminism. She holds a PhD in Arts at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), a Master's degree in Arts and Bachelor in Performing Arts by the same institution. She is a specialist in Laban/ Bartenieff by Faculty Angel Vianna (FAV) and Certified Movement Analyst by the Laban Institute of Movement Studies (CMA/ LIMS/ New York City). She teaches at the Bachelor's Programs of Dance, Dance Theory, Dance and Theater Direction at UFRJ and the Master's Program of Dance and the Postgraduate Program in Laban/Bartenieff at Faculty Angel Vianna (FAV-RJ). 

Aline Bernardi is a transdisciplinary artist: performer, writer, choreographer/bodyworker, teacher and researcher of body and scenic arts, with interest in the transit between dance and writing in the creative process. She works with emphasis on improvisation studies. Director of the artistic stamp Celeiro Moebius; creator and proposer of the Lab Corpo Palavra. She holds a Master's degree in Dance by the PPGDan/UFRJ, Post-graduation studies by PCA/FAV, and the Advanced Training in Performance by C.E.M. in Lisbon. Aline is the curator of the Entre Serras Residências Artísticas. Some of her awarded works are the book-performance "Decopulagem"; the relational performance "Corpo Ambiente"; the videoart "Materia/Substance"; the video-performance "Encantografar: estado de verbo desconhecido"; and the dance-theatre spectacle "As Histórias de @evamariageni"- www.alinebernardi.com.

Andreia Yonashiro is a choreographer, dancer and artist. She has recently completed her Master's studies in the Post-Graduate Program in Dance (PPGDan) by Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Dance at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and has been working with Laban Movement Analisys (LMA) for 20 years. Crossing the influences of her asymmetric creative path, she worked in the creation, conception and direction of awarded dance projects such as "Clarabóia" and "Estudos para clarabóia", "Tempest", "Erosão", "A Spilled Milk", "Toró" “The flower floating beyond darkness”, which were presented in several cities in Brazil, Norway, Italy and Finland. In 2011, Andreia created the platform Cerco (http://cerco.me) for multimodal dance production.

Débora Oliveira works between the arts and neuromotor reeducation. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in the Post-Graduate Program in Dance by Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication of Performing Arts by Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and the Eutony professional certification by the Brazilian Institute of Eutony. Since 2018, she has been recreating aspects of daily life as artistic experiences with the project Transforming Body into Dance between South America and Europe. After researching about the sense of "home", she is now exploring notions of "work" through forms of interspecies movement and inquiring the relations between Gerda Alexander's artistic formation and the transdisciplinarity of Eutony in her Master’s studies. - http://deboraoliveira.online 

Flora Bulcão is a choreographer, dancer and multidisciplinary artist. She is a Master's student in the Post-Graduate Program in Dance (PPGDan) at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, is developing the work "NESTA", starting from the mother's womb to the world. From her Bachelor's graduation in Visual Arts at State University of Rio de Janeiro, she created the performance "Algo tão doce", presented in several art galleries - MAR-RJ, Centro de Artes Helio Otica, Z42, Bela Maré and at the Panorama Festival. Flora is a member of Grupo Sats and the collective Medeia e Suas Margens (IART - UERJ), and a former dancer at Cia. Idea, Contadores de Estórias, among others. In cinema, acted in the film “O Ornitologo” (by João Pedro Rodrigues - PT).

Luana Garcia is a Brazilian dancer and astrologer. She holds a Bachelor in dance and a specialist in cultural accessibility at the federal university of Rio de Janeiro. She has a certificate in ballet and dance from the technical school of arts from the state of São Paulo. Luana is currently coursing her mastering degree in dance at the federal university of Rio de Janeiro. Her research lies upon dance, astrology and somatic practices. She’s also worked as a body coach for actors at some plays, as a coordinator of research at the choreographical center of Rio de Janeiro, and in an internship at the cultural ministry’s project: national dance mapping of Rio de Janeiro. 

Rúbia Vaz is a performance artist. She studied at Escola Livre de Teatro, with a Bachelor's degree in Social Communication from Faculdade Cásper Líbero and is a Master's student at Post-Graduate Program in Scenic Arts by Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of the texts “como a palavra amor sai naturalmente das nossas bocas/ how the word love comes naturally out of our mouths”, to be published by Editora Urutau and adapted for the relational multimedia performance “ophelia is a-live”, and “sismos não listados/ unlisted seisms”, staged by Luh Maza at Portas Abertas SESI. Currently working on the lecture-performance “pátria, quem te pariu?/ fatherland, who birthed you?”.

1B - Workshop - ET221

Aramo Olaya, "Somatic performativity as the embodiment of the principles of contact improvisation" 

This gathering aims to provide a laboratory experience of somatic performativity, which entails a collective sensation of self-organizing and intelligence that occurs when a group of improvisers feel the expanded sensing, individual and group embodiment, energy balance, and play that unfold during the practice of the principles of contact improvisation as taught at EspacioFCI, a contact improvisation school led by dancers Cristiane Boullosa and Diana Bonilla in Madrid.

As a former student of EspacioFCI for over a decade, I am currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at the University of California Davis, which was established by Professor Lynette Hunter in the early 2000s. Notable contact improvisation practitioners and theorists associated with this program include Nita Little, who later founded the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC). In my research, I integrate the somatic communication methodologies of EspacioFCI and key concepts from the Performance Studies program at UC Davis, such as Lynette Hunter's understanding of performativity. Hunter defines performativity as an event that can be methodologically articulated, leading to transformative moments and the emergence of repeatable forms in studio practice (Hunter 2020).

For Cristiane Boullosa, the principles of contact improvisation embody the physicality of the practice. (Boullosa 2022) Some of these principles include non-judgment, non-hierarchy, and individual and collective response-ability. In my experience, somatic performativity arises when a group of contact improvisers commit to repeating the practice of contact improvisation based on its somatic and political principles. This commitment fosters a non-hierarchical, non-judgmental, responsive, and responsible interactive relationship between the dancers and the space. During this brief lab session, I will attempt to introduce core practices from EspacioFCI that allow participants to embody these principles as somatic experiences. 

Bio: Aramo Olaya is a dancer-researcher focusing on contact improvisation (CI), tango, somatic communication, performativity, queer touch practices, and sexualities. They have studied CI at EspacioFCI Madrid and have facilitated numerous workshops on embodied philosophy in Europe, the US, and Latin America. Aramo Olaya holds a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, a PhD in the Sociology of Gender, and is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at the University of California Davis. 

1C - Workshop - ICC G22

Kitty Walker, "Clowndance: Disrupting perfectionism"

This practical workshop will introduce a short sequence of game-led provocations, drawn from the pedagogy of theatrical clowning, re-imagined and tailored specifically for dancers. We will explore how to bring clowning principles of imperfection, risk, laughter and play into vocational and university dance training settings, and professional dance practice.

Highly self-critical perfectionism is a common trait in many professional dancers and vocational dance students; there comes a tipping point where the necessary drive for excellence becomes a fear of failure, tied up with negative self-image. Eusanio, Thomson and Jaque further identify that ‘shame may be a strong characteristic of perfectionism in dancers.’ (see Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, 18(3), 2014). Fear and shame, as well as being harmful to the emotional wellbeing of the performer, shut down the potential for communication and connection with others in the studio and in performance.

However, while dancers fear failure, clowns embrace it. One of the cornerstones of theatrical clown pedagogy is the concept of ‘the flop’; the idea that when the performer has failed in their attempt to entertain, it is their vulnerability in the moment of admitting that failure that forges real empathy and connection with the audience. It is this state of vulnerability, openness, and playful connection that I propose as an antithesis to the perfectionistic shame of the overly self-critical dancer.

In my workshop and rehearsal settings I use laughter; laughing at failure, and with other people, as a tool to generate bonding and complicité. The goal is to create a safe space for risk-taking and vulnerability by disarming dancers’ perfectionism. This workshop will explore: 

• the embodied quality of playfulness

• identifying moments of pleasure in improvised dances

• direct and personal communication with peers-as-audience  

The practical exercises and games in this workshop will be accompanied by previous research participants’ responses on the themes of perfectionism and vulnerability, and autoethnographic reflection from within my practice research process. 

Bio: Kitty Walker is in the second year of her practice as research PhD at De Montfort University, entitled Choreographing Comedy: Convergences of contemporary dance and theatrical clowning in performance and training. Her practical research documentation and reflection lives at www.clowndance.co.uk. Kitty comes to this research from more than fifteen years of performance-making practice. Under her professional name, Kitty Winter, she works as a movement director, theatre choreographer and director specialising in performance for young audiences. She is based in the East Midlands and works regularly with Derby Theatre, New Perspectives and Nottingham Playhouse, including movement directing their acclaimed production of The Kite Runner which has transferred to the West End and Broadway. Kitty also lectures in physical theatre, directing, devising and movement, teaching regularly for Goldsmiths and Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. She trained at Laban, and on the movement MA at RCSSD.  

LUNCH - 12:30-14:30 - ET 101

SESSION 2 - 14:30-16:30

2A - Paper Panel: Feminist Somatics - ICC G21

Polly Hudson, "And So We Sow: Eco-Somatics in Action"

In this primarily visual and poetic contribution- part manifesto, part rally call for environmental action, part memoir- I will share some of the work that I have been investigating in the garden in embodiment and in permaculture. It is part of ongoing work as a gardener and dancer, a long-term research endeavour on an inner city urban allotment, entitled And So We Sow, developing since 2017.

Offering a series of images as a backdrop, created on site in collaboration with the photographer Ming De Nasty, the work draws on principles from Releasing dance practices, particularly Skinner Releasing Technique, from organic gardening techniques, and from wider embodied engagement. 

Eco-Somatics is described as an area of research and practice that combines the knowledge systems of somatics and ecology to expand our sense of self, and to include our wider relations by re-rooting us back into our bodies, and awakening our sensory perceptions (Cudney & Rozek 2022). If we reflect on how our relationship with the land(scape), plants and nature informs embodiment, this allows a moving towards deeper understanding of Eco-Somatics. Perhaps if we spend more time with and on the soil, and more time with our embodiment, we can have a deepened relationship with our inner and outer landscapes simultaneously, and potentially a clearer and embodied response to the climate emergency.

Bio: A teacher, artist, gardener, and dancer, Polly’s work focuses on process within an artistic practice, ethical approaches to teaching, leadership and interaction, Skinner Releasing Technique, and Eco-Somatics. She has made dance works that have been shown internationally to critical acclaim over a twenty-five year period. As a certified teacher of SRT, the principles of which underpin her approach to her work in all areas, Polly is curious about at what point a practice or an activity becomes art. Polly is a Reader in Dance, and currently Head of Movement at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. She is Associate Director of CIPA, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts, at Birmingham City University. 

Dr. Thomas Kampe, "Re-writing Somatic Legacies: Feldenkrais & the Modernist Body"

This paper aims to re-view the beginnings of Moshe Feldenkrais’ (1904-1984)  somatic  educational work as situated within an interdisciplinary milieu that emerged from utopian and diasporic Modernist artistic and educational endeavors, mainly activated by women practitioners and thinkers. It resists dominant historical narratives of Feldenkrais’ practices as the work of a monolithic male genius, and gives voice to marginalized women somatic educators of the modernist period in Palestine and Israel.

By offering an alternative and feminist somatic history, it retraces body-codes and emancipatory ethics found in the work of Feldenkrais to the beginnings of Modernist European Dance and Body-Cultures. The author suggests that Feldenkrais’s emphasis on fostering the mature adult as a creative and emancipated individual emerged from the early modernist ‘Körperkultur’ (body culture) and dance beginnings that formed important part of the cultural milieu in 1920’s Palestine. Feldenkrais experienced holistic dance/gymnastic studies with Israeli expressive modern dance pioneer Margalit Ornstein (Vienna 1888 – Tel Aviv 1973) before moving to Paris. Ornstein was influenced by the work of Viennese Choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (1890 - 1959) and European body-culture pioneer Bess Mensendieck (1864–1957), both visionary emancipatory proto-somatic pioneers. While revealing similarities between Mensendieck’s, Bodenwieser’s and Feldenkrais’s ethos and practices, the paper also places Feldenkrais into the context of post 1940’s Israeli body-culture which drew on European Modern Dance and holistic Reform-Gymnastic practices including the radical work of Elsa Gindler (1885-1961) and her followers such as Ellie Friedman, Judith Bineter or Lotte Kristeller.

Bio: Thomas Kampe (PhD) has worked as a performing artist, researcher and somatic educator across the globe. Between 2012 and 2022 he worked as Professor of Somatic Performance & Education at Bath Spa University, UK, where he co-directed the Creative Corporealities Research Group. Artistic collaborations include work with Liz Aggiss, Hilde Holger, Julia Pascal, Tanzinitiative Hamburg, Somatische Akademie Berlin, & with Carol Brown on re-embodying the diasporic practices of Modernist choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser. He is currently collaborating with Claudia Kappenberg on researching the Viennese legacy of dance artist Hilde Holger (1905-2001), and with Intercultural Roots (UK) on various eco-somatic & arts for health projects. For 2023 he has received a Lisa Ullmann Fellowship to develop his research on Jewish exile dance pedagogue Tile Roessler in Berlin, Dresden and Tel Aviv. Thomas’ research focuses on critical somatic legacies. He co-edited JDSP Vol. 9. (2017) ‘Bodily undoing: Somatics as practices of critique’ and most recently JDSP Vol. 13.1 & 2 (2022): ‘Embodying Eco- Consciousness: Somatics, Aesthetic Practice and Social Action’. He is the co-editor of the book 'Beyond Forgetting: persecution/exile/memory - transdisciplinary perspectives on education in design and performance' (Cuvillier 2021). Thomas is a practitioner of The Feldenkrais Method® and guest-editor of the IFF research Journal Vol. 6 (2019): Practices of Freedom: The Feldenkrais Method and Creativity'. He co-directed Body IQ Berlin Festival 2019 & 2021. https://thomaskampe.wordpress.com, www.thomaskampe.com

Dr. Amaara Raheem (VCA Dance, University of Melbourne), "The Dance of the Writer: A Lecture-Performance"

In 2016 I embarked on an artist residency, curated by Access Gallery, aboard a cargo ship, sailing from Vancouver to Shanghai, spending 23 days at sea. Whilst on board I came across the ship’s log - a public, legal record that noted routine information about our crossing. As I spent time examining the log I began to re/consider the term “emergent”. Historically, emergent is referred to as something rising out of a surrounding view and coming into notice. The ship’s log created a set of conditions that allowed for such an emergence, offering me a device in conversation between my body and the body of the ship. The ship’s log was written in pencil, updated every four hours by an officer on watch, sometimes erased, wanting and partial. Logbooks, we should remember, are capable of concealing as much as they reveal. For me, one of the residency practices that emerged was logging: a mode of capture continually in flux, generating a collective document in conversation with a travelling event that is part-pragmatic, part-mythic, part-recall, part-speculative and most importantly, performative. 

I’m interested in the assembly of emergent content, revealed as textual bodies; evidence of dancing as dance documents you can touch with your hands rather than creative responses. Circumnavigating across unfixed notions of ‘belonging’, I sought to generate new creative texts written in and through the liminal site of ‘in-residence’ in a cargo ship; where concepts of containerization - space / holding / embodiment / generative constraints - activate inhabitation as interlocking processes of writing, listening, and eavesdropping whilst engaging in and with a wider mobility. Logging offers an embodied experience of inhabitation that enables fictive renderings and physical imagination communicable in a wider context so that the presence of textual bodies does not knit itself together in the process of printing words on the page but rather extends beyond measure. The overarching aim of this dance of the writer is to unfix notions of ‘belonging’ as a state of ‘being there’ and instead reveal ‘belonging’ as a tuning/attuning; a dynamic emergent movement that draws on inheritance, interaction, memory and myth. 

