Eco-somatic Research: What if the Complexity of Nature can Teach me a Dance? – and, it’s just an imagination

Abstract

This portfolio gives an insight into my practice-based research exploring how somatic/mindful dance and multimedia collages link to critical thinking about ecologies. It reflects on the process, the difficulties, possibilities and questions that continue to arise when I try to grasp the complexity of ‘nature’ while trusting the embodied knowledge unfolding within dance improvisation and dance scores. The portfolio is a collage that includes parts of the score that I presented as a lecture performance at the Cracking the Established Order conference at De Montfort University in June 2019, critical reflections and various media artefacts that form part of my research. It also proposes to be a score in itself, in order to enable a form of access to the experiential dimension of the live performance and the practice-based research process so to highlight the challenge of sharing such a process in the frame of a journal.