PAR: Identity.Culture and The Body by Roxi Victorian

The process of exploration in Practice as Research, for me, is first engaged in the spiritual and sensory nature of how I approach being. Being open and allowing work, thought, action, dance, inquiry, and movement to come and move through me from God, my ancestors, my connection to the earth, and the purpose placed upon my life. Sensing and feeling are the impetus from which I begin. Allowance is uncomfortable. It seems forced at first, a need to do...but what is doing? Today I make meaning by feeling and collecting. I give in to my body, I resist the urge to think it into doing, and I move. I rest, I leave, and I emerge with quiet insight. Sometimes crowded in the creases of my brain. I breathe. I collect. I collect images and words, people and feelings. I collect the sensorial experience of being and learning. I steer blindly in search of more questions. Today's breath is my dance. In pain, I resist the urge to push. I rest, and I breath. Research Questions: "How does the physicality/cultural experience identity of one's body experience inform their [dance] work?" *The dance is co-created in multiple iterations throughout the process. Even as I type, my fingers dance to the melodies of soulful Hip hop music in the background. Head nods and rhythmic movement interludes are all a part of the dance that is me. Ontologically, I exist fully through the dance. And so the dance is in all things. Join me in moving. Let's Rock! Consider opening the link below as you explore my work. Each link is intended as a new lens through which to listen and visually explore the assemblage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLI71xx56Mg&ab_channel=AmerigoGazaway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrHPj9JGbSM&t=3196s&ab_channel=AmerigoGazaway https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nina+simone+lauryn+hill Thank you for visiting my first exploration of this kind. "What is Truth?"

Ethnography in a Digital World (Speculative as processes are still emergent.)

Digital video, touch screens, haptic technologies, digital sound recording, and phonic or audio ethnography methods, and the potential of the relationship between body data and sensory experience in ethnographic practice.

Embodiment vs. Emplacement

"Attention beyond the limits of body-mind relationship. ‘While the paradigm of “embodiment” implies an integration of mind and body, the emergent paradigm of “emplacement” suggests the sensuous (relating to or affecting the senses) interrelationship of body-mind-environment" (Pink 2005, 7).

I open to spirit. Welcoming, allowing, listening. Submitting to being. Drawing nearer, movement and sensation, I dance. I listen. I dance. Gathering sound, I hold moments curated by history. Holding movements carried through time, marking my body with the rhythms of my ancestors. Process welcomes me, as I welcome it. Wandering and wondering towards a deeper understanding of what is.

Click on the images below to engage with digital video media.

Body Writing: This practice explores improvisational movement sentences, gathering shapes to explore the relationship between words, thought, and movement. Meaning given literal shape in movement form. The vernacular communication of mind, body, thought & expression.

Wandering with spirit: Here I sat for a time. Quietly observing the intricacies of nature's place-making. Here home small communities amongst the grooves of the tightly textured trunk. Hollowed cavities fill with life, breezes, and water. Seeing and learning in tandem. I interrogated the idea of lens here, considering that the broader the lens, the less detail to be seen, as the lens moves closer and the scope narrows, there is more to observe.

Visual and Sensory Ethnography: Explores the possibilities of an ethnographic methodology that attends to and/or includes considerations of the senses. [A multisensorial ethnographic methodology]

"Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry's knowing and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other" (Hirshfield, 1997: vii).

Popcorn Interview Method: I use this method to generate data from a group quickly. To the prompt or question, participants (co-researchers) popcorn their answers or resonances with the question at will. There are no verbal rules of engagement for the popcorn method.

Collage (Collaging) - Doing: The use of collaging as an arts-based method in qualitative inquiry projects involves a researcher or participant/s identifying compelling images, words, scraps, textured materials, and fragments, extracting those materials from the original context, and rearranging them in new displays.

An assemblage that explores and may represent a sensorial experience, investigation, or wandering through the collecting of images. I explore collating in digital and non-digital spaces.

"Collage from “found” visual imagery is widely employed as an accessible medium for expression and illustration in educational, therapeutic, and recreational contexts. Given the history of collage as a strategy of criticism and subversion in the fine arts, visual researchers seek to develop a methodology of collage as a means to knowledge, affording insight into the negotiation and embodiment of media imagery in subjective experience" (Davis 2008, 245)."

www.roxivictoriandance.com

Roxi Victorian is a Ph.D. student in Dance Studies at Texas Woman's University. Her research explores the somatic expressions of Black girls, Black Feminist Creative Methods, Hip Hop feminism ("fucking with the grays"), and Mothering for Social Change. She lives in Baton Rouge, LA, with her husband and three children. See website for full bio and research projects.

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Roxi Victorian - PAR: Identity.Culture and The Body - 2024