Bio: Amaara Raheem was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, grew up in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia and lived in London, UK for fifteen years (2000-2015) and is now based between Melbourne and regional Victoria. She is a dance-artist, researcher, writer and curator working with movement and language. Her work is site-specific, multi-modal and includes live performance, video, text and improvisation. She’s often involved in collaborative processes of performance making, underpinned by strong feminist sensibilities. Amaara holds a PhD by practice from the School of Architecture and Urban Design (RMIT University) and is a part-time Lecturer at The Victorian College of the Arts (Dance), University of Melbourne. In 2022 she was selected for the ABC Top 5 Arts residency to create media content on her ongoing research on practices of artists in-residence. Amaara is one of four editors of Choreographic Practices Journal, and is writing a chapter for upcoming anthology 'Writing Choreography: Extending the Conventions of Dance' (eds. Leena Rouhiainen, Kirsi Heimonen, Rebecca Hilton and Chrysa Parkinson), Routledge, 2023. Most recently, Amaara was awarded the Frank Van Staten Fellowship (Arts Centre Melbourne) to work with Chunky Move’s dance archives.

Lionel Popkin (Professor, UCLA), "Moving with Mixed Metaphors: Six Positions on Uncertainty"

Between March and June of 2020, in the first round of COVID lockdowns, I made Six Positions on Uncertainty, a six-channel movement video from scores that grew out of my wrestling with the fear, confusion, and isolation lockdown brought, while also thinking through the myriad of influences in my movement training history. With the world at a precipice, I asked, how do I want to move now? Not how have I been trained to move or approach moving, but what aspects of those trainings do I still want to embrace, and which would I like to jettison? I was looking for ways to move that embraced my complex cultural and kinetic history.

A partial list of some of those influences: 

1.  Over 30 years of Western somatic training in both image-based (predominantly Skinner Releasing Technique) and anatomically based forms (including Klein/Mahler Technique).

2.  A lifetime of cultural imagery, iconography, and values from South Asia originating from half my lineage and Judaism from the other half.

3.  A performance career that includes a spell in the quintessentially Western post-modern Trisha Brown Dance Company.

4.  An intensive period, early in my training, living in New Delhi studying Kathak, one of India’s neo-classical dance forms.

5.  Teaching for the past 20 years in university settings, absorbing and practicing multiple theoretical approaches to image construction, with an affinity for questions on the role of the archive in contemporary performance.

6.  Acknowledging my perspective is from the North American standpoint. The racial politics in the United States are very different than the UK, particularly within the South Asian diaspora.

With this project, I sought to move out of universalist ‘theories of’ or ‘proposals of’ a body and move into the individual ‘practice’ put forward by my complicated and multi-faceted history.  In my presentation I will screen the video, interrupting it to break down how I built its structure and material, paying particular attention to the many sources that informed its development, sharing these inter-cultural scores, their process of development, and my desire to foster personal and culturally specific processes to create somatic structures of care. 

Bio: Lionel Popkin is a maker of time-based and body-based kinetic scenarios which manifest in performance and video art (a.k.a choreography). His latest project Reorient the Orient, set to premiere in 2024, is an 8-hour durational installation examining his own archive of 30-years of artmaking within the history of representations of South Asian performers on Western stages. The event is presented in a gallery format with intermittent performed events. The work includes 12 kinetic or movement scores, 6 videos (of varying scales), at least 5 rugs, approximately 217 neon yellow wiffle balls, large stacks of archival matter, a huge purple sleeping bag suit, and an elephant (not a real one, that’s cruel). His work has been presented in numerous cities in the United States (where he is based) and internationally. He performed as a dancer in the companies of Trisha Brown, Terry Creach, and Stephanie Skura. He has been commissioned by San Diego's Lower Left Performance Collective, the Li Chiao-Ping Dance Company, Nejla Yatkin, and Carolyn Hall. He is a Professor of Choreography at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique, and a resident artist at the 18th Street Arts Center. 

2B - Workshop - ET 221

Andrea Wright, Noorafshan Mirza, and Ulanah Morris, "Through My Eyes With My Body- Film Screening and Workshop"

Disparities within healthcare continue to dominate where people from the Global Majority (Campbell-Stephens, 2021) experience poorer outcomes, experiences and access to equitable care (Raleigh & Holmes, 2021). It can be argued that persistent pain has far reaching impacts for people of the Global Majority due to intersecting structural oppressions conflating to contribute to the pain experience (Kiverstein et al., 2021).

Persistent pain is a complex interaction of biology, story, society and culture. In the mainstream there is a growing appreciation of the ‘biopsychosocial’ approach to persistent pain, however, confronting the ‘hard problem’ of the social (colonial) construction of racism within these frameworks remains problematic (McGregor & Walumbe, 2021). 

Somatics offers complementarity to dominant biomedical approaches with persistent pain (Meehan & Carter, 2021). However within the discipline of somatics, as with healthcare more broadly, whiteness erases consciously or unconsciously the experiences of those it ‘others’ by invisibilising their lived realities. If fragmentation within pain healthcare and somatics disciplines persists for certain population groups, what must we attend to in our collective past to critically interrogate how we attend to our present? How might somatic practices offer us the resources required to sustain the weight of what is seen and propel us forward towards a more equitable vision of collective growth?

Complementing these ideas with parallel conversations in the Somatic Practice and Pain Network, guidelines were co-created for the network and a short film, ‘Through My Eyes, With My Body’ emerged: a co-authored, collaborative project between three women from African and Pakistani heritage, exploring concepts of race and pain from a Black woman’s perspective.  

This will be a participatory film screening as part of a facilitated workshop inviting participants to engage in a somatic response to reflect ‘back’ on the film and beyond.

Participants are invited to respond in a variety of creative ways. By attending to our internal reaction within the context we are embedded in, what will be our collective response? We will co-create a ‘message’ we wish to amplify for future gatherings about our collective aspirations and actions for change. 

Bios:

Andrea Wright. Andrea practices as a musculoskeletal physiotherapist, a somatic educator, facilitator, shamanic practitioner and creative. An aspiring early career researcher, she is interested in race, social identity, somatics and embodied consciousness. 

Noorafshan Mirza. Noorafshan Mirza’s practice is centred on collaboration. As a filmmaker, creative artist & lecturer her work often engages with contradictions of inequality, power, privilege and (non) participation. Her artistic practice spans moving image, installation, workshops and performed actions. 

Ulanah Morris. Ulanah is an experienced group facilitator, personal & spiritual development & holistic educator & practitioner. Ulanah is also an ordained interfaith minister, a yoga practitioner & mindfulness teacher. Ulanah works in mental health recovery in the NHS & also as a training consultant. 

2C - Group Panel - ICC G17

CONVENORS: Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, Jessica Rajko

PANELISTS: Simon Ellis, Lindsay Gianoukas, Carolyn Deby, Zrinka Uzbinecz, Nicole Michalla, Jane Chan, Muindi Fanuel Muindi, Oana Suteu Khintirian, and Sha Xin Wei!

"Provocations Roundtable: HOW is your research embodied?"

Following an Open Call for Provocations in response to the question: how is your research embodied?, this Roundtable Discussion brings together 'provocateurs' to explore the effects of embodiment within and between disciplinary cultures.

The notion of ‘embodiment’ is integral to contemporary discourse about human interactions with technology  across the arts, sciences, and humanities. In the fields of dance and somatic practices, the notion of embodiment is often employed to foreground the unique expertise of artists/scholars engaged in body- and movement-based research, and further, to transmit this knowledge to other domains. At the intersection of dance with computer science and cognitive science, the notion of embodied cognition is key to positioning the material body as a site of thought, concept, and language formation. 

Increasingly, articulations of embodiment reach beyond the individual human subject as source, to consider relational agency in meaning-making processes. In posthumanist and new materialist theory, the thing-we-call-a-body is always already both biological and artificial, constituted via ongoing circulation beneath and beyond the skin. Pervasive computational and biomedical interventions into human bodies and identities point to the distributed nature of embodiment, blurring lines between self/other and human/nonhuman in the production of knowledge. Further, bridging phenomenological perspectives with broader social and cultural concerns, the growing use of hybrid terms such as ‘ecosomatics’ and ‘somatechnics’ speaks to the need for transdisciplinary exchange.

Insisting on embodiment, however, suggests that there is something other – namely, disembodiment. Rather than reinforcing this well-worn binary, we seek to foreground multiplicity-within interpretations of embodiment, and to probe the perceived effects of embodiment in relation to disciplinary motives, methods, and modes of articulation.  We pose this question in the context of the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference, because the stakes of asserting embodied knowledge are particularly high for this community. By drawing in experts from across disciplines, the aim is to explore generative differences in understandings of embodiment, and more specifically, embodied research.

About:

The Provocations Project involves a series of open calls for provocations meant to spur dialogue regarding differences that have come to matter within and between cultures of research in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Once launched, these calls remain open indefinitely, inviting contributions on a rolling basis to iteratively (re)configure the contours of emergent discourse. All provocations are posted online, and everyone who submits a provocation is invited to join in conversation with other provocateurs through our online community, as well as curated video conversations and roundtable discussions.

Spanning its multiple iterations since 2018, the Provocations Project aims to hold space for generative exchange around novel and systemic conditions that affect cross-disciplinary and collaborative practices. The project is not specific to any one discipline, topic, or community, and yet each question posed as part of the project becomes situated through its resonance in a particular context.

The Provocations Project is coordinated by Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, and Jessica Rajko, drawing on their hybrid backgrounds in contemporary dance, music, and computing, as well as performance philosophy and critical theory.

Read the provocations and submit online @ https://www.provocations.online

Online Workshop (16:00 - 17:00)

Martha Eddy and Jurgita Ramanauskaite, "Moving For Life® - Somatic Dance and Fitness Around the World - Addressing Cancer and Aging"

Moving For Life Dance Exercise for Health is a 24 year old form of Somatic Dance and Fitness  that is known for bringing joy and health to cancer survivors, family members and caregivers and now is also for people with chronic illness, most often older adults.  

This workshop aims to address how somatic awareness is “taught while moving.”  We will unpack the somatic elements disguised in light aerobic dance, social dances and creative interchange. 

Moving for Life was designed using exercise physiology,  dance pedagogy and somatic movement therapy, incorporating various other theories and practices from the biological sciences (e.g., fitness principles, experiential anatomy) and psychophysical paradigms (e.g., connection through shared rhythm, pleasure through the body, adherence based in relationships). The goals may be fitness-related: increased aerobic capacity, flexibility/range of motion, weight management, and neuro-motor coordination or physiological: reduction of swelling, fatigue, and nerve or joint pain, increased mental alertness. However, increasingly they are socio- emotional: making group contact, contending with changing body image, overcoming isolation, finding joy.   Together we address the importance of cultural awareness and the on-going systemic barriers to program delivery in different socio-economic and non-white communities,  including examples from our work in New York City with Spanish speaking breast cancer survivors, as well as in Ireland. References will be made to Moving For Life in Japan and other locations around the world. 

MFL Dance Exercise for Health is on a path of growth; the MFL for breast cancer recovery classes are no longer the most sought-after classes, classes for people with any type or concern about cancer, metastatic patients, those at-risk, others interested in prevention or symptom management -either from aging or treatment side effects are all equally appreciated.  This workshop involves moving with and discussing how the MFL model is making its way throughout the world both online and in person,  and its plasticity in these different contexts.

Bios:

Martha Eddy, international teacher/lecturer, Activist and Master Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (MSMT) with a doctorate in Movement Science, is a prominent advocate for the development of the field of Somatic Movement.  Her book Mindful Movement the Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action (2016) addresses the history and applications of somatic movement in health, education, psychology and politics. She recently co-hosted the 2023 4th Annual Somatic Movement Summit with the Shift Network (accessible online). Martha founded BodyMind Dancing in1981, Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Training combining Body-Mind Centering® and Laban Movement Analysis in 1990, Moving On Center with Carol Swann in 1994, and Moving For Life Somatic Fitness in 1999.  She served on the LMA and SBMC certification faculties with Irmgard Bartenieff and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Her latest book, with Shakti Smith -  Dynamic Embodiment of the Sun Salutation presents concepts from BMC and LBMS  – Developmental Movement, Neuroendocrine embodiment (connectivity to regulate glands and hormonal issues), Biotensegrity, Space Harmony and Bartenieff Fundamentals. Martha's service includes past President of the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association and the Laban Institute of Movement Studies, and current Board member of the Yard Dance Residency on Martha’s Vineyard.  Contact: DrMarthaEddy.com or DynamicEmbodiment.org

Jurgita Ramanauskaite is a renowned fitness trainer and movement expert with years of experience in both competitive sports and bodymind connections.  She is a Moving For Life Certified Instructor who has successfully brought Moving For Life® to Ireland.  She is also about to register as a Somatic Movement Therapist with a background in Dynamic Embodiment and BodyMind Dancing.  

EVENING EVENTS

Improv Jam - 17:30-18:30 - ET 221

Description forthcoming. 

First Timer's Gathering - 19:00-20:00 - The Hub

A casual gathering for all conference attendees but with a special focus on welcoming first-time attendees.  The event will be hosted by a Welcome Ambassador(s) who will be present to answer questions and help facilitate conversation. Please feel free to bring your own food and/or drink.

REGISTRATION - 9:00-9:30 - ICC/ET

SESSION 3 - 9:30-11:30

3A - Paper Panel : Somatics and Future - ICC G21

Greta Gauhe, "Recreating Touch in Online Spaces: Innovative Working Methods for Dance and Somatic Practices"

During my presentation, I will be discussing the results of my practice-led PhD project, which explores methods for recreating the sensation of touch in remote or online settings. The project aims to investigate how digital and physically-distanced practices in dance can enhance participant experiences and increase accessibility.

The presentation will cover two studies conducted as part of the project. The first study is a systematic literature review that examines how touch-based fields have adapted their in-person methods to suit the online format, offering transferable working methods that allow participants to experience a sense of connection and presence online. The second study is an expert interview study that focuses on experienced artists from various fields who have successfully recreated multi-sensory works for the digital realm. The study provides a structured and evidence-informed understanding of creative working methods, as well as advantages and challenges when creating multi-sensory works online.

This research aims to promote positive experiences of touch in online spaces, thereby contributing to mental health and wellbeing while promoting accessibility and inclusivity for people who cannot or choose not to engage in close physical contact for various reasons. The outcomes of this research will be significant for future studies on how touch is understood and negotiated in online spaces, and will contribute to academic knowledge in dance and somatic practices.

In summary, this presentation will focus on two recent studies that offer unique and transferable working methods for touch-based fields that have had to adapt their in-person methods to suit the online format.

Bio: Greta Gauhe is a London-based freelance choreographer, dancer, and researcher who has been making performative works since 2015. Her multidisciplinary works focus on political, social, or ecological issues, with a particular emphasis on exploring empathy, touch, and connection through the medium of dance. Greta challenges the traditional separation between performer and spectator, and her works have been performed in both theatres and art institutions. After completing her MA in Performance at the London Contemporary Dance School, Greta pursued a MFA in Choreography at Trinity Laban to further develop her artistic practice. She continued her research as part of a practice-led PhD, investigating gaps in touch-related online practices at Coventry University's C-DaRE department. As the artistic director of the Follow Through Collective, Greta has managed various productions for theatres, museums, and outdoor spaces. Her works have been featured at festivals and stages across the UK and Europe, including the Resolution Festival, NordArt exhibition, RichMix Theatre, Chisenhale Dance Space, V&A Museum, October Gallery, University of the Arts Berlin, Albany Theatre, and the Camden Fringe Festival. Greta is also actively involved in community dance projects, working with people of all ages and backgrounds. She has taught creative dance classes and workshops for both professional and non-professional dancers. Greta is a recipient of the Leverhulme Arts Scholarship during her MFA at Trinity Laban and the M4Cities studentship during her PhD at Coventry.

