Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Current Issue

Animation pedagogy often focuses on preparing students for work in the creative industries. As such, story and character development are emphasized over other possibilities of animation practice. However, I argue that movement – as a somatic practice – is fundamental to the task of teaching and learning animation. What better material to work with than the moving body with which we have all been practising since infancy? Yet movement is itself prone to fetishized imagery of hard-bodied frenetic motion that endangers its own body/bodies and habitats. This article explores the image of the soap bubble for thinking about the precarity of creative practice. To imagine the soap bubble as a practitioner of somaticity is to take on an ethics of the moving body that recognizes the precarity with which all bodies move while holding their form. I employ the inherent tensile ‘stretchiness’ of language to imagine what it would be to ‘move like a practising bubble’.

This article considers the role of play in the context of creative writing. Taking up Winnicott’s theory of play and Levi-Strauss’s definition of bricolage, I aim to provide a flexible framework that can benefit writers and educators across various creative fields, while avoiding rigid prescriptions of how playing might be enacted. Employing the motions swerving, rebounding and straying, and adding to this set the action of hesitating, I offer an exploded view of my writing practice which serves to demonstrate how practitioners can map the movements in their own creative process, encouraging a playful engagement with creativity that nurtures unexpected and unforeseen outcomes.

This article proposes that collectively engaging in modes of practising that intentionally disrupt or queer habitual dynamics facilitates the emergence of transformed pedagogical approaches. It considers how power dynamics inform and emerge from pedagogical encounters between students and lecturer, and how engaging in practising that queers or disrupts these encounters reveals possibilities for teaching performance practice. It focuses on how encounters are spatially influenced and explores practices that disrupt normative ideas about how we position ourselves in space to enact social relations. These ideas are explored through reflecting on working with the MA Drama cohort at the University of South Wales. We explored normative ideas about what constitutes ‘good’ participation and group working practices in relation to the inhabitation of indoor and outdoor spaces and the performance of power. These experiences are considered in relation to failure, the queering of space and neuroqueering.

Fashion is a practice involving diverse habits of coordination by which affects, signs, sensations and desires are transmitted between bodies in varied spatial, temporal, material and affective encounters. Reflecting on fashion design pedagogies and their somatic resonances in the classroom, this article expands the traditional definition of fashion beyond its formal materiality such that it becomes understood as an intensive encounter between a body and an object in an event of wearing. Grounded in a discussion of a series of pedagogical experiments for teaching new habits of the body, I emphasize new ways of paying attention to the diverse sensations and affects that encounters with abstracted fashion garments can give rise to. This article concludes with the need to consider the practice-based extensive, material dimensions that constitutes the making of fashion in an attempt to work through the production of intensity, affect and sensation in the body.

The article investigates the work of Accademia sull’Arte del Gesto, created in 2007 by Italian choreographer Virgilio Sieni, by examining the relationship within teaching and practising gestures with Delfina Stella, his artistic collaborator. Accademia sull’Arte del Gesto is a research project devoted to the study of the gestures, the meaning of body movement and the transmission of dance. This work on the art of the gesture aims to positively intervene on liveability and a possible sense of belonging, tending towards a renewal of the relationship between the body and the territory. The practice of gesture is transmitted both from the choreographer to the movers and vice versa. How are these practices of gestures open to a variety of people? To what extent is a somatic approach supportive in transmitting this practice? In what ways has Sieni, together with his collaborators, developed these pedagogies for gestures? The enquiry combines my own field research experience and narration around the creation Tracce di Luce (2022), a project by Sieni.

This article examines the notion of ‘practising’ through the lens of contemporary dance technique training. The author explores the extent to which a ‘reflexive-dialogical’ approach to contemporary dance technique training, which is an approach developed within the context of the author’s own action research, can cultivate a mode of ‘practising’ by emphasizing continuous, processual learning. The reflexive-dialogical approach focuses on positioning both dancer and teacher in a critical relationship with their respective practices; a dialogical mode of learning is used to expose and question the ‘how and why’ of physical and cognitive behavioural dispositions that are acquired through the process of embodying and transmitting dance techniques. Proposing that this critical relationship creates destabilization within the habitus, the author argues that such destabilization is required for teachers and students to notice and disrupt patterns of embodiment in the pursuit of maintaining a curious, practising approach to training that cultivates agency.

Review of: A Philosophy of Practising With Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Antonia Pont (2021)

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 230 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-47449-046-7, h/bk, £75.00