Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2019

The purpose of this article is to describe how students exploring fascia through somatics experience its embodiment. This is done by discussing their written impressions of the somatic workshop: ‘Fascia & movement’, which I taught in dance institutions in Bogotá and Barcelona as of 2015. This narrative material will serve to look for further connections between fascia research and the dance education field. The article begins by reviewing some core findings of fascia research and the Anatomy Trains1 model. It discusses the concepts of somatic movement (SM), embodiment and the place of writing within classes, offers a specific class example and describes the methodology and limits of the workshop design and the narrative approach. Then, I compare the main qualities and functions of the fascia with the subjective experiences of fascial embodiment. The most relevant experience found is a sensation of wholeness that comes from within, while a new awareness of internal connections and adaptability takes place. Finally, I will present some contributions, tactics and precautions of integrating fascial understanding into dance, movement education and self-development.

In synaesthesia, the stimulation of one sense or cognitive concept simultaneously and involuntarily produces a sensation in a second sense or cognitive experience. while synaesthesia has been investigated from neuroscience and psychology to social sciences and the arts, the relationship between synaesthesia and dance is largely un-researched. This article provides insight into my practice-led research project on the relationship between synaesthesia and dance improvisation, informed by somatic practice. It demonstrates the interrelation of synaesthesia and dance improvisation when performed by a synaesthete, and discusses the role of attention in this context as well as explorations of the relationship between synaesthesia, somatic practice and dance improvisation by synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes. In conclusion it is suggested that research into synaesthesia through dance and somatic practice can contribute to an integral understanding of this highly quantitatively investigated phenomenon.

This article is a reflection from a moment during the tour of my performance work for young audiences – Found. I explore how the meaningfulness shared in the moments dancing together captures much broader narratives about the transformative connections of Being-in-Place: emplacement. I respond to Sarah Pink’s call to explore bodily experiences through emplacement. Therefore, I use emplacement as a lens to theorize experiences during the practical performance work of Found, beyond the visual aesthetic of seeing live dance. This articulating and valuing the significance of where Self begins, or ends or is continuous in environment shares somatic inquiry with colleagues in architecture, social sciences and geography. I suggest ramifications on how dance offers corporeal dialogue that can empower children to take part in, and become aware of, their own presence in the co-created reality of Place.

This article addresses the concept Body as Archive in the context of contemporary Jamaica, a nation simultaneously grounded in Christian Religiosity and rooted in African Cosmology. Body as Archive is identified here as an understanding of the body that recognizes bodily artefacts as stored in individual and collective bodies for future generations to excavate, critically interrogate, re-craft and/or restore and deploy in the fashioning of present-day individual and community identities, life possibilities and future world imaginings. At its core Body as Archive is the work of the imagination to manifest the body as both archive and artefact, both a space for the collection and recording of historical memory and remembrance and itself an expression of memory and re-membrance. In contemporary Jamaica Body as Archive encompasses notions of beauty, the role of dance, and the significance of performance around and about the Jamaican female body. Embedded in this current exploration is an interrogation of the ways in which the bio-political imagination of past generations inform the excavation and deployment of bodily artefacts in the present.

Realigning the interrelationship between documentation, choreography and the lived moment of performance, this article asks how choreographic documentation practices can be reimagined to articulate deeper layers of embodied knowledge beyond a focus on movement patterns or gestures. Entrusting the dancer to drive the process, accentuating their expertise in perceiving and analysing bodily sensation, the article proposes a series of experimental documentation methods. These include the use of verbal language, the breaking down of choreographic continuity and linear phrasing, and ‘enactive’ filming, with repetition as an exploratory tool. Developed through practice, these methods consider the use of available technologies (laptops, smartphones, etc.), informed by theories of enactive perception. By relieving the tension between the immediacy of performance and choreography as a framework of previously defined choices and limits, the article focuses on the dancer as the primary asset in the documentation process, advocating their agency in articulating interior knowledge and lived bodily experience in documented forms.

The writing becomes a limbed extension – a dance – inked on shore and paper by a body moving in these artist pages. The author poetically captures the process of engaging in the 22nd annual Kokoro Dance Theatre Society’s Wreck Beach Butoh Intensive: a nine-day in-studio period, followed by three outdoor performances: on the shores and in the waters of Vancouver, Canada’s Pacific Ocean. Preece captures the days in a poem, synthesizing felt experience with elements of the daily choreography and context, offering palpable, personal and sensual tellings of one woman moving through process, practice and performance. Although specific, the poems remain accessible – interpretable and relatable to the reader – as fresh offerings, as movements themselves.

In this article I discuss how my background as a somatic movement therapist and educator has informed my identity and current work as a higher education (HE) researcher and academic developer, or teacher of HE. I explore what it means to come from a non-traditional home discipline, and to work in a non-unified field within academia. How does it impact on academic credibility, and the practical choices of methodology and dissemination? What might a new, less traditional home discipline bring to HE research, and what problems might arise for a researcher wanting to draw on less known or regarded methods, practices or theories of research? Within somatic movement and education the ethos of embodiment, that is an awareness of the importance of the body, underlies all theory and practice. Elements of this ethos can also be found across many disciplines within academia. HE is a non-unified field that has been described as atheoretical or without an overarching theoretical base. It attracts researchers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds, and yet draws strongly on social science and hard science descriptions of rigour, validity and what is considered knowledge and research. In this article I take a reflective and embodied approach to consider how this impacts on issues of credibility working in HE, drawing on conversations with other HE researchers and academic developers, and the consequences and tensions that result.

This article details the unique pairing of dance and writing, the likes of which are often considered two very different beasts. It examines how approaches to movement improvisation have been used to form and inform innovative methods of entering into the act of writing from the experience of dance. The argument authenticates the current renewed appreciation for the possibilities of writing to enable further creative critical engagement. Consequently, the meeting of creativity and criticality is one in which the dancer playfully explores and examines the suchness of one’s dancing. Suchness is therefore understood as the unique sum of qualities experienced by the dancer – the point at which clarity and closeness facilitate connection through the images, feelings and sensations evoked by dance. In summary, the article outlines the relationship between dance and writing, before exploring the methods used to facilitate a dancer’s assimilation and validation of what happens for them when they dance.

Radio Strainer: Part Two of the Kinesthetic Archive, Alys Longley (2015) Winchester: Winchester University Press, ISBN 978-1-90611-316-2, p/bk, £20.00

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Wellbeing, Vicky Karkou, Sue Oliver and Sophia Lycouris (eds) (2017) Oxford: Oxford University Press, £115, 968 pp., ISBN 978-0-19994-929-8, h/bk; epub ISBN: 9780190655112