Simon Ellis, "Somatics unlimited"

On the pages of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices – and elsewhere in dance scholarship – artists, scholars, teachers and practitioners are not shy in making claims about the benefits of somatic practices. Such claims are endemic and appear unlimited in scope: becoming pain free (Eddy 2009), greater physical expression (Batson 2007), physical harmony (Mullan 2014), challenging the "dominant discourses" re sexual abuse (Beaudry 2015), "the potential to question and critique the dominant social discourse and practices of neo-liberal societies" (Fortin 2017), and "a pedagogical foundation for the vitalising and integration of the learners’ sexually potent self into training and performance processes" (Kampe 2015). In this presentation I discuss the nature of the claims made on behalf of somatic practices through the flagship Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, and what these claims might say about our responsibilities within and beyond dance research.

Bio: Simon Ellis is a choreographer and filmmaker. He was born in Aotearoa New Zealand, but now lives in the UK and works at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. He thinks about the ways humans might value things that are not easily commodified, and likes to imagine a world filled with people who are sensitive to their own bodies, and the bodies of others. www.skellis.net 

Rea Dennis and Erica Charalambous

"Invisible Labour and in-kind contribution in Dance and theatre productions: Embodied Impacts and hidden somatic costs" 

While dance embraces physical, intellectual, and emotional labour, there are various overlooked labours across the career of a performing artist. This paper reports on preliminary findings from the research project “Invisible Labour and Cost in Dance and Theatre Productions: Investigating in-kind contribution” with contemporary dance and theatre practitioners. The research sought to make visible the complex unpaid labours and other non-financial costs associated with mounting works, for individual artists and artist-led companies in Melbourne Australia. We set out to explore how this invisible labour is incrementally embedded within the artists’ bodies and discuss the ways that it can impact creative experience, embodied practice and dancer well-being. We ask why, when there are business models like that of commercial production companies who report profits, are freelance artists the only people expected to do more for less? Why is their physical, emotional and intellectual labour undervalued? How does the enduring effect of economic instability on the performing artist and their bodies add up to somatic “costs”? The paper reports on how artists speak about categorising their in-kind contribution, the impact on the artists’ mental and physical well-being, and makes recommendations for how innate and embedded somatic approaches might support the artist/practitioner within an economic system that relies on in-kind contribution from practitioners. 

Bios:

A/Prof Rea Dennis is Associate Professor of Performance in the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia. Her creative research investigates embodied and somatic practices in training for actors, sensory dramaturgy in theatre, and participatory works in nature. She is on the editorial board of Dance and Somatic Practices journal and is the current president of the Australasian Drama Theatre and Performance Studies Association. She has numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals and her performance work has toured to Europe, New York and Brazil, Taiwan and New Zealand. 

Erica Charalambous is a dance practitioner and scholar. Her research focuses on the ‘moments’ and modes of curation and engagement with archival content through embodied approaches. Furthermore, her research explores the roles of memory as a process and method through embodied inquiry in building and examining archives through oral history-based strategies and somatic explorations. In addition, Erica currently facilitates workshops and writing projects based on a variety of embodied approaches and modes of enquiry in Cyprus and has presented her work and research in Germany, Luxembourg, France, Portugal, Spain, Romania, Malta, UK, Ireland, Switzerland and Australia. Her latest research is focused on multimodal approaches of writing and the development of alternative archive production projects in Cyprus through experimental workshops, qualitative research projects, discussions, and a series of publications about dance practitioners in Cyprus. Moreover, Erica’s dance and somatic practice explores the stories, legends and myths of the island through embodied enquiry and oral history-based activities in community movement-based festivals.  

Lola Maury, "In the lead-up to a performance: offering inner scores to the spectator"

Dance scholarship provides an array of reflections on the impact of somatics on choreographic strategies and processes: the exploration and generation of movement, the structuring of a choreography or the role of the choreographer and their relationship to the performers in the decision-making process. I place my research within a sub-section of study on somatic practices and contemporary dance that looks at somatically-informed choreographic practices in relation to discourses on spectatorship. In this presentation I will give voice to choreographic practices that draw on somatic principles to frame an intimate dialogue with the spectator—often one-on-one—and to invite them to direct their attention to their own body, sensations, and subjectivity. I will put my practice in dialogue with somatically-informed choreographers who aim to guide their audiences to recognize and value their own body’s wisdom. 

My practice specifically focuses on the lead up to a performance. I ask: ‘how to encourage the spectator, from the very moment we entice them to buy a ticket, to trust that their subjective body is knowledgeable?’ I experiment with preambles and protocols to invite the spectator to attend to their body in the days that precede a performance. I consider expressions such as ‘becoming available’, ‘grounding oneself’ or ‘tuning into’—which are often used in the dance studio—for their potential to inform practices of inviting, welcoming and hosting audiences. The presentation will attempt to offer provocations towards the roles of hosts, guides, facilitators, mediators of experience, in relation to a spectator-guest, witness, listener, beholder. 

Bio: Lola is a French dance artist, lecturer, and doctoral student at C-DaRE, with one foot in the UK (London) and the other in France (Lyon). She curates since 2018, the Cellules D'essai, interdisciplinary days of reflection and sharing of practices funded by the Rhône-Alpes region. She was part of Le Croiseur’s steering committee, a venue dedicated to supporting emerging dance artists, from 2018 to 2021. She is a sessional lecturer in composition at London Contemporary Dance School since 2014 and she previously taught at Formation Désoblique and Birbeck University. She has developed and produced, over the last ten years, her own choreographic work and she co-led Limbic Production with Iris Musel, between 2011 and 2015, delving into art/neuroscience collaborations to construct experiential milieus and live game scenarios. Professional development includes: Artist in residence at the National Centre for Dance in Lyon (2020/21); Surf the Wave, Artist as Entrepreneur (2018); The Place’s Hot House scheme (2014); Deustche Bank Award for Contemporary Dance (2008). She grew up in Paris and Madrid before moving to London in 2005 where she studied at London Contemporary Dance School (BA dance) and Central School of Speech and Drama (MA Performance Practice and Research). 

3B - Workshop - ET 221

Lin Westmoreland

"Pandiculation – a somatic improvisational tool as expedient philosophy and joyous dance practice in an age of anxiety"

In 500BC Heraclitus wrote that harmony of being is found not in the denial of one pole of an opposition, but in the appropriate span or tension between them. This is a potential philosophical and theoretical truth; but more importantly it is, in a corporeal, somatic sense, a truth of our very essence, our existence, and that of all beings, which we discover only in movement. It is implicit in many dance and somatic practices: as we start to move with our breath ‘…we begin to have a sense of balancing, cyclic movement in the body, such as the perennial dance of extension and contraction, the spine and the body opening and closing…’ (Hayes). This is pandiculation. When something opens, something else closes; in-between, at neutral, there is a threshold, a transition. Experiencing this threshold in the ‘moving-between’ achieved by placing pandiculation at the heart of dance and somatic movement, is non-divisive, non-judgemental, egalitarian and essential to transforming emotional dysregulation, such as persistent anxiety. It can awaken playfulness, creativity, and a sense of opening to the world alongside stillness, quiet, a delicious curling inward, and gentle reflexivity. 

Prior to COVID-19, anxiety was already a significant challenge to global health and wellbeing; in England it was the most prevalent mental health condition. Now, following prolonged restrictions and social isolation, anxiety is increasing alongside a more pervasive, underlying collective fear. Medication and talking therapies are the recommended mainstream treatments. Yet, clearly these interventions are not enough. As neuroscience suggests the root of anxiety is in the body, not the conscious mind, then we need healing that happens in the body. The sense of a radical movement into and between, awakened by pandiculation, is necessarily improvisational: supporting ‘affordance-based movement finding’ that reveals ‘the social and political value of improvisational body freedom’, and makes it ‘possible to create in our field a fresh ethics of being-with bodies, which is needed in the world’ (Lavender, 2019).

In this workshop I will outline my research, offer a snapshot of initial findings from my fieldwork, and explore pandiculation as a core practice of improvised movement and dance. 

Bio: I have been dancing and moving for over 30yrs, (not including a childhood spent leaping about!), a little contemporary dance many moons ago, but mostly improvisational, co-creative and performative somatic forms, in a range of contexts, situations, and collaborations. My training has included Hanna Somatics, Authentic Movement, Amerta, Contact Improvisation and Move into Life work with Sandra Reeve. I also completed an MA in Dance and Somatic Wellbeing at the University of Central Lancashire in 2019. I am currently doing a practice-based PhD with the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, investigating how improvised, co-creative and performative dance and movement can transform experiences of fear and anxiety. Prior to starting my PhD I worked for 20yrs in mental health, the last 8yrs as a cognitive behavioural therapist in an Improving Access to Psychological Therapies service. For two and a half years I have had a private practice as a Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist. And at the heart of everything I do, as well as informing my research, is my own daily movement practice, which I do out in nature, in my garden, and in the countryside around where I live in rural Somerset. 

3C - Group Panel - ICC G17

Eugenia S. Kim, Emma Meehan, Sarah Hopfinger, and Selena Chau, "What Happens When We Can't Dance or Move the Way We Used To?" 

What happens when an individual can no longer rely on their body to dance and/or move as it had previously been trained to? What is the grieving process that takes place during the death of that stage of life? What does the subsequent unique rebirth look like for each individual as they discover new modes of dancing and/or moving? And how do somatic awareness and practices help inform those discoveries?

Chronic pain is a condition experienced by many dance and movement artists. It may occur because of injury, illness, or both. Most significantly, chronic pain may inhibit one’s mobility due to physical, psychological, or combination of factors. With the loss of mobility may come a loss of identity – and the gaining of a new one.

This panel is a variation of the lecture performance format and combines live and remote/recorded participation. It opens with two researchers having a cup of tea while discussing the questions listed above. The discussion will be enhanced by live or pre-recorded footage of the other panellists sharing their responses to the questions through words and movements based on their lived experiences managing chronic pain. The panellists range from active choreographers and performers to retired artists.

The purpose of this panel is to address a reality faced by somatic practitioners during their past, present, and future. Many individuals have turned to and/or developed somatic practices when traditional ways of moving no longer served them. But for some bodies, it may be too difficult to fully participate in certain somatic or other movement practices that are thought of as completely accessible. It is therefore worth considering what other ways individuals “move” or make use of somatic knowledge on a daily basis. 

Bios:

Eugenia S. Kim is a transdisciplinary practice-based researcher who uses movement and multimedia technology to create narratives. Her doctoral research proposed the use of dance and somatic movement practices, motion capture and virtual reality (VR) for creating illness narratives about bipolar disorder. Her current research focuses on how AI-generated imagery, motion capture and the metaverse can be used to depict lived experiences of chronic pain.

Emma Meehan is associate professor in dance at Coventry University. She is the principal investigator for the Somatic Practice and Chronic Pain Network (AHRC); and was co-investigator for Sensing the City (AHRC). Recent publications include ‘Moving with pain’ co-authored with Bernie Carter in Frontiers in Psychology (2021) and ‘Moving and mapping’ co-authored with Natalie Garrett Brown in Urban Sensographies (ed. Whybrow, Routledge, 2020).  Current research interests include dance and somatic practices in performance; movement and chronic pain; place dance practice; and cross-cultural dialogue through movement. 

Sarah Hopfinger is a queer disabled artist and researcher, working at the intersections between live art, choreography, performance, writing, crip and disability practices, queerness, and ecology. Her performances have been presented nationally and international with organisations such as South London Gallery, Made In Scotland, Battersea Arts Centre, and Earth Matters Onstage (USA). Her Carnegie funded research project, Ecologies of Pain, uses dance to explore how living with chronic pain can provide insights into, and knowledge about, what it means to live and relate with wider ecological pain.

After a career in dance, performing in operas, musicals, and concert dance works, Selena received her Master of Library and Information Sciences degree and has applied her archival preservation and technical skills in museum, research library, and broadcast environments. Selena has experience in dance and music librarianship and digital preservation, having worked in libraries and archives for 10 years. She has been a member of the Society of American Archivists and a board member for the Theatre Library Association. 

SESSION 4 - 11:30-13:30

4A - Paper Panel: Somatics and Pedagogy - ICC G21

Lisa May Thomas and Carey Jewitt, "Unlocking Touch: exploring somatic participation in remote performance with binaural technology"

We propose to present commentary and excerpts of Unlocking Touch, an interactive performance which brings together binaural sound technology and somatic-based invitations. Unlocking Touch experiments with the relationship between sound and touch and explores how immersive technologies can be used to provoke or evoke touch-based experiences or sensations. We will outline some of the processes and methodologies used in the collaborative design process, and discuss some of our learnings from the project. We pose questions around how we might consider notions of care and difference in designing experiences for bodies in performative engagements with technologies. 

Bios:

Lisa May Thomas is a dance artist and researcher. She is currently working at the new ESRC funded Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol. She investigates the intersections between dance, embodied participation and immersive technology, and her film and performance work has been experienced by audiences around the world. Lisa is a resident at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol and Studio Wayne McGregor QuestLab Network Artist. Her practice-as-research PhD at the University of Bristol investigated the role of digital technologies in performance, combining dance-somatic and improvisation practices with multi-person VR technology. Recently, she directed VR participatory performance work Soma (Bloomsbury Theatre 2021) and participatory binaural sound experience Unlocking Touch in collaboration with UCL’s Digital InTouch Lab (2022). She has presented her work at numerous academic events, such as C-Dare’s ‘Somatic Practices and Chronic Pain’ research network at Coventry University (2020), for ‘Bodies, Movement and AI in VR’ at Goldsmiths University (2021), and presenting on VR and the senses in performance at the Sentient Performativities Symposium at Dartington Hall, Tanzmesse in Dusseldorf, and the Inter Arts Centre at Lund University (2022).

Carey Jewitt is Professor of Technology and Learning at UCL Knowledge Lab in the Dept of Culture, Communication and Media (UCL IOE), and Chair of UCL Collaborative Social Science Domain.  Her work explores how the use of digital technologies shapes interaction and communication, engages with interdisciplinary methodological innovation and contributes to the development of multimodal theory. Carey is Director of InTouch an ERC Consolidator Award which investigates the sociality of digital touch technologies for future communication. She has led many interdisciplinary research projects funded by the ERC, ESRC, EPSRC, British Academy and a number of charities. Carey is a founding editor of two SAGE journals, Multimodality & Society, and Visual Communication.  Her recent publications include the book, Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication (2020) and alongside articles including in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Qualitative Research, The Senses and Society. 

Phaedra Petsilas and Thomas Kampe, "Radical Somatic Pedagogy within vocational dance training – nurturing the creative agent dancer"

In this presentation we would like to consider the transformative possibilities of embedding well-being practices within a vocational dance training curriculum, and how somatic approaches to learning can be integrated within the delivery of codified dance techniques and the development of the creative agent dancer.

If we consider dance training & education as transformative processes which contribute to the holistic and artistic development of an individual, it seems vital to develop ways in which the dancer in training can develop themselves in relation to physical, psychological and social aspects of their identity.  Central to somatic education is the awareness of our authentic, natural, living body-mind with its multiple layers of experience, memory and affect. Pedagogically, somatic approaches have focused on the well-being, autonomy and creative agency of the individual, and on the development of enhanced awareness of how the body operates anatomically and kinaesthetically.  

We would like to open up the discourses around rigour, resilience and creative agency within conservatoire training and how these relate to notions of autonomy and freedom. Our presentation is based on pedagogic experimentations and interventions within a UK dance conservatoire since 2017 and the ongoing development of well-being practices as part of the curriculum delivery.    

Bios: 

Phaedra Petsilas was born in Athens, Greece where she trained in ballet and contemporary dance. She then moved to the UK to continue her training and then pursue a career in dance education and choreography. She gained a BA (Hons) in Dance from Chichester University, and followed this with an MA in Dance Studies from Laban, where she specialised in choreography, scenography and aesthetics. She has also obtained a PGCE in post-compulsory education and is currently embarking on her PhD research on dance pedagogy. Phaedra is an experienced dance educator with expertise and insight in both practical and academic aspects of dance who has a passion for dance education and training.  She thrives on mentoring and supporting dance students to achieve their full potential as fully rounded, creative and thinking dance artists. Phaedra Petsilas is Head of Studies at Rambert School where she is responsible for the academic provision, as well as research and professional development, including leading on the MA Dance Research for Professional Practitioners. She is a member of the executive senior management team of the School and as part of her role she has been developing the research culture, playing an active role in promoting the strategic vision of the School.

