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Practice
as Research
I am currently entering the final year of my PhD in Performance
Practice at Exeter University. This is an intriguing, exhilarating
and challenging process. My research is based on Move into Life
practice as a teacher, performer and director. I am focusing on
articulating an approach which I am calling eco-somatics.
I see this as an ecological approach to soma and body in movement,
which means that I approach movement practice and theory from the
moving experience rather than from a mechanistic, static view.
The
basics of eco-somatics develop embodiment, awareness and creativity
within each person's unique movement vocabulary. It deliberately
makes no distinction between movement for personal development,
movement for performance training and movement as a therapeutic
skill. The basic training ensures that life, creativity and health
remain intrinsically woven together.
However
in the next stages of work, a person often clarifies their intention
and chooses to develop their movement from a particular angle, sense
of aesthetic or professional need - be it for their life, as a performer
or as a therapist. Some people move between prioritising personal,
professional or artistic applications of their movement practice
at different moments in time.
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Eco-somatics
is a dynamic, systemic and process based approach to the art of movement.
We live and move from apparent certainty towards the unknown and back
again in a constant state of inter-dependency and dialogue both with
our changing selves, with the changing others and, crucially, with
our environment - movement in the present and in presence.
I
see "movement in presence" by its very nature as transformative
for the participant, for the witness/audience and for the environment.
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For
my practical submissions, I am now preparing the final stages of
my solo performance, following three "movement studies" over the
past two years, in which I investigate in depth some key practices
within eco-somatics as a movement artist. I have applied the same
key practices with performers as co-director of an ecological performance
at Bristol Zoo and investigated the same practices, as a teacher,
during a week's residential workshop in Autobiographical Movement.
This is a module within the Move into Life basic training programme,
which many of you are familiar with.
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| Drawings
by Greta Berlin |
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