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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2017
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2017
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Celebrate and Demonstrate: Radical politics in somatic practices
By Carolyn RoyAbstractThis article uses Celebrate and Demonstrate, a project proposing a political alliance between dancers with other workers in the form of rallying and marching together as a lens through which to examine the potential for somatic dance practices to participate in radical politics as they are enacted today. It considers the politics immanent in dance, specifically somatically informed dance, with reference to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontological foundation, being-with, suggesting that this is both the origin and process of the kind of politics recognized in philosopher Judith Butler’s theory of performative assembly. It goes on to propose that, as the somatically trained dancers touch, listen to and engage the world with a particularly heightened sensitivity and openness to the potential for change, they are particularly well adapted to engage in such radical political manifestations.
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‘Recovery’, ‘eating dys-order’ and somatic practice: An auto/ethnographic exploration
More LessAbstractThis article uses an auto/ethnographic lens to juxtapose experiences of ‘eating dysorder’ and ‘recovery’ lived in the contrasting milieu of bio-medical and somatic discourse and practice. Evocative auto/ethnography serves here as an anchor for reflections upon the question of why I experience embodied subjectivity so differently within the somatic field, and why I consider these experiences as critical events in my ‘recovery process’.
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A guide to clitoral embodiment
More LessAbstractBody-Mind Centering® is a somatic practice that includes the study and embodiment of human embryological development as a foundation for understanding movement and the body. The embryology of the genitalia represents an unexplored frontier in Body-Mind Centering. Unlike its embryological corollary, the penis, the clitoris is absent from most illustrated anatomy texts. Clitoral embodiment remedies the inattention paid to female and non-binary genital development by presenting a framework for embodying multiple potentials for sex and gender expressions through imagery, movement and embryological study, with an emphasis on invagination over penetration. Standing at the intersection of somatics, embryology and gender/sexuality studies, clitoral embodiment uses classroom/studio learning and practice to explore an underlying biological explanation for sex and gender fluidity.
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Entangled histories, part 1: Releasing the Archive
By Carol BrownAbstractReleasing the Archive probes the potential for a return to the past as a method for revitalizing corporeal expression in the present. In this trans-hemispherical project, we explore the avant-garde dance practice of Gertrud Bodenwieser (b. 1890 Vienna, d. 1959 Sydney) in Vienna prior to her exile to Australia in 1938 through a somatic approach. What is the potential opened by a recovery of the principles and practices of her dance methods and corporeal project? In inhabiting the archives of former Bodenwieser dancers through an inter-corporeal approach, Releasing the Archive explores what they can do in the present. It renders visible the specific somatic and expressive logic of dance methods that emerged in Vienna in the period 1919–38 and were developed in Australia from 1939, when they were ‘outlawed’ in Austria and Germany. At the same time, it invites an ethics of witnessing the past through the stories of the dancers who embodied it.
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Entangled histories, part 2: Releasing the de-generate body
By Thomas KampeAbstractThis second part of writing on the research project Releasing the Archive, undertaken by Carol Brown and Thomas Kampe in collaboration with dancers of New Zealand Dance Company (NZDC), aims to discuss notions of contemporary somaticinformed re-transmission of the work of Gertrud Bodenwieser (Vienna 1890 – Sydney 1959) as acts of cultural repair. The article unpacks, through historical texts and dancers’ notebooks, how the diasporic work of Gertrud Bodenwieser, influenced by Modernist body-culture pioneer Bess Mensendieck (c. 1866–1957 ), aimed to construct a practice of somatic realism concerned with emancipatory perspectives on twentieth century western personhood. The author discusses proto-somatic and proto-feminist roots of Bodenwieser’s corporeal practices as critical processes, and reveals how Bodenwieser’s discovery-based pedagogies invite and foster dancers’ psycho-physical agency within collaborative modes of creation. The article critiques the application of The Feldenkrais Method as a contemporary somatic modality to support the revitalizing of a re-emerging ecstatic and eccentric highly dynamic bodycoding. It contextualizes Releasing the Archive as a trans-cultural and intergenerational articulation of coming to terms with the complexities of a nearly forgotten European exiled dance legacy.
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Soma-conceptual choreographic strategies in Boris Charmatz’s enfant
More LessAbstractThis article explores the sociocultural and political potential of touch-based somatic practices in relation to a performance by French conceptual choreographer Boris Charmatz entitled enfant (child) from 2011. By doing so it aims to bring together two seemingly incommensurable approaches to choreography: somatic and conceptual practices of dance. enfant is a piece for ten to 26 children (between the age of 6–12), nine professional adult dancers and two machines. The first half of the piece sees the adults manipulating the children, who seem to be asleep, in a doll-like fashion. Though some of the images are visually beautiful and virtuous, there is a sinister tone to the choreography. The piece explores the sensitivities and anxieties around the politics of touching children, addressing social taboos as the children seem vulnerable and helpless at first. As the piece progresses the tables turn, the children awake and start to play and manipulate the adults in a joyful explosion of activity, energy and power. In this article I’m interested in examining how somatic practices, as essentially the ‘undoing’ of learned behaviour, can be extended beyond the body of the individual to the collective and/or social body. Ultimately it questions what the status of children in our society is and how touch-based somatic practices can embody a critique of social, cultural and political norms in the twenty-first century.
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‘Let the freak-fly fly’: Somatic approaches to undoing traditional power dynamics in dance-making
By Amanda HampAbstractMiguel Gutierrez, Stephanie Skura and The Architects serve as case studies of dance artists whose somatically informed performance work and creative practices purposefully redistribute power in their creative and dance-making processes. This article analyses their practices in order to consider how they privilege dancers’ somatic intelligences and grant dancers authority in creative decision-making. Dancers who practice with Gutierrez, Skura and The Architects rehearse distinct modes of creative authority, which I discus in terms of vital participation, radical permission and contemplative self-government. Such practices can create emancipatory effects for the dancers as social subjects, and reverberate in the sociopolitical world.
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Body intelligence – individual and social potentiality/emerging thoughts from a festival
By Katja MünkerAbstractIn October 2015, the Somatic Academy Berlin (SAB) hosted the first BODY IQ Festival. The festival was dedicated to the experience, exchange and research of body intelligence from the perspectives of various somatic approaches. Its main focus was the social relevance of somatic practices and of body intelligence. The festival-viewpoint considered that the practice of somatics supports the development of intelligent skills and knowledge based on the experience of the conscious body. It suggests that these human capacities are not only relevant for individual development but also for application within social-cultural contexts. Practitioners, teachers and participants were invited to further explore and research the potential of the relation between body intelligence, somatic methods and social impact. In order to develop a shared understanding of somatic knowledge beyond existing methods it is important to develop common terminology including a definition of ‘body intelligence’. To do so, I begin this reflection with a clarification of the term body intelligence as it is used here. I then provide an overview of the festival format, the workshop contents, and the panel discussion. I finish with a reflective summary on the relevance of the festival and the social potential of somatic research and body intelligence.
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Reviews
Authors: Vincent Cacalano and Antje HildebrandtAbstractPerformance Review Girls at Work, Katie Duck and Yolande Snaith, Ivy Arts Centre, University of Surrey, Stag Hill, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, 17 February 2016
Book Review Collaboration in Performance Practice: Premises, Workings and Failures, Noyale Colin and Stefanie Sachsenmaier (eds) (2016)
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