Thomas Kampe (PhD) has worked as a performing artist, researcher and somatic educator across the globe. Between 2012 and 2022 he worked as Professor of Somatic Performance & Education at Bath Spa University, UK, where he co-directed the Creative Corporealities Research Group. Artistic collaborations include work with Liz Aggiss, Hilde Holger, Julia Pascal, Tanzinitiative Hamburg, Somatische Akademie Berlin, and with Carol Brown on re-embodying the diasporic practices of Modernist choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser. He is currently collaborating with Claudia Kappenberg on researching the Viennese legacy of dance artist Hilde Holger (1905-2001),  and with Intercultural Roots (UK) on various eco-somatic and arts for health projects. Thomas’ research focuses on critical somatic legacies. He co-edited JDSP Vol. 9. (2017) ‘Bodily undoing: Somatics as practices of critique’ and most recently JDSP Vol. 13.1 &2 (2022): ‘Embodying Eco- Consciousness: Somatics, Aesthetic Practice and Social Action’. He is the co-editor of the book 'Beyond Forgetting: persecution/exile/memory - transdisciplinary perspectives on education in design and performance' (Cuvillier 2021). Thomas is a practitioner of The Feldenkrais Method® and guest-editor of the IFF research Journal Vol. 6 (2019): Practices of Freedom: The Feldenkrais Method and Creativity'. He co-directed Body IQ Berlin Festival 2019 & 2021.    https://thomaskampe.wordpress.com, www.thomaskampe.com 

Cecília de Lima (Instituto de Etnomusicologia: Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança), "Dance and Somatic Practices: In the quest for an integral intelligence"

Throughout my teaching and research career in dance, the gap between traditional research and teaching methodologies and methodologies derived from somatic practices has been somewhat persistent. Although some of the somatic techniques are accepted by the World Health Organization as alternative health methods, generally, these methods continue to be appreciated precisely as alternative means to standard methods. Standard medicine and traditional scientific research are recognized as being based on scientifically validated research, i.e., seeking objectivity, resorting to calculations and measurements and following the traditional standard scientific procedures. Somatic practices don’t comply to this type of validation, they start from a different perspective and have a different purpose, therefore, their methodologies are inevitably divergent. In order that these practices are not approached with a certain distrust or fall into an obscure mysticism, I think it is essential to make a clear distinction regarding the different points of view, intentions and methodologies that differentiate somatic practices from the traditional vision of scientific research.

Based on an experiential account that confronts the traditional education/ research with the education/ research experienced within the scope of somatic practices - this presentation focuses on four methodological aspects that distinguish somatic research,  namely: 1) An experiential methodology; 2) A creative interactive methodology; 3) A processual methodology of self-discovery; 4) A methodology for incorporating images and metaphors, emphasizing a perception of the whole.

Finally, I defend the importance of interrelating somatic investigation practices with scientific investigation as well as the need to develop an integral intelligence, as a mode of intelligence which combines the development of an embodied knowledge with intellectual abstraction.

Bio: Currently Cecília is a Professor at the University of Lisbon (Dance Bachelors course and Doctoral degree) and at Escola Superior de Dança - Polytechnical Institute of Lisbon. She is also an integrated member of the research Institute of Ethnomusicology (INET-MD) and a  member of the editorial board of the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices (UK). Her research focuses on the relation of dance with phenomenology, cognitive sciences, somatic practices, artistic education and digital-media art. Her work has been published in several academic and artistic venues. She holds a PhD in Human Kinetics/ Dance, from the University of Lisbon. Her PhD research, entitled: Transversal Thinking: The Art of Perceiving the World as the Paradox of Movement, was developed with a full scholarship from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT). In 2008 Cecília received her Master degree  in choreography from the ArteZ University of the Arts (NL).

Since 1999 Cecília has been developing her career as a dancer, choreographer and researcher, collaborating with diverse artists throughout Europe. From 2000 until 2006 she was a co-founder of Canvas Performing Art Dance Company (NL), where she co-created several multidisciplinary performances. 

URL: www.ceciliadelima.com

4B - Workshop - ET 221

Mr. Tamur Tohver, "Zero Zone Praxis: Non-Dual Exchange"

Fear undermines and narrows the expressive possibilities and quality of the performing arts. However, the performer can create an unlimited external and internal space if they can achieve a higher state of consciousness at their time of performing by releasing – their ego. This prevents stage fright and brings a total merge experience between the performer and the spectator, creating an absolute exchange. Thereby, the performance can be a spiritual practice, ritual or ceremony, where dualities disappear.

Zero Zone praxis (ZZ, the new training technique) is an effortless, unique practice for a performer, developed and designed to create a graceful simplicity for the performer-spectator relationship. It is based on the immediate and intimate exchange and ambience in a shared space. ZZ is made to improve the performer's ability to avoid the detrimental effects of stage fright by enhancing the training and performing process. 

The ZZ provides a new perceptual bodymind technique for performer training, combines Western and non-western traditions, practices spirituality and proposes enhanced pedagogy for performance. ZZ is an idiosyncratic fusion of psychophysical actor training, Vedic philosophy and yogic perceptual techniques facilitated according to coaching principles. It includes external and internal psychosomatic training and intellectual knowledge of consciousness from yoga philosophy.

By giving the performer a specially designed ZZ praxis as a tool, a platform can be created that simultaneously achieves a range of goals: releasing blockages, alleviating fears, achieving unlimited performer-spectator communication, and cultivating the ability to develop higher artistic freedom in the sense of liberation. The ZZ praxis could be one of the steps to refreshing Performing Arts and restoring its critical value: purification. 

Bio: Tamur's academic-artistic research focuses on an actor-director exchange, self-cultivating performer training, consciousness and immediate transmission at show time to prevent blockages in reception. In his craft, he is fusing spoken word and voice to physical bodymind theatre and avoiding descriptive stage solutions to preclude the spectator's expectations and evaluations. Tamur is a creator of Zero Zone perceptual praxis, which prevents stage fright and increases exchanges in the actor-director dyad and performer-spectator communion. Trained as a director and an actor, he is an academic performing art teacher for multiple genres, a researcher, a self-cultivation coach and a yogi. While being a creative practitioner with a laboratory approach to performing arts for over thirty decades, he has given workshops internationally, taught performing arts in the U.K., U.S. and Estonian universities, and made productions with his professional international Polygon Theatre Company, broadcasting and film companies. He is a Manchester Metropolitan University (U.K.) PhD candidate and the author of the book on audio art Silent Listening Is Easier (2003). Tamur gladly shares his experiences via personal functional training with concrete techniques in performing arts, leadership coaching, yoga or personal self-cultivation. The empty space is not empty!  

4C - Group Panel - ICC 517

Prof. Marth Munro (PhD) (UP); Dr. Kristina Johnstone (UP); Dr. Karina Lemmer (TUT), Dr. Refiloe Lepere (TUT), and Mr. Morné Steyn (UCT)

"In my master's house" 

Audre Lorde (1983) offers: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Spatz brings this quote into conversation with embodiment, asking: “Is embodiment just another one of the master’s tools, which will never dismantle the master’s house, or can embodiment be counted among the techniques that might dismantle the house of "the body?” (Spatz, 2020: 252). Inspired by this provocation, we aim to share from our unique, and maybe sometimes shared, perspectives what it means for us, as educators who are committed to contributing to decoloniality, to facilitate embodied performance practices in performing arts education in South African higher education. With a focus on the ongoing effort to develop a decolonized embodied theory that attends to and accounts for the suffering of the global majority, our goal in this panel is to explore the complex and contentious relationship between performance epistemology and decolonial criticism. We expand on our understanding of instructional practices and performance strategies. We consider this within the context of performance and theatre making education applying embodiment as a central construct. We share and reflect upon the aesthetic and ethico-political techniques that each of us use to question, trouble, or dismantle the tools and epistemologies that are at the centre of higher education practices within the South African landscape. We acknowledge that it is only when we are willing to speak back while dreaming forward that we will have the courage to enact change. 

Bios:

Marth Munro (PhD) specialises in bodymind and voice in behaviour and performance. She publishes in the field of Embodied Performance Pedagogy (including areas of Acting, Voice, Movement). She is a Professor Extraordinaire in the School of the Arts: Drama, University of Pretoria, contributing to post-graduate research in Embodied Performance and has supervised Masters and Doctoral students to completion of their studies across her speciality areas. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Voice and Speech Review (VASTA). As a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst, she currently serves as the African Coordinator and faculty member of the Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies (NY) New Pathways program. Marth has organised and facilitated intensive training workshops in LBMS in South Africa, which has allowed her to engage with the colonial past of the country to expand the diversity and inclusivity potentialities of LBMS. As a Lessac Kinesensics Master Teacher she acts as a facilitator of Lessac Kinesensics workshops in South Africa (where she has been key to reimagine the approach ensuring a translingual and inclusive pedagogy), Croatia and in the USA. She is a qualified Sound Therapist and a Registered Somatic Movement Educator (ISMETA). With a childlike curiosity, Marth plays with purpose and joy. 

Kristina Johnstone is a Belgian South African dance artist and teacher. She recently completed a PhD in Creative Work at the University of the Witwatersrand, which explored questions of embodiment, choreographic practice, representationalism and decoloniality in a South African context. She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Cape Town School of Dance in South Africa and the Makerere University Department of Performing Arts and Film in Kampala, Uganda, and is a co-author of the book of Post-Apartheid Dance: Many bodies, many voices, many stories (2012). Kristina is currently based at the University of Pretoria, School of the Arts: Drama where she teaches Movement and Physical Theatre. 

Karina holds a PhD, which examines multilingual embodied acting in the South African context.  This was the outcome of various creative research projects that explored multilingual performance in the South African context. She is a senior lecturer at the TUT Department of Performing Arts where she specializes in voice and acting. Karina is also an editor for IDEA and is certified as  a Lessac Kinesensics Facilitator  and a Meisner acting coach. Karina has worked with actors on several theatre productions and films.  She is a Naledi nominated director and theatre maker  who has adapted and directed several classical texts and has created original multilingual South African Theatre within the academic context and professional platforms.  

Dr. Refiloe Lepere is a black feminist playwright, theatre director, drama therapist, journalist, and facilitator. Her areas of expertise are activism, postcolonial and feminist theories in performance studies, and participatory art. Her work using therapeutic theatre weaves history, statistics, and personal narratives to address issues of social justice, trauma, the intersectional identities of black women, and the performance of labour. Her research examines how race functions and, as a result, frames and shapes our perception of the world. She teaches African Performance Studies, Directing, and Scriptwriting at Tshwane University of Technology. She has delivered guest lectures at Howard University, Georgetown University, and New York University. She contextualizes her work by focusing on how we consume, interpret, and respond to stories within the larger literature of black feminist aesthetics and drama therapy. She was a guest editor for the Drama Therapy Review-Journal issue called "Breathing Beyond Borders: Racial Justice and Decolonial Healing Practices”. She has contributed to several anthologies. She recently concluded a residency at The Woodshed: A Center for Art, Thought, and Culture. Racial Justice Institute at Georgetown University Her international plays include Recipes, Remedies, and Rumors (US), Between Sisters, Postcards: Bodily Preserves (Germany, SA, and USA), Money for Shoes (Botswana, SA, and Swaziland), Heading Out (US & UK), Songs for Khwezi (US & SA), Disappearing Act, and Black in the Box (US & Canada). 

Morné Steyn is a performer, practitioner-scholar and lecturer at the University of Cape's (UCT) Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies (CTDPS). As a performer, Morné has appeared in a diverse range of professional theatre and film productions in South-Africa. He holds an MA (Drama) degree in Gender and Performance Voice studies from the University of Pretoria (UP). Morné’s artistic-research practice is informed by and explores a sensuous approach to knowledge: one which is grounded in a host of global perspectives that aim to explore the intersectional dynamics of a diverse, yet inclusive way of discovering the world through performance. The critical nexus of Morné works resides at the performative explorations of race, sex, gender, class and culture in and through performance. Morné is also a Certified Lessac Voice and Movement Teacher® (USA) as well as a qualified Yoga Instructor. He currently serves as a Board Member on the Lessac Training and Research Institute, NYC. Morné has shared his work on bodymind/voice and performance at multiple national and international forums and platforms. Morné has taught nationally in South-Africa as well as internationally. Through his work he endeavours for his work to contribute towards stimulating an embodied yet critical poetic for inter-relational relationality.

LUNCH/BOOK LAUNCH - 13:30-15:30 - ET 101

Dr. Diego Pizarro (Federal Institute of Brasília) and Dr. Ciane Fernandes (Federal University of Bahia) 

"Somatic Epistemologies in Different Cultures"

This proposal aims to launch an eBook in English, referring to themes presented by guests at the Somatics and Dance Conference held in Brazil in 2021, followed by a conversation related to Somatics in Different Cultures. The general theme of the book considers Somatic Epistemologies in Motion as an expanded international, and collective process. The eBook texts involve emerging themes of Somatics, such as Somatics as an expanded field, Brazilian Somatics, Critical and Socially Engaged Somatics, new sociocultural epistemologies of Somatics, Somatic writing, Somatics as Research, Somatics and Native Peoples, Somatics and disability, Somatics and decoloniality, Somatics and sustainability, among other key topics that involve the current demands for the embodiment of different ways of being in the world through Dance and Somatics. The conversation circle is intended to have two Brazilians and one American scholar who have been involved with Dance and Somatics for decades. They will focus on the aspects of culture within Somatic Epistemologies development, the growth and presence of Somatics in Brazil, as well as focus on social justice and cultural issues in Somatics in the US. Considering the eBook brings together scholars from different countries, it is believed that an expanded conversation circle on the subject can indicate new paths for the development of somatic knowledge internationally, seeking new partnerships for the development of publications and events that consider the multiplicity of ways that Somatics acquires in specific contexts. This proposition seeks to foster the development of a wider web of integration between Somatic initiatives around the world, raising the subject in order for a community of praxis to come together and develop further ideas on how to create effective connections and interchange.

Bios:

Diego Pizarro is Associated Professor at the Federal Institute of Brasília (IFB) since 2010, coordinating the research group CEDA-SI – Collective of Studies in Dance, Somatics and Improvisation. He carries out post-doctoral research (2022-2023) on Somatics of Voice at the University of Brasília, CAPES/BRAZIL fellow. He is a Permanent Professor at the Graduate Program in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Bahia (PPGAC/UFBA), where he also finished his PH.D. He is a Certified Teacher of Body-Mind Centering℠, teaching and researching Somatics, Ecoperformance, Embodied Anatomy, Dance Composition, Contact Improvisation, and Contemporary Dance.

Ciane Fernandes is performer and tenured professor at School of Theatre, Federal University of Bahia (UFBA, Brazil) and one of the founders of UFBA’s Graduate Program of Performing Arts, also professor at UFBA’s Graduate Program in Dance. M.A. and Ph.D. on Art and Humanities for Performing Artists, New York University. Certified Movement Analyst by the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies, where she is an associate researcher. She is the founder and director of the A-FETO Dance Theater Collective since 1997, and has developed the Somatic-Performative Approach, which focuses on ecoperformances in dialogue with diversity and disability in the context of Practice as Research.

