A sensual awareness of the body

How does that function in dance education?

After having a very insightful skype meeting with my supervisor, I feel new questions have arisen, closing the door on some subjective and close ended thoughts, and opening new avenues, which has brought me to a state of unknown. But that's okay! I have to rejig my brain to look from different perspectives and angles, I have brushed past recently. 

As I want to focus my research project student centred, I started to go off track making assumptions that weren't necessary. I didn't need to make any assumptions or final decisions about what I thought about my focus of research. When really I haven't even started it!

As I work in education, I am fascinated by learning process, and as part of my role includes covering lessons I often find myself experiencing learning with students, which has developed my own teaching methods and enabled me to provoke students more about the learning process, its not about what you achieved, but the process that assisted you in achieving it. I started to think generally about theory and how we compartmentalise understanding, with some spectacular practice I have seen in English lessons, I put myself as the role of student when researching and thought back to what I did at school to deconstruct meaning. 

You may think why? As dancers we are a part of embodied practice, rooted in deep connections with our own self. Recently I wanted to think about reflection within the experience, and realised that is just not practical, as my supervisor helped me to understand we are always subconsciously learning through experience. 

I want to investigate the body and mind in dance education, and whether dance educators can create strategies to create more awareness when creating, performing and responding. I went to my computer typed in somatic practice, and a realm of different articles arose, which caused sheer panic, but then I saw the word dialectical. I could resonate with it, as I experience dialect everyday, dialect in an academic environment, dialect in an informal conversation, instructional scenario, and generally verbalising thoughts and ideas to students. 

I decided to just read the first part of the article (listed/referenced at the bottom). I thought about when I plan lessons, what do I do? How do I meet the needs of students? From a general learning perspective. I took quotations that derived meaning and questioning that I could help shift my thinking around awareness. How would I link this to the bigger picture of my practice? How was this going to change or consolidate my perspective?

I started to use linguistic techniques to make inferences about the quotations and suddenly, the text had helped me to create a clearer picture of why I want to investigate sensual awareness in dance. 

"Dance is created with the understanding that movement is an integral part of the fabric of the dancer's human experience places the dancer's embodied self at the centre of choreographic content. He can no longer be understood as an object to be consumed by the spectators gaze" (Edinborough, 2012, p.258) 

When we understand something, we have become fully embodied within it, meaning we have had to experience it. So how do we experience it/ or what helps us to understand what our movement means to us? Well if I investigate the word fabric, I instantly think of minute pieces of thread that intertwine and connect. So this must mean that they are a range of factors involved in understanding our ideas. Is it a part of the environment, or is it the sensual experience we get from this? Another interesting lead was the word object. An object is often static, to be viewed and not to be developed as it is the artists creation that has formed it.


With this in mind, I looked at my next quotation with the following ideas in mind- To experience something and to full cognitive awareness you have to become fully immersed.

"To take one pertinent example of the dancers shift from object to subject.."(Edinborough, 2012, p.258) 

Why are these words so different and how are they relevant with dance? Like said before about the connotations of object to be viewed and interpreted. But subject, taking the aesthetic qualities from dance as the object that is looked upon and has use for the audience engagement and enjoyment, the subject can be delved into, developed because the subject is ever growing. To create full awareness, we need to have "...have emphasis on the sensual and tactile qualities of dance invites both dancer and spectator to question received norms". (Edinborough, 2012, p.258). Our received norms being our expectation of what we would look for aesthetically, pretty similar to a grade boundary which can be counteracting to the aim of making and responding. 


We have to feel something to be able to explore, to find ways to move in ways that are unexpected. That do not need to fit in with aesthetics of dance. For example, I found myself converting back to classical dance movements (the norm) but actually "hierarchical distinction" (Edinborough, 2012, p.258) can disturb the process of choreography, and this is where I will try to teach as I feel in that moment, not to fit steps together that are there for the sake of it. Allowing students to interject with what they feel at the time, with their own bodies meaning. 


The whole process of unpicking the meaning of research and relating it to the wider picture, has now helped me to understand how theories start to relate to my practice.

Next steps are writing up my intended purpose for research and creating more clarity with the ethics form.


Link to research

Somatic sensibilities: Exploring the dialectical body in dance.
http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.mdx.ac.uk/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=e3b9ed0a-a19c-43b5-a3eb-1de4e52c31a1%40sdc-v-sessmgr01