Embodying Recognition: Dance Improvisation for Scientists
(2023)
author(s): Susanne Martin
published in: Research Catalogue
In this exposition (text, videos, photos) I discuss a series of participatory lecture performances as one major outcome of my artistic research on dance improvisation in and for science and technology oriented higher education. These lecture performances aim to give different stakeholders in the science field an initial insight into dance improvisation and to facilitate discussion of its potential for the scientific learning, teaching and research culture. From the perspective of a dance artist and artistic researcher, I trace the details of how and why I created events for scientists to encounter dance improvisation through shared exploration and shared reflection. Interlacing descriptive and reflective writing, I unfold the argument that by engaging in improvisation as an embodied recognition practice, reflective processes can be set into motion, which critically question habituated forms of bodily, social and epistemological exclusions within academia. In other words, by conceptualising dance improvisation as recognition practice, I hope to shed light on its critical potential which exceeds questions of spontaneity and creativity.
Shadows of Intimacy, collaboration with Jia Yu Corti
(2023)
author(s): Zoe Panagiota (aka Betty) Nigianni
published in: Research Catalogue
Interactive digital art installation for dance performance in collaboration with choreographer Jia Yu Corti, London Contemporary Dance School (The Place), 2011.
Dance improvisation by Robert Anderson and Kathy Crick.
Re-enaction of Rough and Tumble Game
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Hermans Carolien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This artistic project takes rough-and-tumble play (R &T play), also referred to as fight play, as the central starting point. R &T play refers to ‘vigorous behaviours, such as wrestling, grappling, kicking, and tumbling, that appear to be aggressive except for the playful context’ (Pellegrini & Smith, 2005, p.79), and that are almost always performed without hurting each other (DiPietro 1981). In the first phase material was collected from different events (‘mattress’, ‘rope’, a short film and a working session at the Conservatory of Amsterdam). A selected set of imagery was then handed over to first year students of the Modern Dance Theatre department at the Amsterdam University of the Arts. The following themes emerge from this working process:a sense of being alive, serious attention to having fun, energy level, joint attention,and the importance of both imagination and touch in this type of play.In this project also archive material is included that resonates with the theme of fight play.
Participatory sense-making in physical play and dance improvisation: drawing meaningful connections between self, others and world
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Carolien Hermans
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The starting point of Carolien Hermans' research is how both children's physical play and dance improvisation by professionals can be considered somatic practices where sense-making manifests itself in and between bodies, and through movement. Hermans makes use of the concept of ‘participatory sense-making’ (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007) to understand the role of movement, and the lived experience, in the way we make sense of self, others and world. This philosophical-scientific premise is closely aligned with enactivism, a movement in cognitive science that claims that cognition is not so much an internal, mental phenomenon as it is the result of the dynamic relationship between an organism and its environment. Enactivism offers an alternative to traditional models that conceive of cognition as an internal information-processing process in which perception and action serve primarily as inputs and outputs. Body, context, and (the lived) experience thus play a crucial role in the sense-making process.
Re-enaction of spontaneous Dance Play
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Hermans Carolien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
With Dance Play I refer to a set of activities in which play and dance intermingle with each other. Playing becomes dancing. Dancing becomes playing. Play is an aesthetic process which creates new meanings (Linqvist, 2001, p.42). The same is true for dance. Play, just as dance, is never purely re-production: it is creative action (Linqvist, 2001.
In this research project I first collected several spontaneous dance events of my daughter (Hotel Dance, Living Room Dance and Beach Dance). This material was then handed over to Paula Ferreira Guzzanti, a dance practitioner and researcher based in Ireland. Through re-enactment of the original material, I aim to explore how affects and intensities can travel through different bodies.
Living Archive
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Hermans Carolien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Over a period of five years (from 2013 to 2018) I have collected images of the physical play of my own children, with their friends and neighbor kids. Living archive is here defined as the documentation and collection of a series of play events over a period of five years. ‘Living’ refers to the act of archiving, as the documenting, recording and (re-) arranging of traces over time (Van Alphen, 2014). The archive is “not a passive storehouse of old stuff”’ (p.16), but an active site where knowledge (such a memories, traces) is not only stored but constantly re-constructed. The living archive is open, fragmentary and unstable (Ketelaar, 2018). It consists of more than a hundred photographic sequences and stand-alones that all serve as kinetic markers/traces of the original physical play event.
Re-enaction of animal becoming
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Hermans Carolien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In this artistic project I explore the concept of transformation - specifically the transformations that take place between the human and the animal. It is assumed that both play and dance improvisation trigger novel sense-making capabilities by a deep engagement with the environment (Paolo, 2007). Both activities give rise to transformative forces, ways of becoming that create openings and passages through which one re-engages and re-connects with the environment.
In the first phase of this artistic project I recorded a spontaneous play event of my 12th year old daughter . Her play serves as an entrance point to examine animal becomings as transformative forces. In the second phase I re-enact the animal becomings of my daughter through an improvised dance solo. The aim is to grasp, in a corporeal sense, the transformative forces that are at work here.
Play and Dance Improvisation: scores, games and challenges
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Hermans Carolien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In the previous phases of my artistic research I built up a living archive of play activities that occurred close to my home. In the second phase, some of these play activities were re-enacted by dancers/performers in order to capture and get a deeper of understanding of the vitality affects, energy and intensities. In this phase I want to develop a play/dance improvisation workshop around the concept of participatory sense-making. I am therefore collecting games, scores, challenges that are developed by me or other.
Interactive digital art installation for dance performance in collaboration with choreographer Jia Yu Corti, London Contemporary Dance School (The Place), 2011. Dance improvisation by Robert Anderson and Kathy Crick.open exposition comments (0)