SESSION 5 - 15:30-17:30

5A - Paper Panel: Somatics and Technology - ICC G21

Mônica Dantas, Suzane Weber, Fellipe Resende, "Notes on capturing dance movements: a southern Brazilian’s perspective"

The use of motion capture (mocap) systems has significantly increased over the last decades on many dance projects and inquiries. However, these technological resources are expensive and less available to countries outside the Global North mainstream. This paper aims to describe the process of creating two dance remote performances using motion capture system and 3D model, in collaboration with Eva Schul’s/Ânima Dance Company and Iara Deodoro’s/Afro-Sul Dance and Music Group. We address the question: how can we, through documenting Iara Deodoro and Eva Schul’s work, share embodied experiences that defy Western dance and the dominant discourses about dance, body and technology, challenging the canon of dance practices that have typically engaged with digital work? Our project may seem too large and ambitious, but we trust that in a country as big and diverse as Brazil, some light should be shed on different dance practices and artistic communities, as much as in their documentational and poetic initiatives. Iara Deodoro has founded the Afro-Sul Music and Dance Group in 1974. Issues of black diaspora, gender and age are presented on her choreographies, that encompass movement composition and improvisation. Eva Schul has been working with contemporary dance since the 1970s and founded Anima Dance Company in the 90's.  Her dance practice is based on the embodiment of non-effort and movement flow principles, also including the use of improvisation as a compositional practice. These choreographers  have been pioneers and their companies have operated as training centers for generations of dance artists who have been developing their work all over the world. We see in them, Schul and Deodoro's figures and works, tradition and innovation. We hope that crossing their dances with motion capture systems could allow the preservation of ancestral cultures of movement and the elaboration of possible futures for dance in southern Brazil.

Bios:

Mônica Fagundes Dantas, a contemporary dancer and an associate professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul), supervises Ph.D. and master’s candidates in the performing arts programe and teaches in the dance undergraduate course programe. She has a Ph.D. from Université du Québec à Montréal and received two grants from the Brazilian Ministry of Education to conduct  post-doctoral research at C-DaRE, Coventry University. 

Fellipe Santos Resende, dance artist and researcher. Former substitute professor of the Dance courses at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC). PhD student at the Post-graduate Program in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). Holds a master in Performing Arts (PPGAC-UFRGS), a specialization course and a undergradute degree in Dance (UFRGS) and a bachelor’s degree in Physiotherapy by the Federal University of Goiás (UFG).

Suzane Weber da Silva earned her Ph.D. from Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. She is a professor at UFRGS ((Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul), Porto Alegre, Brazil, since 1996, teaching and supervising Ph.D. and master’s candidates in the performing arts programe. She is also an actress and contemporary dancer. She received a grant from the Brazilian Ministry of Education to conduct postdoctoral research at C-DaRE, Coventry University. 

Zjana Muraro, "Soma-thèque: Somatics, Technology and New Materialism"

This paper considers the intersection of somatics and technology in the context of contemporary times. Historically, mediatization or the technification of performance practices can be said to begin at the start of the 20th century (1934) with the invention of radio and music recordings. Today these have evolved and built up to television, video, film, podcast and now social media. This paper explores how these technological mediums intersect with somatic practice and dance in contemporary times. Mediatization, has become increasingly prevalent in the production and distribution of dance and somatic practice. More broadly in the world, media surrounds us. We are constantly seeing 2D digital images, hearing music playing, logging on to social media, everywhere around us the world is mediated. McCarthy and Wright have written in Technology as Experience (2004) “much more deeply than ever before, we are aware that interacting with technology involves us emotionally, intellectually, and sensually... We don’t just use technology; we live with it.” (McCarthy & Wright, preface)

Thinking about technology as something we live with increasingly through recent world events including Covid-19 globally, this paper proposes an investigation into possible speculative futures of somatic practices with dance and technology.

From a perspective of a Feldenkrais® practitioner and dance choreographer, a new materialism perspective is explored looking alongside more-than-human perspectives. What does mediatization do to somatic practice and what can somatic practices do within mediatization? What forms of knowledge produced through somatic practices historically and contemporarily can help us imagine a more sustainable future world. The concept of intra-activity from Karen Barad in new materialism is explored through an enquiry around the meaning of being in liveness rather than live and functioning intra- actively rather than interactively.

The simulated world, the fantasy adventure, the immersive experience, the performative protest, and site-specific dances happening in both physical and digital spaces are explored in relation to the linage of somatic practices. The emergence of new materialism and object-oriented-ontology (OOO) in line with posthumanism theories show us that the illusion of the human being the most important and central part to everything simply does not correspond with the actual reality of the social, ecological, and cognitive processes of the world today.

Bio: Zjana Muraro is an artist, somatic practitioner and researcher from Brooklyn, New York. Her works have been supported by Arts Council England, European Culture Foundation, and Compagnia di San Paolo. She holds an MA from Tisch NYU in Performances Studies and currently conducts research as part of the independent dance scene in London.

Zelia ZZ Tan, "Reconstructing Dance Through Digital Somatic Practice & Extended Phygital Choreographies"

My artistic research is focused on reflecting live mocap interactive dance with avatars and creators. I questioned the conventional subjectivity of media by dislocating performers in time and space, aiming to generate novel physical and mental experiences that challenge subjectivity within media.    

The point of departure for the dance experiment is a query about the body and the transformation of embodiment. My digital somatic practice reconstructs bodies' conditions, stimulating organic dialogues between live dancers, participants, and visual data within Extended Reality technologies. These empower the phygital performances synthesizing the physical and digital.      

A key research question drives this work: What are emerging collaborative methods for future dance? Practical demonstrations will show how digital tools transform movement, reshaping choreographic sources, and relations in performance - both enriching and complicating somatic practice and crossover creation. I'll also share challenges and glitches encountered.      

Your engagement with these demonstrations, reflections, and anecdotes will contribute to sparking new artistic visions. Together, we'll advance and transform this research by discussing the experiments shared.

Bio: Zelia ZZ TAN is a cross-disciplinary dance artist focusing on presence and identity. She is a pioneer in dance and technology in Asia who creates virtual and hybrid performances using motion capture, AR, VR, avatars, and other immersive technologies. Her research interest is in the future of the body, experience, and interaction. In 2022, Zelia co-founded TechDanceLab, an artistic research and experimental platform. She is also a dance filmmaker whose works were featured in 18 film festivals worldwide. Based in Hong Kong and works globally with master artists such as Gilles Jobin and Sasha Waltz. Zelia graduated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts with her BFA (Hons) in Dance before joining City Contemporary Dance Company, one of Hong Kong's leading dance companies, as a dancer and educator from 2019 to 2023. In 2015, she was invited by Helsinki Festival to present her solo works, and was a finalist in the Korea International Modern Dance Competition. Zelia was nominated for the Tom Brown Emerging Choreographer at the Hong Kong Dance Awards 2023. Her most recent work was Accelerating Dimension, with live mocap, avatars and audience interaction at the Phygital_D Festival presented by West Kowloon Cultural District. In Fall 2023, Zelia will begin pursuing her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in the United States as a double major in Interactive Media for Performance (Theatre) and Choreography (Dance), with financial support from the Asian Cultural Council.

Dr. Carolina Bergonzoni, "Dancing-Reading-Writing: A Practice of Teaching and Researching into the Excess"

The proposed discussion explores the practice of Dancing-Reading-Writing (DRW), as a sensing pedagogical practice of teaching into the excess. The practice of DRW, which I developed while completing my doctoral studies can be defined as a “somatic phenomenology” (cf. Kozel, 2015), as it relates to the art of improvisation and of somatic education. I am not concerned with the lived (notice the past tense here) experiences—the root of phenomenology—but rather with the possibility of noticing body data as they are arising (notice the gerund). DRW looks at the somaticity of teaching and take into full consideration the body. The body has often been conceived as the excess, the “too much”, the more-than of scholarship, even in dance and somatic studies. 

Susan Kozel refers to the “phenomenological process” as “less polished, less complete, and almost always overlooked” (2015, p. 54) and she argues that it “usually exists only in a performer’s personal journals or notes shared with collaborators as part of a working process” (2015, p. 54). For me, the “excessive data” do not need to be polished, or completed, as they are essential to the research and the writing itself. 

When improvising and teaching improvisation, I witness the traces, lines, and inscriptions that are left in my body (the excess of evidence), and I give myself and students time to process and digest this information (the lack of evidence). The dancing data are both an excess of and a lack of evidence; they are tangible (in the form of sweat droplets, saliva, changes in the body, journal notes) and intangible.

To conclude the discussion, I will describe the idea of an excessive intangible/invisible score, a score that only exists after the score—in the traditional sense of a set tasks for the dancers—is danced. 

Bio: Carolina Bergonzoni (she/her) is a dance artist, a somatic educator and practitioner, and an emergent scholar. She holds a PhD in Arts Education, a BA and MA in Philosophy, and an MA in Comparative Media Arts. She is the 2023 recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation Award for the Arts & Inquiry in the Visual & Performing Arts in Education SIG of AERA. Her practices span between dancing, writing, and teaching from the body. She is the Artistic Associate of All Bodies Dance Project, an inclusive dance company that brings together dancers with and without disabilities. She has directed two audio-described movies and has been part of Translations, a dance created in collaboration with blind and partially sighted consultants, to be experienced with the non-visual senses.

5B - Film Panel - ET 233

Suzane Weber da Silva and Mônica Dantas, "New Old Bodies: Weaving between dance and life"  

The debate about old age is becoming increasingly explored in contemporary times on a worldwide scale. Nevertheless, this debate in arts, still scarce and recent, can be seen in the articulations between gender, race/ethnicity, and social class in a relational and complex way. In times of pandemics, we understand the importance of care, attention, and empathy in the face of this social group that has been one of the most vulnerable regarding the political and social consequences amplified by social distancing. According to WHO’s (World Health Organization) classification, in developed countries, individuals are considered “elderly” when they are over 65 years old and, and in developing countries, when they are over 60 years old. In a society that excessively values youth, seduction and work, bodies that are on their way to maturity, as some of the examples we will present below, tend to be devalued. How can we perceive, live, and reflect about aging in a society that glorifies youth? How dare we define old age as a universal experience if elderly people in many countries of the Global South are not even granted the right to be discriminated against, because they represent a burden on public coffers to cover retirement? This film aims to describe the process of creating a dance performance called “New Old Bodies 50+” with five Brazilian dance artists who are over 50 years old to reflect on age, longevity and vulnerability in dance. We picked some questions to trigger our reflections and movements:  How do we embody the passage of time in our bodies? How do we integrate illness and fragility into our dancing? We also picked a theme for the improvisation: I am / we are. We talked, improvised, danced, reflected and remembered our experiences together. The performance mixes dance, video and live music and the whole project include a video dance exhibition and dance workshops to people aged over 50. To display the passage of time in our bodies allows us to test the somatic dimension of the body, from the perspective of an experienced self. Older bodies, that accumulate experience, mature bodies filled with contradictions: our bodies are constantly oscillating between strength and vulnerability, between the expertise of movement and the pains and physical limits. Getting old is to understand that, surprisingly, there are always new challenges and possibilities for the body. Even our injuries and sickness allow us to discover new ways to move the body and other ways to recover and regain our vitality. To us, dance is a way to exist, sharing affection, care, audacity, fears, metamorphosis. Always driven by the pleasure of moving and of finding new ways of inhabiting our older new bodies. We want to challenge the perspective of body image in dance, and highlight the older bodies of dancers. Our vision is that to give image to those dancing bodies matured by the passage of time constitutes a political act.

Bios: 

Presenter Suzane Weber da Silva earned her Ph.D. from Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. She has a master’s degree in Human Movement Sciences and a bachelor degree in performing arts at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul), Porto Alegre, Brazil. She is a professor at UFRGS since 1996, teaching and supervising Ph.D. and master’s candidates in the performing arts programe. She is also an actress and contemporary dancer. She received a grant from the Brazilian Ministry of Education to conduct postdoctoral research at C-DaRE, Coventry University. 

Presenter Mônica Fagundes Dantas, a contemporary dancer and an associate professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul), supervises Ph.D. and master’s candidates in the performing arts programe and teaches in the dance undergraduate course programe. She has a Ph.D. from Université du Québec à Montréal and received two grants from the Brazilian Ministry of Education to conduct post-doctoral research at C-DaRE, Coventry University. 

Dr. Sue Hawksley, "Dwell: landscape in the figure"

‘Dwell: landscape in the figure’ is a screen-dance work responding to the urgent issue of habitat loss. It focuses on three endangered ecological communities in the Adelaide Hills and Fleurieu Peninsula regions of South Australia - coastal, heathy woodland, and wetland. Their rich biodiversity is evocatively conveyed through haunting visual and sonic footage, and by three dancers who embody the ‘landscape in the figure’. Movement, sound and image become increasingly stressed and degraded as the space available to them diminishes. The work reflects on the precariousness of these unique habitats when encroaching threats swing the ecological balance against them.

The predominant Western attitude toward the natural environment positions humans as separate from nature, a view which has led us to consider the planet in terms of resource exploitation rather than as a living system of which we are part. Now, faced with global-scale degradation of climate and nature, we need to transform this attitude toward a more empathic relationship with our world. ‘Dwell’ invites contemplative viewing and deep listening. It seeks to cultivate a sense of embodied presence in, and as, nature, and in so doing, foster appreciation of the part we play in it.

We took a somatically based approach to the research & development of this project. On site visits we collected sound, image, and ‘body-recordings’, together with written and drawn reflections. Acknowledging that these locations are threatened refuges, we adjusted our practice to respect, take care of and cause minimal disturbance to habitats and inhabitants. We therefore worked mostly in stillness, employing somatic techniques of active-listening, yielding, and connecting to place. With an attitude of perceptual openness, we explored witnessing and being-witnessed-by the environments. Choreographic material was then developed in the studio by releasing and realising the movement latent within the ‘sensorial snapshots’ gathered on site.

Creative team: Sue Hawksley (concept, production, direction); Richard Hodges (image/montage); Sue Hawksley, Tammy Arjona & Billie Cook (choreography/performance) and Jesse Budel (sound design). Project page: www.articulateanimal.org/dwell.htm

Bio: Dr. Sue Hawksley is an Adelaide based independent dance artist. She is artistic director of articulate animal - a platform for critical and creative inquiry into embodiment, movement and environment, often within the context of interdisciplinary and collaborative practices. Projects have been presented in theatres, galleries and academic contexts internationally. She has performed with major companies including Rambert, Philippe Genty, Scottish Ballet and Mantis. She holds a PhD in Dance from the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh College of Art) and has extensive experience as a dance educator. Sue currently works in environmental conservation & habitat restoration in the Adelaide Hills. Her URL is www.articulateanimal.org 

Rennie Tang (virtual) and Sara Wookey, "A Shared Aliveness at Louvre Lens Park: Play, Rest and Proximity"

Louvre Lens Park is a space for reflecting on the shared aliveness between living bodies and landscape, between animals, plants and people. A tacit dialogue unfolds through the language of movement as it encounters this expansive landscape. Rennie Tang’s interest in peripheral landscapes led to her proposal to instigate a spontaneous collaborative process between a dancer, designer and filmmaker within this public landscape as a way to bring this dialogue to life. Louvre Lens Park was selected for its whimsical offerings for bodily movement, especially at its periphery, and opportunities to explore relationships between architecture, human movement and landscape. The broader context is also relevant. Lens is a city at the periphery of France, 195 km north of Paris, and is the home of the Louvre Lens Museum which is located outside the spotlight of its cultural counterpart in the country’s capital Parisian center. Choreographer and researcher Sara Wookey developed a score, or set of verbal prompts, structured into 3 parts: play, rest and proximity, as a response to the Louvre Lens Park landscape designed by landscape architect Catherine Mosbach. Filmmaker Christian Kipp collaborated with Sara and Catherine enacting this score as they meandered along the periphery of the park, filming their journey and developing it into a short film. 

Bios:

Rennie Tang is a designer and educator based in Los Angeles. Her research explores human movement as a shared language between all living beings and the development of kinesthetic design and pedagogical methodologies. Projects are often fueled by interdisciplinary collaborations with visual artists, choreographers and healthcare researchers. Her work draws from her background in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and dance. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from McGill University and a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University.

