This project draws on, is informed by, and extends a 6-yr practice as/is research project called Concrete-Water-Flesh, between Helen Kindred and Adesola Akinleye. The research is eco-somatic, a place-making artistic practice which has emerged and evolved through eco-somatic awareness, performance, choreographic methods of working with, and generating movement scores, informed by our perspectives as we identify as Black, neurodivergent and deaf dance artists and scholars.
The research centres questions of how we are a part of it all – entangled bodies, spaces, environments – a part of the world around. In this book, we share our use of movement scores as a method of somatic exploration within a practice-as/is-research paradigm. We use scores to explore the somatic sensing we discover through dancing with each other and other ‘things’ around. We have found our use of scores has revealed fascinating information about how we are present, and our responsibilities, in the everyday environment. Through this, we developed techniques for work with dance scores that unexpectedly offered us insight into collaborative processes for spatial practices and Place-based research. The scores manifested dance methods and tools for a practice of eco-somatic, Place-based art-making.
We consider how we position Dance as a method of inquiry, rather than a performative result of research. Our belief system of relationality, which is identified across a number of Africanist and Indigenous worldviews, is how we enter into the exploration of scores. These values of relationality, generosity, and accountability are common across many Indigenous and Africanist worldviews. We write the story of events. We use this storied approach to offer a feel of the relational, the situation across which knowledge emerged. This is to give a sense of the assemblages and vitalities that have spawned this book. Coming from an Afro & Indigenous methodological perspective of relationality/transaction/intra-action we need methods for exploration of the relationships and exchanges between things; we need methods for moving in the in-between where the exchange of the lived experience is revealed. We use our moving practice of dance as a method for being present in these shifting relationships of the lived experience.
Across our dance-practice, scores have become tools for exploring how we are actively present in the environment around; how we come into being-in-place. The use of scores in this way gives vitality to our on-going commitment to engage the sensitivities of danced somatics to enhance investigations that explore the relational awareness and responsibilities of humans and non-humans as co-collaborators.
Published book with Intellect Publishers.
This book is dancing as dialogue: a study of movement and place that explores the fundamental entanglement of humans and the environment through dance. Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore intertwines dance ethnography, Black feminism, and a new materialist lens to explore movement scores as methods and tools for a practice of eco-somatic, place-based art-making. The book examines research processes that explore somatic awareness, offering choreographic movement scores as methods for sensing and belonging with/in world around.
The choreographic-scores seem to offer an infrastructure for bringing the multiplicity of the assemblage of the moment into a manageable somatic focus. This allows us to become into, to be with-in and in movement dialogue with environment. Our experience of emergence reveals the congregations of us, the histories of our lived experiences in relationship with the possibility of new encounters within the infrastructure. The infrastructure of the choreographic-score offers a temporary organisation of the assemblage of the moment. The choreographic-score allows for an unravelling of pre-conditioned, contained/imposed structures of our bodies. As we explore the choreographic-scores with-in the shore or the city, we become attentive to the somatic of how our bodies respond to the defining relationships of those places.
‘This is a beautiful book! Akinleye and Kindred articulate a trans-corporeal practice of site-specific dance, inviting us to imagine new worlds where cities and seashores are danced as modes of connection and community. …’– Stacy Alaimo, author of Bodily Nature, Science, Environment and the Material Self
