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.

I see "movement in presence" by its very nature as transformative for the participant, for the witness/audience and for the environment.

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.