Sara Wookey's transdisciplinary research across architecture, choreography, sociology and museology is informed by her 30 years as an internationally recognised dance practitioner. Her research asks pressing questions about the nature of human interaction that finds articulation through public sector spaces such as theatres, museum spaces, health care sites and academia. Her current concern is how expanded choreography can help to change the human imaginary of relationships between bodies and space in ways that can be more inclusive and sustainable. Affiliates include Tate Modern, Art Science Museum Singapore, Van Abbemuseum, Royal Holloway University, Dance East and Coventry University. 

Lucy Nicholson, "Moving With..."

Moving With is a short film made in partnership with Jonny Randall, to capture a moment in time between mother and son and their local landscape. A celebration of simple things: being together, moving together, listening, and watching all we have on our doorstep. It documents dance artist Lucy Nicholson and her son, Benji’s, regular dance walks in their local village of Staveley, Lake District, Cumbria.

Mother and son dance together, responding to the accompaniment of their natural surroundings with a backdrop of the beautiful national park. Acknowledging the power and grace in stillness, slowness, gentleness, calmness – without challenge, target or adrenaline we love, appreciate, participate and experience our natural world. 

The film then documents the sharing of the Moving With process through screening, workshop and drawing with local families and schools in the North West.

We know that a large part of the apathy towards the climate crisis is in our othering of our ourselves in relationship to our environment and as a remote region within the Northwest, this project offered a wonderful opportunity to engage our local and wider communities with their own natural surroundings and to encourage young and old to feel more connected to their environment, not doing something in it, on it or over it but moving with it.

The film offers a unique aesthetic and creative practice – an intergenerational, sited, improvised work. We were interested in acknowledging the embodied knowledge Benji offers this project – asserting his inherent improvisational ability as a valuable artistic aesthetic to view and learn from. We’re proposing a new way to make work, share work and engage audiences with the work.

Bio: A senior lecturer with UCLanDance with The University of Central Lancashire, Lucy works within the Laban-Barteneiff Movement System to facilitate dance technique, composition, performance, improvisation & facilitation. She is interested in a return to the body as a starting point for creative practice; acknowledging this as a valid place to work from. Lucy also has a large body of community practice working across ages and communities, providing opportunities to support self-awareness, reflection, change and empowerment is fundamental to the way she works. Her work has focussed for many years on building practice with vulnerable groups, most commonly in the criminal justice and recovery communities and is currently training to be a movement analyst to support this work further. The Moving With Project has developed naturally from moving into the juggle of maintaining practice within motherhood and builds on her growing interest in the embodied facilitator and leader. 

Virginia Farman, "Souvenir"

Souvenir is a series of four short dance films created in the 2020 lockdown via audio -recordings sent to twelve dancers who were geographically dispersed. Each audio was directed through an improvisational score that generated a specific way of engaging with the environment and of embodying an interior relationship to it. Intermittently, when following the audios, the dancers video recorded sections of their dancing and then sent what they had collected to Virginia who edited it into the films that make up the Souvenir collection. 

In discussing the project, Virginia reflects on the theoretical frameworks that supported the practice, and on how the processes that were developed to direct the dancers aligned with her ongoing research into how to created site-situated choreographies via correspondences that enable an untethering of choreographic control over how people and places interacted, and how this, she argues, enables a coequality between subjects and the expressive potential of places, to emerge.  

Bio: Virginia Farman is a choreographer and artist-researcher whose practice explores improvisation in site-situated choreography as method for cultivating connections between individuals, communities and environments. Virginia is a senior lecturer at the University of Chichester, a long-time collaborator with Three Score Dance, Brighton, and a PhD candidate investigating site-situated choreography.

5C - Workshop - ICC Studio (with a moment outside)

Benjamin Skinner, "Material Encounters" 

This workshop explores how the sensorium of the physical body cultivates an awareness of the environment around it. The creative methodology of the session illuminates the similarities and differences between materials and the materiality (and hybridity) of the physical body through the cultivation of clay sculpture, charcoal drawing and the exploration of movement. 

As humans, we delineate space whilst perceptively building an embodied sense of interior and exterior worlds. We exist in a constant state of flux, rippling between the edges of our skin and the complexity of an exhausted planet. Within this workshop’s frame, we will investigate the intersection of socio-ecological boundaries and the materiality of the physical body. My objective is to support participants in gathering alternative forms of knowledge through a series of cross-disciplinary tasks.

As a form of interpersonal engagement, these encounters will be given the time and space to evolve into collective charcoal drawings, or sculptures using found objects. Depending on the composition of the people attending the workshop, there will also be a chance to experiment with somatic vocabularies that explore the skin’s capacity to continuously unfold into the environment. 

Bio: Ben works as an illustrator, dancer and facilitator of arts-based somatic practices. His pedagogy explores different ways of influencing how people perceive the environment by drawing upon embodied knowledge. As a PGR he has taught in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries and the School of Fine Art for the University of Leeds. In April he submitted his practice research thesis which documents the delivery of creative and somatic workshops and the design of an illustrated guidebook: This is a Guide to Noticing.

EVENING EVENTS

Outlier's Gathering - 19:00-20:00 - The Hub

A casual gathering for all conference attendees but with a special focus on welcoming those who feel like they are an "outlier" in terms of background, interests, etc. The event will be hosted by a Welcome Ambassador(s) who will be present to answer questions and help facilitate conversation. Please feel free to bring your own food and/or drink.

REGISTRATION - 9:00-9:30

SESSION 6 - 9:30-11:30

6A - Workshop - NEW LOCATION: ICC G22

Elaine Colandrea and Rori Smith, "Evolving with Our Elemental Kin: A Continuum Workshop"

Our workshop incorporating the breath, sound and fluid movement practices of Continuum will draw from our recent publication, The Elemental Body: A Movement Guide to Kinship with Ourselves and the Natural World. Continuum is a somatic practice that explores the important role fluid movement plays in the function and health of our bodies and our world at large. By exploring the human body as a body of fluids, we can enter experiential research pertinent to ecology, evolution, and human development. 

We consider body and environment to be a key topic of inquiry in the field of somatics today. The embodied study of our human form in its myriad contexts (ecological, political, social, etc.) provides us with the ground to understand our being-in-the world through relationship and co-creation. By studying the qualities and processes that our bodies share with other expressions of life (other species but also other conceptual bodies like bodies of water and land masses) we can enhance awareness of our position within various ecosystems, from local to global.

 As we come to grips with global ecological crises it benefits us to remember that we are more embedded within and similar to the matter that comprises our world than we are separate from it. We believe there are positive ethical outcomes possible from considering our bodies as kin to our environments. We cherish our kin, we care for them, and we recognize that we share both mutual origins and futures. In our workshop we will use the elements (Air, Earth, Fire and Water) as lenses through which to explore some examples of processes and qualities that the human body experiences in relationship with its environment. 

Weather permitting, we will meet outdoors in a flat, grassy location. Please bring what you need to feel comfortable seated and lying down in this environment. For accommodation, please reach out to rori.smith@maine.edu. In inclement weather, we will meet indoors.

Bios:

Elaine Colandrea’s interest in the transformative capacity of the body led to a master’s degree in Dance Education from Columbia University and careers in dance/choreography, somatic education and bodywork. Based in the Hudson Valley of New York, Elaine teaches regularly in Italy and has been an invited presenter at many retreat centers and somatic conferences. Elaine is Artistic Director of Watermark Arts, which hosts digital art galleries; produces exhibitions, films and performances; publishes an annual journal and convenes somatic movement workshops. Artfully embodying the natural world in service to creating a more humane society is an abiding passion. Learn more about her work at www.elainecolandrea.com & www.watermarkarts.org.

Rori Smith is an artist, somatic movement educator and researcher of bodily experience. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from Temple University, is a member of the Continuum Teachers Association, teaches Pilates, and is a doctoral student in Art and Philosophy at University of Maine. Her interests include critical theory, ethics, feminist/gender theory, and the philosophy of perception. Her latest performances have been presented by University of Maine, Watermark Arts, The Living Room/Moving Target Portland, World Dance Alliance-Americas and Wilson College.

6B - Workshop - ET 221

Ilya Vidrin (Assistant Professor of Creative Practice Research, Northeastern University), "Somatic Partnering Workshop" 

How partners encounter each other plays a role in whether they will be able to sustain their interaction. Given the range of desires, motivations, and intentions in dancing with others, it seems important to distinguish different degrees and types of togetherness. By focusing on the role of reasoning and understanding, we stand to gain a clearer picture of how expectations about interactions inform the dynamics between partners. This, in turn, affords a picture of what partners can actually achieve in and through their connection. The epistemic picture assumes that there are things that are knowable in dancing together, while the ethical picture assumes that we are responsible for the things we ought to know. In this one-hour workshop, we will examine the specific characteristics of dependence in dancing together through the practice of Somatic Partnering. We will consider how important ethical concepts, such as trust and manipulation, can be explored through movement and physical interaction. Participants will be led through a series of movement exercises to consider the ethical significance of touch, proximity, and gaze in social interaction. We will also discuss how changing forms of physical interaction and dance have historically shaped societies and can alter our collective future. All bodies and physical abilities are very welcome. 

Bio: Dr. Ilya Vidrin is Assistant Professor of Creative Practice Research at Northeastern University. Born into a refugee family, Ilya’s work engages with and investigates ethics of interaction, including the embodiment of care, trust, cultural competence, and social responsibility. As an interdisciplinary research-practitioner, Ilya's research draws on concepts and methods in social epistemology, performance philosophy, ethics of care, and cognitive psychology. Most recently, Ilya has been featured as one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” (2022), and has been an artist-in-residence at the MIT Media Lab, Harvard ArtLab, L.A. Contemporary Dance Company, North Atlantic Ballet, Ballet Des Moines, Jacob’s Pillow, the National Parks Service, The Walnut Hill School, Interlochen Arts Academy, Boston Center for the Arts, Le Laboratoire, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), and New Museum (NYC). Ilya pursued undergraduate studies in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience at Northeastern University, a Master’s Degree in Human Development and Psychology ​at​ Harvard University, and a PhD ​at C-Dare (Coventry University). 

6C - Group Panel - ICC G21

Prof. Sahid Teguh Widodo (Institute of Javanology, Universitas Sebelas Maret), Dr. Riwanto Tirtosudarmo (formerly Research Centre for Society and Culture, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI)), Dr. Samsul Maarif (Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS), Universitas Gadjah Mada), Dr. Diane Butler  (Intl. Foundation for Dharma Nature Time), and Dr. Emma Meehan (Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University)

"Amerta Movement: Perspectives from Indonesia"

Amerta Movement is a non-stylised approach to movement developed by the late Javanese artist Suprapto Suryodarmo (Prapto), an internationally recognised figure in the field of dance and somatic practices. During his lifetime, Prapto taught people from many cultural and religious backgrounds in different regions of Indonesia as well as internationally. In recent years, several books and articles have emerged on Prapto’s work such as Embodied Lives (ed. Bloom, Galanter, Reeve 2014) and The Roots of Amerta (Lavelle 2021). However, in this panel we particularly call attention to perspectives of practitioners/researchers in Indonesia to enhance knowledge and understanding of Amerta Movement. We also foreground perspectives from a wide variety of disciplines (religious studies, social demography, Javanology, cultural studies, dance-movement studies and performance practice). 

Eddy (2002, online) suggests that global influences are not always well acknowledged in somatic practices. Fortin also (2002) addresses the importance of attending to how somatics is currently practiced in different cultures, stating (2002, 132) that: ‘We move from being ego-somatic, centered on individuals, to a philosophy of eco-somatics, promoting relationships between knowledge bases and people in different sociocultural contexts.’ Both Eddy’s and Fortin’s articles are now over 15 years old but still raise pressing questions today. How is somatic work being practiced and researched differently across cultures and how are knowledges being circulated? More recently, Fortin and Grau (2014, 3) reflect on the paradoxical view in somatic research that bodies are culturally, socially and politically mediated but there is also a desire for shared understandings across cultures. Alexander and Kampe (2017) further address the need to move towards inclusion and accessibility to develop a somatics in the future. Therefore, this panel is set within this context, with a need to attend to ‘global somatics’ and create opportunities for dialogue across cultures. 

Bios:

Dr. Samsul Maarif is a core faculty member, and now serves as the head of MA program of the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies (CRCS), Graduate School, Universitas Gadjah Mada. His research interests include religions of indigenous people, ecology, community development and advocacy. He is the coordinator of a coalition of 10 institutions (NGOs, Research and Government Institutions), called “Rumah Bersama”, working on issues of indigenous people (kepercayaan/ masyarakat adat), and mentor for youth organizations: Comdev of Jayapura, Comdev of Merauke, Tani Muda Santan of East Kalimantan, and Ecotourism Group (Pokdar(e)wis) of Ammatoa, Kajang, South Sulawesi.

Professor Sahid Teguh Widodo is a Professor of Ethnolinguistics at the Faculty of Cultural Science and the Institute of Javanology, Universitas Sebelas Maret. His expertise is cultural studies and applied linguistics. His recent research examines how the social values of ancient Javanese society are reflected in heritage and the arts. He has published widely in English and Bahasa Indonesia. He has been integrating dance practices into Javanology Institute activities.

Dr. Riwanto Tirtosudarmo, holds a PhD in Social Demography (1990), Research School of Social Sciences, the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. He was a senior researcher at the Research Center for Society and Culture, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (PMB-LIPI). He has been a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Brown University (1996–97), Fellow-in-Residence 2000–2001 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) and Visiting Professor 2003–2004 at Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) Tokyo University for Foreign Languages (TUFS). 

Dr. Diane Butler is a dance-movement artist, teacher and cultural program director who has collaborated with artists from diverse cultures and faiths in the Americas, Europe and Asia for 38 years and lived in the villages of Bedulu and Tejakula, Bali, Indonesia since 2001. She and Suprapto Suryodarmo co-founded Dharma Nature Time, a cooperative international foundation to support interculture in cultural environments through sharing in the arts, religiosity and nature. Diane is an alumna of the 2011 UNITAR World Heritage Training, holds a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School; MALS in Dance & Culture from Wesleyan University; and is the first foreign scholar to earn a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Universitas Udayana, Bali where since 2014 she serves as a volunteer Associate Professor. Since 1997, Diane has offered Awakening InterArts workshops in a number of countries.

Dr. Emma Meehan is an Associate Professor in Dance at the Centre for Dance Research, Coventry University. She received an International Academic Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust called ‘Dialogue Moves: Amerta Movement in Indonesia’. She was the principal investigator for the AHRC funded Somatic Practice and Chronic Pain Network. Recent publications include ‘Moving with Pain’ co-authored with Bernie Carter in Frontiers in Psychology (2021) and ‘Moving and Mapping’ co-authored with Natalie Garrett Brown in Urban Sensographies (ed. Whybrow, Routledge, 2020). Emma has co-edited several collections including Performing Process (2018) with Hetty Blades and Dance Matters in Ireland (2018) with Aoife McGrath. She is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College UK; and Board Member for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and its EDI working group.

SESSION 7 - 11:30-13:30

7A - Paper Panel: Senses and Somatics - ICC G21

Lillian Shaddick, "Becoming one with the compás: musical embodiment in flamenco dance"

Compás - the rhythm, cadence, or musical timeline in flamenco music – is fundamental to the embodied experience of flamenco dance. The structure of flamenco collaboration requires dancers to function as musicians, where a dancer can call, direct, move with, contribute to, and react to the music. For the dancers, the literal making of sounds and rhythm, through zapateado and body percussion, becomes experientially synonymous to silent movement, and can be articulated through a feeling of ‘oneness’ with external music sources. Here, I share findings from ethnographic research investigating the embodied experience of flamenco dance for those engaging with the practice in Australia. I conducted 35 qualitative interviews with dancers from beginner level to professional performers and teachers. I also have been undergoing and reflecting on my regular flamenco dance training that began in Spain in 2019 and continues today in Australia. Hearing from dancers who have had to experience the process of absorbing flamenco music and creating musical muscle memory as adults, as well as from teachers who have had to design and facilitate these processes, offers us insight into dance and music skill acquisition that both challenge and confirm current research and theorising on embodiment. From feeling lost and out of control when dancers cannot hear the compás, to feeling ‘one’ and like they’re ‘flying’, dancers embodied experiences are intimately linked to musical experiences. The absorption of flamenco compás assisted dancer’s embodied expression, it altered their perception both within and outside of flamenco contexts, and it offered them the opportunity to momentarily free themselves from their concerns of daily life. This presentation offers insight into a practice where the lines of music and dance are blurred.  

