Some fleshy thinking: improvisation, experience, perception

This essay reveals the tacit ways of knowing inherent in somatically based dance improvisation practices and considers how such embodied experience might become present, become recognized and understood, by both dancer and viewer. Written as a playful dialogue between ‘Dancer’ and her ‘Practice’, concepts drawn from phenomenology are elaborated to reveal the ways that deeply internalised experiential movement practices may enter and expand perceptual fields. This is approached in two interconnected stages as I ask: Firstly: How, as an improviser, is it possible to know ‘something’ of the dancing body whilst ‘in-action’? Secondly: How is improvisation, as a mode of embodied research and knowing, developed with, and made ‘sense’ of, by an audience? This entails a consideration of the relationships between body, experience, perception and knowledge

Closer to the body: reflections on skript and extracts from collected writings

In this two part article we reflect upon the experience of writing-dancing with audiences and artists in the context of our installation work skript (commissioned by Dance4, Nottingham, 2013). Part one considers how skript engages embodied, felt sense, improvisational and collaborative modalities in relation to the act of writing. As such we consider the ways in which the particular interface of language and embodiment, which is the focus of skript, might allow a knowing of ‘something’ otherwise – be that something a sense of our own bodies, a dance work, a performance experience or perhaps just that moment in time. In part two we share extracts of some of the writings that were collaboratively generated as part of skript. We focus on the work of three performance/movement artists: Guy Dartnell, Miguel Pereira and Rosalind Crisp. These dance-writings are published as they were written in real time, in the moment of engagement. They are edited only for length and at times to correct typographical errors (but only if the errors seemed to disturb the flow of the ideas) rather than to simply ‘tidy’ the text or the grammar. The writings are relational, improvisational and at times fragmentary. For more writings see: www.writing-dancing.blogspot.com

Creative Articulations Process (CAP)

This article outlines the ‘Creative Articulations Process’ (CAP), offering ways of coming into knowing in/through/about one’s own dance practice. This process, developed by the authors in the context of The Choreographic Lab, seeks to enrich creative activities through an elaboration tacit knowledge and practice as research. The article establishes the foundations of the process, briefly introducing the work of Hincks, Gendlin and Damasio, alongside others. It then goes on to take the reader through the six facets that form CAP – ‘Opening’, ‘Situating’, ‘Delving’, ‘Raising’, ‘Anatomizing’ and ‘Outwarding’. The article is written to encourage an active engagement, providing strategies and prompts for the artist/researcher

Improvisation practices and dramaturgical consciousness: a workshop

Re-presenting on the page a dance workshop, this article draws attention to what I describe as a dramaturgical consciousness within improvised dance performance. Developing this particular consciousness entails a reconfiguration of the dramaturgical and the improvisational, which allows us to understand them both as embodied practices that play with memory. The workshop takes the participant/reader through a series of activities designed to activate a sensibility through which action and intellect, inside and outside, and past and present are productively blurred. As a practical workshop, it requires the purposeful activation of embodied thinking while foregrounding the importance of the memory, perception, and composition as the basis of a dramaturgical consciousness in improvisatory performance

Practice-as-research

I begin by offering a brief overview of the methodological concerns of PaR, locating it within both established and emergent research paradigms. I then go on to suggest that we need to understand the entanglement of PaR with epistemologies that are crucially embodied, emphasizing the significance of motility and materalities in PaR. Here, experiential and embodied knowing is brought into focus through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s (2011: 17) notion of ‘materials-in-motion’, encompassing the work of the feet, as well as the hands and the head. Through these ideas I foreground the significance of expert skill in PaR, an area that has to date received little attention. PaR is elaborated here as a form of enskilled, in-process research. I note that, in its embracing of subjectivity and intuition, PaR is sometimes messy, but always reflective and reflexive, in its methods. In the final section I offer a framework for PaR enquiries and discuss the often multi-modal and multi-voiced outcomes of choreographic PaR to propose that the artistic researcher, via purposeful strategies of emplacement, position their epistemic materials for diverse publics

