Video credit: Alex Boyd; Moving bodies of water workshop at Open House Hackney.
I create movement scores that focus on tracing the interplay between environments and inner landscapes, as well as cultivating a space for self-reflexivity and collective storytelling that seeks to account for both the personal and political dimensions in lived experience. I consider the body as porous, a concept I develop from Stacy Alaimo's text "Bodily Natures", and permeable with environments. Hence the orientation toward the moving body as ecologically entangled, a term I adapt from Donna Haraway's text "Staying with the Trouble". I am curious about the potential of deep listening practices as a way to cultivate attunement with natural environments. I employ somatic movement methods to facilitate embodied process that enhances an awareness of the felt-sense by following impulses and sensations arising in the body.
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Posthumanist, new materialist and ecofeminist studies conceptually frame the movement scores holding propositions and invitations for embodied actions as ways to decentre anthropocentric views of the human, undermining hierarchies of being and troubling power relations. The workshops propose exploratory and playful ways into the body as a site for listening to the ecologically entangled embodied self by tracing sensations, gestures, moving from impulse and allowing the body to speak through witnessing, writing, mark-making and storytelling.
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I take an experimental approach and develop the scores I use for facilitating sessions from my own site-sensitive and responsive embodied movement practice. I cultivate relationality with the more-than-human by meeting companion spacies as teachers, through durational deep listening practices, slow-somatic movement, dreaming and materialising encounters with the land through subtle bodily sensations. The prompts and invitations I use to facilitate guided movement are often co-developed in partnerships with creatures, landscapes, elements and objects.