Public - Current Issue

An editorial introduction to PUBLIC 67: Return to the Body / Reversus est ad Corpus: Dance, and Embodied Methodologies.

This essay considers Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012), a participatory guided audio-video tour through Kassel’s old train station, situated at the sprawling site of Documenta 13. Focusing on their own experience, Takahashi considers how connotative, complex, and creative thinking can emerge from one’s movements through enormous international art exhibitions, where one encounters a series of complex artworks in rapid succession. Is there potential in how physical limitations combine with too much information and too much aesthetic experience? What does it mean to lose control and objectivity, to give up the distanced, objective view, and instead be immersed, embodied, emotional, and frustrated?

During a recent North American tour, Florent Nikéma performed in Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring. After an October 2022 master workshop held at the Department of Dance, York University in Toronto, Canada, Nikéma was interviewed about his trajectory and contemporary experience in African-based dance vernacular by one of the participating graduate students.

Tracing matters of death and ceremony across black studies, indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and critical decolonial jewish studies, I find myself most interested in that other death, the preliminary death, which precedes biological death. This is not “social death,” the murder of kinship structures. Nor is it the death of the physical organism. This death is ceremonial, practical, and transformative. It is a kind of death practice, a daily practice of dying. Photo essay with images from the 2017 Judaica project embodied audiovisual laboratory: Ben Spatz with Nazlıhan Eda Erçin and Agnieszka Mendel.

Pepper Highway was first out of the gate before you-know-who. She isn’t as pretty nor is she rich as you-know-who. Pepper Highway is a poetess who shuns the limelight and is shy and quiet.

This article uses reflections from childhood memories of sensory experiences and interactions with the multispecies community to explore how the more-than-human world bears witness to one’s presence. They are also used to discuss how a greater sensory awareness of the more-than-human world increases one’s sensitivity to shared but unequal vulnerabilities in a changing and precarious climate. The author suggests that how we interact and come to know a place through the senses matters in the traces we leave and the kinds of relationships that form as a result.

A conversation with philosopher Alphonso Lingis, by Jonathan Osborn, with an introduction my Mila Volpe.

Somatic autoethnography integrates a materialist perspective that positions a dance ethnographer’s personal history--ethnicity, race, class or national origin—with modes of attention that highlight the impact of perception. From a contemporary neuro-science perspective somatic autoethnography can be articulated as an embodied form of research in which an act of mimesis in learning a dance form in a specific cultural context engages the neuro structures of the ethnographer to evolve new states of embodied cognition and an integration of perception, context/place, memory and imagination. In phenomenological terms, ethnographers transform their experience of their ‘lived-body’ through an intensive engagement in which the body of the performer through imitation becomes the object of the learner’s subjective identity. This project considers this topic from a historically contextual perspective of the author’s personal experience across three dance forms and cultural locations—Middle Eastern Raqs el Sharqi, dance among the Azande of South Sudan, and Japanese Nihon Buyo.

Naishi Wang and Jean Abreu. Project: Deciphers.

Naishi Wang and Lukas Malkowski. Project: Face To Face

This essay explores dance practice-as-research and phenomenological methods to articulate an experiential, embodied dialogue with the material world. Drawing on practice notes from a phase of embodied research, the text argues for dance as a salient tool in reimagining, traditional forms of knowledge production and imagines the speculative possibilities of our communicative capacities with different bodies, human and non-human. Using practice-as-research as a frame I posit that dance-based systems of improvisation have the potential to deepen and articulate our habitual sensory faculties, expanding relational dialogues. Using scores and task-oriented improvisation in practice with more-than-human bodies, the text focuses on a process of discovery through the lived body and articulates an experiential practice, as one that enlivens bodies and builds worlds.

This is an internal artistic conversation with Brother(hood) Dance! in affirming how building a creative movement practice centering dance, with a focus on agriculture and technology, (D.A.T.) embodies a holistic methodology that taps into healing somatic responses to socio-environmental distresses. The D.A.T practice is an offering toward moving into a generous relationship with self, community, and the earth. D.A.T is an ancient practice of meaning-making for the culture. What if your agricultural practice helped you remember how your grandparent cooked or moved? The elements of the earth are technological in the multiple ways humans wield them. Brother(hood) Dance! uses this opportunity to root and offer intimacy in a D.A.T. experience.

Embodied dance, critical inquiry, dance studies, cognition, creative movement