Recommendations for action: enhancing artistic doctoral education in dance and performance

The Recommendations for Action centre around requirements for the artistic doctorate in dance and performance. We focus in particular on doctorates that situate creative embodied practice as the core mode of inquiry and as part of the manifest outcomes of research. The recommendations emerge from research conducted by the Artistic Doctorates in Europe: Third cycle education in Dance and Performance project (ADiE, 2016-2019) (www.artisticdoctorates.com). ADiE is an Erasmus+ funded partnership between eight organisations across the UK, Sweden and Finland. The partnership undertook surveys, gathered case studies and curated events for stakeholders to share, reflect upon and enhance the experience and significance of doctoral education. The recommendations revolve around creating collaborative research environments, discipline-specific training, supervisory and examination processes and enhancing impact. Throughout we place a particular emphasis on the relationship between universities and the cultural sector in an effort to promote connectivity for candidates and to advocate artistic doctoral research within professional dance and performance contexts. The recommendations are underpinned by commitments to an ethos of care and the fostering of plurality. You may want to read this document if you are: • a prospective student thinking about undertaking a doctorate • a supervisor or mentor of artistic doctorates • a programme manager or academic involved in the design and delivery of artistic doctoral studies • a cultural sector or industry partner interested in supporting, commissioning or presenting doctoral research and/or its outcomes. • a doctoral education provider looking for best practice in artistic doctorate provision • a policymaker developing funding schemes, frameworks for research, regulations or reviewing systems for doctoral studies

Everywhere and nowhere: improvisation as an un/rans/disciplinary practice a performance lecture

A performance lecture by Prof V L Midgelow (Middlesex University, UK) What am I? she asks. In a solo performance/lecture Prof Vida L Midgelow eats her words, ingests knowledge, animates her dead self and dances everywhere and nowhere, whilst speaking about improvisation and the un/disciplinary in an ever so slightly ridiculous set of circumstances in which she struggles to stay on script and often fails to achieve the planned outcome. What am I? she asks. What is the potential of improvisation? What are the recurring features of improvisation in dance performance? What are the critical, fluid, emergent and situated modes of knowledge that are operating within an improvised context? What am I? she asks, What if improvisation cannot be known? What if improvisation is not a thing but an unseen process? For, as a generative, relational and temporal activity - improvisation is embedded in ‘the ways we work’ (Ingold 2007:3). Through leaky excessiveness disciplinary bounds are broken, as improvisation is understood here as un/disciplinary practice that proceeds toward a productive (un)knowing. I am. I am three trillion cells (as Hay would say) A dancer The coffee I drank this morning A frog The sound of feet that pass along the corridor Between 3 to 7 seconds behind or maybe ahead of myself I forget I am a person trying to forget in order to remember Am trying to be here With you, with me. I am A professor of dance and choreographic practice, with responsibility for Research Degrees. I am a frog I am Alice I am women how had a rabbit A frog that cannot jump I am a women who slid down the stairs and fractured her ribs I am not making this up. I am. Not. Improvising. What am I? She asks. I am Improvisation. ____________ Moving between lecturing, dancing and other performance modalities this presentation uses the form a performative lecture to illuminate the significance the improvisatory, in and beyond dance, to reveal the epistemic work it embodies within our contemporary knowledge economy

Sensualities: experiencing/dancing/writing

Through this article I articulate the interplay between writing and improvisational dancing to describe a methodology for an embodied, sensual and experiential mode of writing/dancing in which the boundaries between these two disciplines are blurred. Through a consideration of this writing practice, I argue that, as a form of knowing, it offers an implicit challenge to the normalised economy of academic discourse. Developing out of a ‘practice as research’ project undertaken within The Choreographic Lab (University of Northampton), the article includes extracts of the work ‘Dear Practice …’, in which I, as ‘dancer’, enter into a series of exchanges in the form of letters with my improvisation ‘practice’