Bio: Lillian is a dancer and PhD student from Aotearoa, New Zealand that is currently teaching and studying in Australia at the University of Sydney in the Theatre and Performance Studies department. Her ten years of experience in various social and entertainment dance scenes has and continues to inform her research including her current PhD project on the embodied experience of flamenco dance and her masters on the commercialisation of samba no pé in Australia. 

Tanatchaporn Kittikong, "Training Thai performers using a Buddhist-Somatic Approach "

The research project explores a possible series of activities and methods to assist young performers in understanding and practicing the "state of being" in performing and as performance. This approach is called the "Mindfulness/Meditation-based approach to performer training" or MbM, which uses cross-cultural techniques, vocabularies, and beliefs inspired by Thai Buddhist mindfulness practices and Vipassana meditation, as well as a Western approach to somatic movement as its framework. A set of activities was constructed and devised using principles based on the Buddhist view of psychophysical experience, tailored to the needs of each individual student-performer in the undergraduate degree program of Performance Practice at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. These activities involve breathing, sensing, moving, following, learning, and responding to psychophysical experience. The aim is to cultivate mindfulness and encourage the performer to engage, observe, witness, and contemplate their bodymind experience as it enters through their body movement sensations, into the formation of memory, thinking, and feeling towards a sense of self as the concept of "being". This paper presents an analysis of the 60-hour workshop experience and its impact on the creative process of the participants' solo performance from my perspective as the workshop leader and pedagogue, together with the experiences of the four young performers as research participants. 

Bio: Tanatchaporn Kittikong (Or Kittikong) teaches theatre and performance at the Performance Practice Program, Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, Khon Kaen University, Thailand. She was trained as an actor in Russia (BFA in Theatre Arts from Moscow State University) and has a deep interest in theatre for educational settings (MEd in Drama and the Creative Arts in Education from the University of Exeter), well-being, and artistic ends (PhD in Performing Arts from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Australia). Her research involves the performer's bodymind in performance practice, intercultural acting, and performance making. She is the author of the first Thai textbook on performance, titled "Performance: A Basic Understanding of Performance" (2020). She works as a scholar and researcher, and continues her artistic practice from stage to site-specific and various media. Her email address is tanaki@kku.ac.th. 

Keith Miller, "Giving voice: singing and sounding in Amerta Movement practice - a performative lecture sharing ongoing movement-research "

To find voice, first give voice...

As newborns our voice is one of the first signs of life, our first communication-expression, and its uniquely recognisable personal sound accompanies us throughout our lives. Even in silence we have internal voices. Voice speaks of inner and outer experience and it has boundless physical and somatic resonances, carrying verbal language whilst at the same time extending beyond the spoken word – into pre-linguistic ‘animal’ grunting, involuntary screams and laughter; to calling, crying, murmuring, whispering and countless other forms of speech; to chanting, praying and transcendent soulful singing ‘beyond words’. As a primary medium of communication, of expression and relationship, of feeling and meaning, discussion and decision, question and commandment, voice is a cornerstone of selfhood, of society, of human relation with others and with the earth.

Yet voice itself is invisible, ephemeral. Inside and outside the body at the same time, our voice arises, takes form and instantly disappears...

This presentation will share some explorations from my movement-research-practice with the land, plants and animals around my home in the New Forest, and from my ongoing collaborations with artists and performers in the UK, Europe and Indonesia. My practice is rooted in the non-stylised improvisational practice of Amerta Movement developed by the late Indonesian movement artist Suprapto Suryodarmo (Prapto), an embodied study of human and natural presence that offers ways for mutual exploration and dialogue with nature and with people from different personal, cultural and natural ecologies. Amerta Movement often features improvised music, singing and vocal ‘sounding’ created by movers themselves or by participant audience ‘witnesses’, and the practice provides rich opportunities and useful techniques for investigating movement and voice together.

Among the questions I am exploring are:

• How might voice help with receiving, listening, tuning - with myself, others and the environment?

• How might vocal movements be mutually combined and companionably integrated with other body movements?

• How can I navigate the flow of improvisation and the tides and currents of sound, rhythm, melody, verbal language?

• What does voice itself wish to say?

Bio: Keith Miller is an archaeologist, artist, musician and movement practitioner with a special interest in our relationships with nature, culture, ancestor and place. His professional background is the investigation, conservation and interpretation of historic buildings, sites and landscapes in the British Isles. His movement practice, developed since the 1980s, is rooted in Buddhist mindfulness meditation and the non-stylised movement practice of Amerta Movement developed by the movement artist Suprapto Suryodarmo (Prapto), a practice grounded in daily-life movement – sitting, standing, walking, lying down etc. – and the perception of the ‘moving self’ as a multiplicity of selves in reciprocal dialogue with a constantly changing environment. https://www.triarchypress.net/amerta.html

Keith’s movement-research explores movement, art and song as ways for investigating and connecting with places and communities past and present, both human and non-human, and as ways for fostering empathic ways of being-with and caring for ourselves and our environment. He is UK co-facilitator of Web Art Garden, a forum where people interested in art, culture and environmental issues can share creative movement-based activity from their own ecologies http://www.webartgarden.com Since 2008 Keith has co-organised Amerta movement workshops at Avebury prehistoric stone circle in the UK, and for many years until Prapto’s final year in 2019, he assisted with teaching on Prapto’s annual workshops at Avebury and on their ‘Song of Ancestor’ workshops in Bali. (For Keith’s account of ‘movement-archaeology’, see ‘Excavation without digging’, in Embodied Lives, Triarchy Press, 2014 https://www.triarchypress.net/keith-miller.html)

7B - Panel/Workshop - ICC Studio

Kat Hawkins, Anna Seymour, and Joel Brown, "Moving towards less ableism in somatics"

How can somatic practices work to be more inclusive for disabled people? What can we learn from disabled people who have spent many years working with somatic practices, both as individuals and as part of group settings?

Three disabled somatic practitioners will together hold a workshop before the conference in order to share past and present experiences and to workshop how to work with their relative impairments in order to offer suggestions for facilitators moving forward. All three of us have accessed somatic practices as a way to work with the body - bodies disabled by society - and to gain deeper understanding and autonomy over how we show up in and navigate the world. Two of the practitioners have over ten years experience of being in and facilitating inclusive somatic practices, and all of us believe in the potentials of using somatic practice to aide conversations and perceptions of the disabled body in dance.

Including three disabled dance artists - a double leg amputee with PTSD, a wheelchair user with a spinal cord injury and a Deaf person - this panel, including a presentation and demonstration within a dance studio will share some of our personal experiences, followed by a demonstration of a somatic workshop, and findings that come out of our initial workshop together and a 'wishlist' of things we would like somatic facilitators to hold so that we might feel better able to access somatics based spaces, and to feel more able to flourish once there. 

This panel will have a framework of Disability Justice principles, and will speak to points such as ableism and dance, ableism and somatic practice, the link between trauma and the body, the impact of systemic trauma, the impact of the link between ‘wellness culture’ and ableism and gaslighting within somatic contexts.

It will discuss how Disability Justice can help us to implement cultures of care and access within spaces working with somatic practices so that we are striving towards regular check ins, access being centred and celebrated, trauma-informed models of facilitation, non binary modalities, and the individual being part of a wider network of support, without patronising attitudes. 

Bios:

Kat is a PhD Researcher in dance partnered with Candoco Dance Company, and an artist working with movement, image, language and time currently based in London. 

Anna is an Australian born dance artist and performer. She is currently a dancer with Candoco Dance Company, an international dance company of disabled and non-disabled dancers, based in London. Born profoundly deaf to a hearing family in Lismore and growing up in the Northern Rivers of NSW, she started dancing at the age of 6 years old. After a long break where she didn’t dance for several years due to the inaccessible nature of dance at the time, she moved to Melbourne to study a BA of Dance at Deakin University. She lived in Melbourne for 14 years as a freelance dancer, choreographer, teacher, consultant, and producer. As a dancer, Anna has worked with different choreographers in Australia and the UK as well as creating her own work. Anna also co-founded The Delta Project, a dance collective of Deaf and hearing performers based in Melbourne. She has worked as an actor for TV (ABC’s Get Krack!n) and theatre (Deafferent Theatre). With Deafferent Theatre, she performed in Black is the Colour (Melbourne Fringe 2016) earning her a Green Room nomination for Best Performer in Independent Theatre. Anna collaborates widely with artists across different art-forms including her mural painted by Guido van Helten in Prahran exploring people’s relationship to architecture and public spaces. With Candoco, she performs and tours the company’s repertory in the UK and internationally. In 2022, the company performed at Warwick, Tate Modern, Poland, New York City, Milan, Manchester, Sweden, Abu Dhabi, Norway, and Laban and Sadlers Wells in London. Dance works include Set and Reset/Reset by Trisha Brown, Face In by Yasmeen Godder, Last Shelter by Jeanine Durning, In Worlds Unknown by Seke Chimutengwende and soft shell by Annie Hanauer.

Joel is a paraplegic dancer and singer-songwriter. He has toured extensively throughout the USA and internationally with Brown-Rice Productions and AXIS Dance Company from 2011-2014. He is currently a dancer with Candoco Dance Company since August, 2015. He has performed work by and collaborated with choreographers such as Trisha Brown, Alexander Whitley, Arlene Phillips, Yvonne Rainer, Marc Brew, Victoria Marks, and Graham Brown. He has produced two solo music albums and composed for Graham Brown’s A ppl e Falling (2013) and You (2015).He was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Performance in 2013.

7C - Workshop - ET 221

Funmi Adewole, "Through African dance drama and embodied cognition: A somatic inquiry"

This workshop and the mode of facilitation used in its delivery is the result of a critical and somatic inquiry into the processes through which I learnt to dance and to perform which has taken place over several years. Central to my dance experience is performing in African dance drama productions. I however have other significant experiences such as social dancing in familial and recreational contexts, taking classes based on neo traditional African dances, performing in Physical theatre productions, and taking classes in various Euro-American dance practices including somatic based classes. I draw on a range of scholarly work including that of Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1996), Francis Nii-Yartey (2016) and Shay Welch (2022). I am developing a practice which explores embodied cognition, creative movement, physical interaction, movement quality, and storytelling through perspectives of Pan-African movement principles and intercontextuality. 

During the workshop I will invite the participants to draw on their personal experiences of social dancing and improvisation to explore the dance exercises and games that I am devising. These exercises and games engage with concepts such as ‘grounding’, ‘anatomical pathways’, ‘movement transformation’ and ‘the teller’s stance’. Some of these concepts are well known and I seek to extend the range of pedagogic tools for their transmission whilst others are performance concepts I am theorising through practice. The dance exercises and games are technically based on Africanist dance aesthetics, principles which are found many African dance styles such as polyrhythm, low centre of gravity, seated body postures, patterns of movement, various ways of contacting the floor with the feet and the production of vibrations, rotations, and undulations. Exercises will be explored by participants alone, in duets or groups and in circles formations. Space will be made at different points in the workshop for discussion and questions. 

Bio: ‘Funmi Adewole Elliott is a senior lecturer in Dance at De Montfort University, England. She holds an MA in Postcolonial studies and PhD in Dance Studies. She is also a performer, dramaturge, and dance researcher.  On relocating from Nigeria to Britain in 1994 she began a career in the arts which included tours with Physical theatre and African dance drama companies, arts consultancy, and voluntary work as a dance advocate. Her touring credits include performances with Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble, Horse and Bamboo mask and puppetry company, Ritual Arts, Banner Theatre, The Chomondeleys and Artists-in-Exile. Her present research interests include dance as a profession, storytelling as performance, the Dance of Africa and the diaspora in the cultural and creative industries and postcolonial inquiry in practice as research. She creates solo pieces of movement-based theatre. Most recently she performed The Blind Side (2022) at the YENSA festival in Toronto, Canada.  She has been exploring her experiences in dance and performance from a somatic perspective from about 2016 and has lead somatic based workshops at Body IQ in Berlin and Independent Dance, London. 

Online Paper Panel - Somatic Reflections: 11:30 - 13:30

Sarah Neville, "Embodied participation - dance knowledge informing work-place training"

Embodied knowledge informed by dance knowledge can positively expand the capacity of work-place training when activated through simulation tasks that apply immersive participatory practice. Through a detailed examination of a variety of technologically advanced industry environments where experiential learning occurs, analysed through the lens of embodied cognition, this paper identifies the ways in which dance knowledge can be transformed into new and enhanced forms of experiential learning. A cognitive ethnography applied to fieldwork across industries (education, aviation, transport and healthcare), demonstrates that that embodied experience is activated by learning through moving, doing and participating within immersive digital environments. The question of how dance knowledge is transferred across industries is addressed through theories of embodied cognition paired with emergent communication strategies from human-computer interaction, that develop terminology and new physical languages and identify the significance of subjective participation as a result of participatory practice in simulation for work-based training. 

Bio: Sarah Neville is an Australian choreographer and scenario designer who devises new media performance, instigates inter-disciplinary practices and invests in multi-platform processes and production outcomes. Sarah has created work for Adelaide Festival and Fringe, Ausdance Choreolab, Dance House, Australian Choreographic Centre, ADT’s Ignition season, Strut Dance, Link Dance Company, Vitalstatistix, MOD UniSA and the Venice Biennale 2019. In 2021 Sarah was awarded an Arts SA Fellowship to create dance for virtual reality experiences. In 2022, Sarah received a PhD from Deakin University/ Coventry University researching embodied participation in immersive digital environments. Sarah has a Research Masters in Choreography from the Queensland University of Technology and a BA hons from Flinders University in Theatre and Film. Sarah was an intern at the research centre for interactive and virtual environments (IVE) at UniSA and has presented at ANAT’s Spectra, Siggraph, Technart and the 7th MoCo Conference. Sarah is currently an adjunct research fellow at UniSA Creative/ IVE and tutor in Creative Arts at Flinders University. 

Dr. Kate Hunter (Lecturer in Art and Performance, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) and Dr. Olivia Millard (Senior Lecturer in Dance, School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia)

"The Imperative Of The Present: Improvisation, eavesdropping and the ageing body" 

This paper examines an interdisciplinary improvisation practice that brings together dancer Olivia Millard and theatre-maker Kate Hunter.

Drawing on their performance work ‘Audio Logical’, the authors unfold their separate and interwoven practices as they respond, react, move, and travel together through the crossovers and meeting points in the genealogies of their combined fifty-year performance history. This immersive practice has brought considerations to the fore of sustaining a practice; what does it mean to build a body of work - and a body? How do we sustain an embodied practice now and into the future?

‘Audio Logical’ engages with the imperative of the present while contemplating past experiences and embodied histories, which, as suggested by John Cage, is expressed in each person, act, interaction as an “interest in continuity whether in terms of discourse or organization" (1973, p.75). Built from weekly improvisation sessions grounded in a travelling score, ‘Audio Logical’ uses recordings of the artists’ bodies in motion – breathy gasps, arthritic knees, crackly elbows – to create a personal, comic and moving performance of gathered and shared embodied histories to arrive together, momentarily, in the present.

In this paper, the performance is considered alongside a concurrent study of daily listening-in-place: an 'audiological' gathering of field data in which the artists expand the notion of eavesdropping to consider all objects and non-human objects in their periphery - sounds, memories, haptic sensations, bodily perceptions - as valid and resonant contributors to the characteristics of a place. The artists bring their experience of improvisation to this practice to propose a-sitting-and-listening-to-the-world as an improvisational duet with environment.

