Positioning practice within your writing

We had some great sessions last week looking at Ethics and delving further into academic writing in the arts with guests Dr Sam Murray and Peter Thomas. (recordings are on unihub if you missed these and for those in module two PLEASE DO REFER back to this Ethics session when completing your MORE application).

In the session looking at the arts within academic writing on Thursday, we discussed relationships between writing and practice, and the expression of the voice of our practice within our 'academic' writing I spoke of my own experience when forming the written thesis of my Practice-As-Research PhD. 

I share an excerpt from the Introductory chapter here, where I worked to position, to provide a rationale, for the choices I made in the design of the written thesis and the relationship of this to my practice for the doctorate. The research explored new ways of working with the practice of Bartenieff Fundamentals (part of the Laban Bartenieff Movement System) through improvised dance performance-making.

Introductory chapter: rationale for thesis design (excerpt)

'The use of the different written and visual modalities throughout the thesis draws together connections between concepts and experiences which blur the boundaries of their separation. The use of hyphens to connect words as they are positioned to be in relationship with each other; space-time, bodily-spatial, body-space-environment is a conscious decision which is reflective of the embodied approach, a commitment to seeing all aspects of the research in relationship with each other. This strategy is used to re-iterate the significance placed on the meaning-making through each phase of exploration being in the between-ness of things rather than the things themselves. This is reflective of Sullivan’s approach (2001) to transactional living and learning and echoes the premise of Bartenieff’s work ‘...the whole is more than the parts. Each skill [BF] becomes “more” because the individual skills are viewed in terms of relationships between them and how they can contribute to our larger life’s purpose’ (Hackney, 2002:201).

Woven through the chapters are notes from practice and scores. These serve to further illuminate my practice within the academic text and offer a mode of spac-ing the thesis with something of a visual voice of practice as it develops through exploration with conceptual theories. Scores are offered in presentation as greyed text (opaque pages when printed) between the academic writing within the chapters. Notes from practice that are integral within the body of each chapter are aligned to the right of the page and presented in grey text also.

The contribution of scores (and similarly my notes from practice throughout the thesis) acknowledges other scholars who have written about the complexities of translating embodied experiences in somatic movement into language (Sheets- Johnstone, 2009, Fraleigh, 2004, Bacon and Midgelow, 2014, and Barbour, 2011, 2012) and my earlier research with Akinleye (2018) looking at the limitations our western verbal language imposes on our dancing.The scores of this thesis are offered as a method of bringing some of the embodied experiences of the research to the fore through poetic and ‘metaphoric language’ (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009) which represents an expansion of BF away from the conceptual frame and language of
LMA.

The three improvised works used to illustrate this journey are offered developmentally: espacement, the first work to be engaged with is developed through an exploration of the BF Principle of breath support—core of the practice. KnowingUnknowing progressively develops this concept to interrogate the relationships between BFs inner connectivity and outer expressivity through processes of de-familiarization of bodily-spatial-sonic environments, and lastly ...whispers develops ways of (re)articulating BF patterns of yield and push | reach and pull in relationship with Laban’s space harmony through connectivity of touch, body-space- other. In parallel to their relevance within the practice of BF, concepts of core and distal, not as fixed destinations or places to inhabit but in the way that they signify the pathway of a journey, are used to form the flow of these works as illustrations of explorations of practice.

Three performance works were presented collectively as a public exhibition of artistic practice on November 5th, 2019, at Middlesex University, London. The works were presented in the form of an installation specifically constructed for this event to enable the sharing of all three works in one event and intentionally removed from the linear constructs of theatrical programming. The space comprised three interconnecting rooms: a small immersive space for engagement with the film of espacement, and two other spaces of live performance sharing ...whispers, and KnowingUnknowing. The works were shared over a period of one hour thirty minutes. The presentation of work in this format is not intended to contribute to discourse around dance installations, dance in the gallery more broadly. Rather, the relationship with this mode of sharing is as a mechanism to offer new variables to the improvised performance of the works with the presence of the audience sharing the space. The works thus unfold with the audience are part of the environment of the performance moment. Through the lens of this research every element is viewed as co-constructive of the relationships of body-space-environment that the works examine. The presentation of works through this installation is thus not a central concern of this thesis and notions of performance perspectives of dance installations will not be attended to. Key to the research is the process, exploring BF through improvisational strategies. The exhibition of the works offered a way of sharing these processes as they evolved through improvised performance. The works are documented independently through film for reference of the individual process discussed within this submission'. 

 

Kindred, H. 2021. 'dancing the in-betweeness: (re)articulating Bartenieff Fundamentals through improvised dance performance-making', London: Middlesex University, (unpublished PhD thesis)

 

What are your thoughts? 

How are you considering the voice of your practice within your research, within your writing? 

How do you communicate embodied experience to others? 

 

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