Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2013

As an experiential practice of somatic perception, dance digs into the living matter of what is scientifically currently recognized as the source of self-consciousness and of the thinking process, producing what is commonly referred to as ‘embodied knowledge’ or ‘embodied thinking’. What is the expression of such a mode of knowledge? How can it be transmitted to other fields of knowledge? Departing from proposing the artistic practice of dance as a technology of proprioception, this article explores a particular view of this issue by relating the dancer’s phenomenological experience with some contemporary theories of cognitive science. It develops the notion of ‘embodied knowledge’ not merely as the innate know-how of the bodily system to act and survive, but as sensorial awareness of such know-how. This intensified awareness opens up an experiential understanding of reality as an embodied motion condition, generating a distinct reasoning based on a transformative paradoxical value ground.

As a post-performance reflection, this article addresses the complexities of a number of different issues surrounding the dramaturgies of art–science collaborations and the role of agency when spread across multiple collaborators. It includes comment from the voices – artistic, scientific and academic – involved in shaping Revolve from dusk to dawn and speculates on the impacts of the research and production. Revolve is an interactive performance inspired by sleep science (chronobiology); it was previewed as part of SEAM2011, 17–18 September 2011, at Critical Path in Sydney, premiered in Christchurch, New Zealand, during the Body Festival, 4–5 October 2011, and presented as a lecture performance during the Somatics and Technology 2012 Conference, University of Chichester, 23 June 2012.

In this article, we describe a framework for creating technology-based experiential systems rooted in somatic movement education for health and well-being applications. The proposed framework starts with principles derived from somatic modalities in general, and three of the major somatic theories in particular: The Alexander Technique™, The Feldenkrais Method™ and Body-Mind Centering®. In building such a system, we consider ways to translate concepts of expanded motor-sensory awareness, function and ease of movement into measurable attributes for action quality, with simple-to-use and easily available sensing/feedback technology. Inspired by the pioneering work of F. P. Jones, a student of F. M. Alexander, whose research looked ‘to scientifically demonstrate the physiological mechanisms underlying its principles’, our framework seeks to build upon this work by leveraging advances in current technologies for motion capture that enable home-based deployment (KINECT, cell phone accelerometers, etc.), as well as advances in pattern classification technologies for distinguishing actions based on attributes that correlate to subjective, kinaesthetic responses. The framework is intended to provide a foundation in the implementation of a real-time, media-based, interactive experiential system. As well, it is intended to engage communities of somatic practitioners, theorists and technologists in extending the scope of the research and development of new applications.

Sondra Fraleigh has described the body as bounded by skin and having form, yet merging, relational and metamorphic (Fraleigh 2012). In this article I draw on the making of a short four-minute film Anima (2005), co-directed by myself and videographer John Irwin, in order to discuss the ways that the intuitive sensuous soma may be presented in film. The purpose of the film was to explore ecological notions of perception, to engage the viewer in ‘relational seeing’ (Sewell 1999) and to lead the eye downwards and inwards in order that the viewer might perceive human skin and rock, seaweed and hair, land, ocean and body as the same yet distinct, separate and merging. At the same time, what is revealed in the film by the solo female dancer is the soma, whole and articulate, part of the ecology of place, and ‘place’ itself.

The following article is a visual essay that gives access to the creative processes used by The Oblique Strategists (Manny Emslie and Sarah Spies) in Autoscores© In the Loop Project (2012). It can be read in a linear fashion or through an intertextual framework. Inherently, an intertextual approach allows for plurality and a continuous re-arrangement of readings, which we would like to encourage. Embedded within the article are a number of key links to our online scores that make the scores open to possible re-appropriation and performative action. Our self-portraits are included in the visual document below and online at: http://theobliquestrategists.wordpress.com.

This article outlines the potential of dance improvisation practice to function as a technological interface with one’s environment, drawing parallels between the performances of Twig Dances (Sarco-Thomas 2010) and technologies used in the life sciences to map living matter onto still frames. A postphenomenological approach is used to compare improvisation scores with image-making technologies. Scores that invite corporeal responses to the non-human, and kinaesthetic responses to organic matter, are highlighted as technologies which stand further exploration and examination as they mediate our experience of the world. A diversifying field of somatic practices is proposed as a means to investigate the potential knowledges generated by ‘excitable tissues’ enlivened through improvisational practices.

This article presents an overview of the motivations behind my artistic approach and a description of current research. My artistic process aims at a transformation of the body based on tactile, kinesthetic and experiential references. It takes the experiential as its raw material. This process inevitably opens up alternative gestural codes, performative modes and behaviours. As a result, it is possible to consider a new relationship between somatics and technology capable of engendering new aesthetic, cognitive and communicational paradigms. Here, technology activates a process that reconfigures sensory-perceptual activity and leads to a change of corporality (corporalité) that in turn generates corporeality (corporéité). This dynamic is based on developing a notion of corporeal potentiality – or interval – and introduces the notion of emergence through which an eventual organization of a new experiential form in the performing arts can appear. Christine Buci-Glucksmann speaks of the interval as the equivalent of the Japanese term Mâ (2003: 89), explaining it as a latent potentiality present within the virtual. I argue that the virtual is part of the physical body and show how these concepts can be linked as the foundations of a methodology that I have developed with dancers. This methodology is one of an evolutive nature and is based on strategies of destabilization of three components of somatics that I have experimented with in order to recreate what Hubert Godard calls ‘an ever fluctuating real’ (Godard in Kuypers 2006: 60).