The artists also acknowledge their ageing female bodies unapologetically. Rather than representing a loss of youth, the elder body is proposed as a site of revolutionary potential: “…not simply a sign to be read, a symptom to be deciphered but also a force to be reckoned with” (Grosz 1994, p. 120).

Bios:

Kate Hunter is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, improvisation, painting, and sound. Her work juxtaposes digital and analog technology, storytelling and the live body, and employs innovative use of found objects, polyphonics and verbatim recordings to examine the complex interplay between hearing, listening, reading and speaking that is implicit in the ways humans communicate through language. Kate is interested in relationships between the brain and the body, embodied cognition and its relevance to physical theatre trainings and improvisation. Kate was an associate artist with award-winning physical theatre company Born in a Taxi for 15 years. She has trained extensively in the Suzuki Method of Actor Training, Viewpoints and Composition, and has studied in New York with Anne Bogart and SITI Company, the UK with Ruth Kanner and Andrew Morrish, and with acclaimed theatre director Richard Schechner. She is a founding member of Suzuki Melbourne, a peer training group committed to regular practice and interrogation of the Suzuki Method of Actor Training. Kate is currently Lecturer in Art and Performance at Deakin University. 

Olivia Millard has worked as a performer, maker and lecturer of dance for the past 25 years. She has performed with dance companies and independent choreographers/directors in Australia and internationally, and has created over 20 dance works, both funded and commissioned. Olivia taught at WAAPA, Perth from 1999-2006 and since 2007 has worked at Deakin University. Olivia’s PhD was conferred in April 2013 and her current position at Deakin is Senior Lecturer in Dance. Olivia has worked with the group About Now for the past ten years, co-creating work for several festivals and events and is also a lead researcher in the multidisciplinary AllPlay Dance program measuring benefits of dance and developing inclusive dance programs for children with disabilities.  

Róisín O'Gorman, "From Silenced Tongues to Falling Gardens: a reflection on somatic approaches to evoking silenced stories"

This paper will reflect on and analyze an ongoing creative arts research project (“Falling Gardens”) which addresses the cultural legacies of embodied silences of carceral institutions which litter the Irish landscape. It will explore how practices of poesis offer a bridge between discourse and bodies and how this located historical legacy resonates with similar sites and practices globally. The paper will review a range of creative approaches to writing that emerge from the body (following for example, Tufnell and Crickmay, Pallant, Longley, Barry) and examine work emerging from a series of workshops which will move between visual media, writing and somatic encounters with the physical and psychical remains of these institutions. The paper will reflect on the ways in which somatic practices also entice a stretching the possibilities of critical language to make space for othered and silenced bodily experience. Furthermore, it will consider the performative and non-performative use of language in containing bodies; the integration of exploring language through voice and sound as well as the visual markings of words on a page; creative writing practices developed with particular attention to the moving body as source for new writing and new modes of performative practices.  

Bio: Dr. Róisín O’Gorman lectures in Department of Theatre at University College Cork. Her  research examines performance as an interdisciplinary epistemology. Her work articulates the joint space between creative arts practice and traditional scholarship interweaving practice as a Somatic Movement Educator along with creative arts practice and traditional scholarship.  This work results in arts-based research projects, essays in international journals, book chapters and video essays which develop conceptual knowledge and integrate those concepts through the varied forms. See http://research.ucc.ie/profiles/A027/rogorman

LUNCH/BOOK LAUNCH - 13:30-15:30 - ET 101

PLENARY - 15:30-17:00 - ET 221

Plenary Panel, Reflections and Future Considerations

Panel Contributors: Funmi Adewole, Heni Hale, Rosemary Lee, Kate Marsh, Diego Pizarro 

Chair: Natalie Garrett Brown

This Plenary Panel will offer short think pieces from each of our panel members to reflect on conference learnings, current practice and considerations for the future of dance and somatic practices closing with an opportunity for delegates to contribute to the discussion.

Bios:

‘Funmi Adewole Elliott is a senior lecturer in Dance at De Montfort University, England. She holds an MA in Postcolonial studies and PhD in Dance Studies. She is also a performer, dramaturge, and dance researcher.  On relocating from Nigeria to Britain in 1994 she began a career in the arts which included tours with Physical theatre and African dance drama companies, arts consultancy, and voluntary work as a dance advocate. Her touring credits include performances with Adzido Pan-African Dance Ensemble, Horse and Bamboo mask and puppetry company, Ritual Arts, Banner Theatre, The Chomondeleys and Artists-in-Exile. Her present research interests include dance as a profession, storytelling as performance, the Dance of Africa and the diaspora in the cultural and creative industries and postcolonial inquiry in practice as research. She creates solo pieces of movement-based theatre. Most recently she performed The Blind Side (2022) at the YENSA festival in Toronto, Canada.  She has been exploring her experiences in dance and performance from a somatic perspective from about 2016 and has lead somatic based workshops at Body IQ in Berlin and Independent Dance, London. 

Dr Natalie Garrett Brown undertook her dance training and education at Trinity Laban and London Contemporary Dance School completing her doctoral studies at Roehampton University in the area of dance and Somatic Practices. She is also a trained executive Coach and Somatic Movement Educator and is currently Dean, at the School of Arts and Creative Industries at London South Bank University.

Diego Pizarro is Associated Professor at the Federal Institute of Brasília (IFB) since 2010, coordinating the research group CEDA-SI – Collective of Studies in Dance, Somatics and Improvisation. He carries out post-doctoral research (2022-2023) on Somatics of Voice at the University of Brasília, CAPES/BRAZIL fellow. He is a Permanent Professor at the Graduate Program in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Bahia (PPGAC/UFBA), where he also finished his PH.D. He is a Certified Teacher of Body-Mind Centering℠, teaching and researching Somatics, Ecoperformance, Embodied Anatomy, Dance Composition, Contact Improvisation, and Contemporary Dance.

Heni Hale is co-director of Independent Dance (ID), an artist-led organisation supporting the development of dance in multiple forms through inviting artists to co-create learning and exchange ideas. ID is based at Siobhan Davies Studios in London and hosts an international programme of classes, workshops, projects, festivals and partnerships with higher education including an MA/MFA creative practice with Trinity Laban. Heni also works as a performer and choreographer, co-founding a performance research collective, Dog Kennel Hill Project, in 2004 which produced touring theatre works, gallery installations, video works and site-based interventions. She is currently studying towards a PhD with Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University and Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, supported by Midlands4Cities.

Kate Marsh is a disabled dance artist with over 20 years of experience in performing, teaching and making. Her interests are centred around perceptions of the body in the arts and notions of corporeal aesthetics. Specifically, she is interested in each of our lived experiences of our bodies, and how this does (or doesn’t) inform our artistic practice. Her doctorate focused on leadership in the context of dance and disability and draws strongly on the voices of artists to interrogate questions around notions of leadership, perceptions and the body.

Dr. Dani Abulhawa (University of Leeds/PEBL) and Dr. Christian Berger (PEBL) 

"Skateboard Somatics: Exploring Seaweed and Marine Ecology through Movement" (Workshop)

This is a guided improvisation workshop, in which you will be invited to participate on a skateboard. We will work with information about seaweed lifecycles, intertidal location, and seaweed movement, and explore how the use of skateboarding practice might help to facilitate engagement with both somatic improvisation and (marine) ecology. We are in the process of developing workshops that will use skateparks and skateboarding practice to explore marine ecology with people aged 13-24 in Holyhead, Isle of Anglesey. We would like the opportunity to explore these ideas with professional peers, and to gather feedback and advice for further development. 

This workshop is suitable for beginners to skateboarding. It is open to wheelchair users and other participants who cannot or do not wish to use a skateboard. Dani Abulhawa and Christian Berger are qualified skateboarding coaches and will guide you through fundamental skateboard technique. All equipment – including a skateboard, helmet, wrist guards, knee pads and elbow pads will be provided. Please confirm your place in advance and inform us about your access and participation needs.   

Bios: 

Dr Dani Abulhawa is Lecturer in Contemporary Applied Performance at the University of Leeds and co-editor of the Choreographic Practices Journal. She is the co-founder of accumulations, a supportive network of dance and movement artists based in Manchester, UK. Dani is a director of Skate Manchester CIC, which supports accessibility of skateboarding to diverse people, and the development of skateboarding activity and spaces in the city of Manchester. Dani is an ambassador for SkatePal, a charity that build skateparks and facilitate skateboarding sessions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Dani and Dr Christian Berger co-founded Plant Ecology Beyond Land (PEBL) CIC in 2019. PEBL conducts research and development for seaweed farming and environmental monitoring. Dani’s involvement is focused around exploring play methods for developing empathetic connections to marine life, and supporting a viable aquaculture sector through community-empowerment. 

Dr Christian Berger has a background in sensor design and manufacture, having completed his PhD at the University of Manchester in Microelectronics and Material Science. He also previously led a team of Engineers at Atomic Mechanics developing advanced sensor electronics for the Agri-tech and Robotics Industry. Christian is a co-director of Skate Manchester CIC and co-director of Plant Ecology Beyond Land (PEBL) CIC. 

Adesola Akinleye and Helen Kindred

Rosanna Barragan

Melanie Brierly, "Dance as a process of artful care in the Parkinson's community" (Workshop)

My in-person workshop explores dance as a process of artful care in the Parkinson’s community. 

Although symptoms and responses to medication vary across the Parkinson’s population, and change with disease longevity, all people with Parkinson’s experience a sense of bodily felt disconnection and a flow disturbance, with impact to movement, thinking, mood, life perspective, social and familial relationships, and the activities of daily living. Caregivers of people living with Parkinson’s also experience changes to the normal flow of life because they have less time to spend on themselves, socialise, or find the energy and patience to meet the new demands of a caring role. 

Dancing together promotes co-regulatory health support and collective acts of care. In my workshop, we will experience, reflect, and discuss some of the processes through which shared dancing and moving enhance experiences of connection and flow as support to health and wellbeing in the Parkinson’s community. 

Bio: Based in the Northwest UK, Dr Melanie Brierley (Mel) is a dance and health artist and registered somatic movement educator (ISMETA) advocating for the benefits of movement and dance to health and wellbeing. Through a process of artful caring, Mel facilitates somatically informed movement and dance practice to support the physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual needs of each person. Mel offers specialist Connect & Flow movement/dance sessions and one to one Home Performance practice for the Parkinson’s community. She facilitates group and one to one movement/dance practice with people living with other neurological conditions such as Dementia, Multiple Sclerosis, MSA, Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy, and Stroke. Both nationally and internationally, Mel delivers professional training and mentoring in dance/movement for the Parkinson’s community.

Maisie Beth James, "Exploring Somatic Practice and Virtual Reality: How can VR support the body’s experience and perception of the Self?"

In this article, we consider the affordances of an immersive Virtual Reality experience as a way to overcome some of the common barriers to optimising the body’s somatic potential. We pose this hypothesis through the lens of Sartre’s theory of the body, drawing on his landmark work ‘Being and Nothingness’. In particular, we argue that Virtual Reality helps to overcome a limiting ‘thisness’ experience of embodiment. A person’s perceived transposition from the known material reality could be uplifting to the inner self, especially for people who may be hindered by their ‘thisness’. It creates an alternate mode of embodied relating, one where a person may be empowered to reclaim their self without judgement. Sartre’s body modes provide a novel theoretical framework to understand somatic expression, but Virtual Reality also introduces an original context for somatic practice and research. We conclude there is promising theoretical alignment, but also clear empirical potential from this early exploration. This real-world possibility leads the way to new areas for research and practice, as we outline in this article.

Bio: Currently studying her PhD looking into somatic practices and pain management, Maisie completed her BA at The University of Winchester in Education Studies and her MA at Liverpool John Moores University in Dance Practices. Since graduating, she has been involved in various research projects with dance students and research participants investigating the applications of somatics as a therapeutic modality and alternative, experiential approach to education. As a researcher, Maisie positions herself at the forefront of emergent knowledge within the field of somatic movement practices and synthesises philosophical concepts with practice research to inform her practice. 

Maisie.james@mail.bcu.ac.uk 

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3187-4136

Hilary Kneale, "Stillness of Horses" (Performance)

A spread of drawings, floor bound, earth bound, speak of this, we speak of this in language of shape and form and cycles. As I move amongst the drawings slow ancient sounds emerge from me in remembrance. Vast blackness torn into light from the secret depth of the sky. Rock worn over, smooth, ice smooth, wind and earth grit bound. Body opens to the heart of itself. Moss forrest-like grows its way over and through. I look out far…… to where my eyes see nothing, far out to where my eyes see nothing…..look out look out… see where the strings come together distant distant far away into the time before. The strings shiver the strings shiver shiver.. shimmer, the strings are far away they come here now, always now, the strings are far away they are here now……… the strings……. shimmer…... A pool of over thirty drawings are on the floor all around me, pencil, pen, charcoal, thread/stitch-drawn, they are awake in the space, spilling their stories out amongst each other, they jostle, float, slide, find their place. I move amongst them, hear them, speak them. Their stories emerge through my body in sound and word and movement, I move them and with them. They are not fixed in time or space. They speak of the vast and the minute, of ancient and new born, of stars and moss and rock and tree…… pulsing cells moving, growing, dying, they speak of body, earth body, animal body, hot, pepper hot stars biting hard into the darkness awake awake. The images have emerged within fast drawn circles, called in from amongst the seen and unseen of the more than human realm. I live amongst other life on Dartmoor, their presences flow through me and into the portal of each circle. The drawings enter through visceral experience and are ‘beings’ in themselves. As artist, I entwine installation, drawing, performance, eco somatic practice and shamanism to bring out this intimate work as prayer and as call for remembrance. Drawing dimensions 600 x 600"

Bio: Hilary Kneale is an independent interdisciplinary artist, somatic practitioner, published writer, educator and guardian of Vision Fast, who lives and works within her own quest to remember the true nature of interrelatedness. Her work is a releasing of seen and felt experiences within the natural world into deep body-based responses. It is with a sense of wonder at the beauty and fragility of the natural magic that surrounds us that she enters explorations between the past and the present, while at the same time calling into the future for renewal. Her performance works are akin to ritual and may include; writing, drawing, items of clothing and other hand-made magical objects. Hilary Kneale has a background in education and fine art and has trained extensively to embody and develop practices with support of the work of Helen Poynor (www.walkoflife.co.uk) and Northern Drum Shamanic Centre (www.northerndrum.com) She brings a quality of deep grounding in the present as she inhabits and teaches ways of opening the body into the unknown realms of the heart, mind and spirit to support a re-connection with the more than human realms.Hilary Kneale lives on Dartmoor in Devon alongside a still vibrant community of wild beings. www.hilarykneale.com

Diego Martínez-Campos

Jill Green

Lars Dahl Pedersen, Ph.D. fellow at the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University, and VIA University College in Denmark, "Students realize playful movement through contagious ripple effects"

Research on creative dance education has indicated that students can take risks and improvise when the teacher relinquishes control through an open and explorative approach. I add to the discussion by exploring the unexpected and spontaneous episodes when teaching dance improvisation in settings outside dance education. Based on empirical material from a design-based research project conducted within the Danish bachelor’s degree program in social education, I analyze three episodes where students take the initiative and use their bodies and voices to play essential roles in creating sensuous, repetitive, and humorous group formations. I argue that these episodes can be understood through phenomenological and sociological conceptualizations such as sociability, contagion, affectivity, crowds, and laughter and that students can explore playful movement through various contagious ‘ripple effect’ processes. These moments are a kind of significant everyday playful choreography that is a beneficial skill for social educators involving embodied creativity. 

Bio: Lars Dahl Pedersen, a contemporary dancer and choreographer, holds and MA in phenomenology and philosophy of mind and is currently a Ph.D. fellow at the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University, and VIA University College in Denmark. In the national research program, Playful Learning Research Extension, he explores the role of the body and movement in play and education through choreographic experiments in early childhood and social education.

Jacquelyn Marie Shannon

Dr Naama Spitzer