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A little about the project

As we move through this web of ecological crises with the climate crisis on the one hand and the global coronavirus pandemic on the other, many of us will be experiencing increasing levels of distress right now. Often, we think of our mental health as a personal problem, something we must tend to privately. However, when so much of our internal experiences are influenced by what is happening outside of us, we can no longer deny the impact our changing environment is having on our mental health.

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Who?

I am looking for 10 dance movement improvisation artists to take part in my practice as research project looking to unpick these layers of personal, political and ecological complexities in our lived experiences of distress. The project seeks to explore how dance and movement improvisation practice may serve as an alternative way to start articulating these entanglements of our time. Two of the questions guiding the research are:

• How can moving bodies tell stories about the personal and contextual entanglements of distress?

• Can embodied research practices perform entangled storytelling in order to resist or undermine hierarchies of being?

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What?

We will be using digital environments to perform this research. I would send you a weekly audio-recording of a themed guided journey linked to these questions over a period of 6 weeks. You would be invited to record your practice and then share some of the material you generate through the guided journey. In-between themes, you would also be invited to a 1 hour online weekly group debrief session, where you would have the opportunity to reflect on personal and shared experiences with other participating artists. We would then collaborate on a final audio-visual piece from the material we produce individually. This final piece is led by a third research question:

• How can the practice be a way to forge intimacies and offer novel ways of communicating about shared experiences of distress given the ecology of our time?  

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Why?

The jump from the personal to the collaborative work is vital in exploring some of the tensions that may lie between personalised, collective and shared experiences of distress.

 

Duration

The research will take place over approximately 9 weeks: 6 weeks for the movement practice and 3 weeks for the collaborative component from 1/2/2022 - 29/3/2022. The data collection will be undertaken either using digital environments and cloud-based systems, that is video conferencing services like zoom for discussion. You will then be invited to send your material video files and are advised to send them either as web links to streaming video hosted on a site such as Vimeo or YouTube or as video files transmitted directly via sites like WeTransfer or DropBox. Written and audio material can be shared as a copyrighted PDF document or via sites like Google drive, DropBox or Soundcloud. 

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Disclaimer

Whilst the guided practice of this research may hold therapeutic value it is not intended as therapy or a clinical intervention but purely as artistic practice. There will not be any financial remuneration for the material produced through the practice research, however, all participating artists will retain full authorship of the artwork they produce through the research and will also be credited for the final artwork produced collaboratively.

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A little about me:

I am a creative practitioner and a doctoral researcher in Visual Cultures. Both my applied practice and research evolved from weaving 5 years of experience working in third-sector mental health services in London and a personal ongoing dance movement improvisation practice. I will be offering one-to-one as well as group debrief sessions throughout the research to support you in your process.  

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Get in touch by sending an e-mail to fform003@gold.ac.uk or by filling in your details in the form below if you are interested in participating or if you have any questions about the project that you would like to discuss. I look forward to hearing from you!