Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - 1-2: 6th International Dance and Somatic Practices Conference - Reconnections: Looking back, moving forward, enacting change, Dec 2024

This primarily visual and poetic contribution: part manifesto, part rally call for environmental and EcoSomatic action and part memoir, shares some of the work that I have been investigating in embodiment and in permaculture. It is part of ongoing practice as a gardener and dancer, a long-term research endeavour on an inner-city urban allotment in the United Kingdom, titled ‘And So We Sow’, which has been developing since 2017. It features images created in collaboration with the photographer Ming de Nasty at my plot in the summer of 2022. The work draws on principles from Releasing dance practices, particularly Skinner Releasing Technique, from organic gardening techniques and from wider embodied engagement. It has various strands underpinned by a curiosity about how we inhabit our inner and outer landscapes simultaneously. Currently, it reflects on my working-class roots and on women’s labour of the body and on the land.

Concerns about redundancy of ecosomatic education due to its niche nature or inaccessibility may be overestimated. This study interviewed ecosomatics students to examine which factors are involved in piquing interest in this form of education and knowledge production. Findings can inform how ecosomatic education can best be promoted and organized to attract under-reached demographics. Receptivity to ecosomatic education does not require previous interest in either somatics or the environment, but can be driven by other incentives, such as interest in adjacent activities, academic credit rewards, physical health improvement, financial access or recommendations, suggesting that how programmes are institutionally validated and presented as beneficial to the student has implications for reach and impact. This study offers guidance on relevant factors and challenge assumptions about who engages with ecosomatics.

This article explores the application of somatics in the methodology of Practice as Research (PaR) through ecoperformances in aquatic environments. For the past fifteen years, I have been devising a PaR approach based on Somatics, dance theatre and performative practices, called Somatic-Performative Research (SPR). Through SPR, I have been exploring Laban/Bartenieff Movement System and Authentic Movement in fluid environments, especially the seashore and in the ocean. Influenced by Warren Lamb’s Posture Gesture Merger, I named this unfolding Merger as Research. The current text discusses the somatic premises of this PaR approach, and its role in today’s hectic living circumstances. This discussion is particularly relevant to me as mother of a 20-year-old severe autistic adolescent. Within a hydro-centric context, somatics and ecoperformance generate a neurodiverse modality of PaR, which validates a multiplicity of wisdom beyond what is considered as purely rational. This approach intends to honour different pathways towards much broader forms of knowledge, including more-than-human. Intelligence is no longer a quantitative data produced by an accelerated and abstract (human) mind but rather integrated modes of interacting, learning and growing with/in an ever-changing environment.

Like many western dance and somatic practices, contact improvisation (CI) has long centred a concept of ‘the body’ that ignores culture, identity, privilege and power. However, for many dancers, identity-based power dynamics do affect how they interact, what risks CI poses to them and how accessible the practice is. This article examines consent practices as one response to identity-based risks in CI. It determines that, to most effectively limit the effects of identity-based power dynamics, the responsibility for consent practices must be shared amongst dancers of all levels of privilege in a CI space. Such distributed consent practices have the potential to address power differences without reifying them, as they allow dancers to modulate risk without naming specific identities. Although increasing consent practices in CI poses a number of challenges, this investigation indicates future potential for consent practice as a strategy to acknowledge and address identity in CI.

This article positions meditation as a critical well-being practice that nurtures well-being and self-regulation. The utilization of meditation within a dance conservatoire environment can contribute to the pro-active engagement with self-care, and meditation, as a practice of ‘embodied self-care’, foregrounds subjective agency and can disrupt the dominant paradigms of dance pedagogy as a process of striving towards idealized goals. In this article, we evaluate the implementation of a meditation practice programme within a dance conservatoire setting, and by drawing on the premise of meditation as a practice of self-regulation, we argue that it is a vital vehicle for well-being and resilience in dancers. We also position meditation as a somatic practice that can be utilized to foreground the embodied subjectivity of dance students through a productive encounter of western dominant dance training practices and eastern contemplative practices which activates agency and embodied criticality.

Research into physical simulation practices across industries (aviation, transport and healthcare), provides insights into embodied knowledge. Embodied knowledge informed by dance knowledge can positively expand the capacity of workplace training. Through a detailed examination of a variety of technologically advanced industry environments where embodied knowledge is applied, this article identifies the ways in which dance knowledge can be transformed into new and enhanced forms of embodied participation. 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 and human factors. Key insights extend concepts of somatic practice across arts and industry for mutual benefit.

The performing arts sector is in crisis as it confronts its reliance on unpaid immaterial labour and in-kind contributions by individual artists. Independent performing artists become good at balancing financial benefits with pleasure and esteem measures within their creative lives. However, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have made it more and more challenging to sustain a sector that relies on this generosity. This article seeks to better understand the impact of the long-term reliance on the goodwill of independent artists on the artists themselves. It shares artists’ stories and identifies the various types of labour that fall into the unpaid category for independent artists and artist-led companies producing dance and theatre in Melbourne, Australia. The article considers how the practitioner’s body endures the cost of this labour as a somatic load and how this impacts their well-being, health and creative lives.

This article, based on a Ph.D. research I conducted in Brazil, brings into discussion issues of power, hierarchy and exclusion in the Alexander Technique and in the broader somatic field. It takes a closer look at the influence of lineages and personalisms in the context of modern dance, their subsequent rejection in contemporary dance, and their resurgence as somatics became an integral part of the contemporary dance scene. Through this exploration, I intend to shed light on the potential adverse implications of such practices in the field. Following these discussions, I present a series of initiatives taken by different somatic practitioners, which aim to minimize these outcomes. The article claims that to envision a future for our field, it is essential that we first engage in a thoughtful reflection on the gaps and shortcomings we have left behind, before endeavouring to move forward.

This article 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 50-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. 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.

Between March and June of 2020, in the first round of COVID-19 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 that 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? In this article I discuss how I built the structure and material for the piece, paying particular attention to the many sources that informed its development, moving out of universalist ‘theories of’ or ‘proposals of’ a body and into the individual ‘practice’ put forward by my complicated and multifaceted history.

Review of: The Elemental Body: A Movement Guide to Kinship with Ourselves and the Natural World, Elaine Colandrea and Rori Smith (2022)

Rhinebeck, NY: Epigraph Publishing, 106 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-95474-474-5, p/bk, £28.00