Embodied Creative Practice Research Project

Nicola Forshaw, Senior Lecturer in Dance and Drama at York St. John University and myself are exploring and developing a dance and music practice which exists in the mutual ground between disciplines, and our experiences as dancers and a cellist and violist respectively. We bring all our expertise, knowledge, curiosity, vulnerability and trust to a process driven by the relationships found between two practitioners who dance and play string instruments. Our practice is forming a network of embodied knowledge and we actively ‘draw together psychological feeling, bodily experience, dance and musical elements into an all-embracing, free and creative way of life.’ (Katya Rothe, 2014, p.197)

Our improvisational creative practice demonstrates how moving and musicking quietens the talking mind, allowing it to hear the body think. This explores the mutual ground of narrative and embodied thinking. It is in the entwining of music and dance that we are able to explore our psychology and physiology and show, rather than tell, this to others. Furthermore, our practice demonstrates the body’s desire to be in motion alongside music, as temporal phenomena.

Continuing from my PhD (The Dynamics of Mutuality in the Composer and Performer Relationship), our braided improvisation-led practice explores Susanne Ravn and Simon Høffding’s assertion ‘that artistic improvisation centres upon a process of oscillating agency’ (2022, p.516) and how each ‘I’—with our separate histories, techniques, knowledges and experiences—becomes an embodied ‘we’ ‘connected to the oscillatory process of assuming and relinquishing agency.’ (2022, p.534)