I approach the moving body as an ecologically entangled and storytelling medium. I am informed by my applied working experience in crisis recovery mental health services, ongoing embodied research, somatic and dance movement improvisation practices. The activist scholarship of Mad Studies orientates my practice to question experiences of distress as the personal responsibility of the individual. A focus of my embodied storytelling practice, is to trace the interplay between environments and inner landscapes, to politicise bodyminds. I consider the body as porous, a concept I cultivate 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 like forest bathing and those offered by Pauline Oliveros, as a way into exploring relationships with environments. I draw principles from somatic practices - the felt-sense - to follow impulses, pulsations, contractions and sensations as entry points into a state of enhanced embodied awareness. Posthumanist, new materialist and eco feminist studies conceptually frame the movement scores I create for my workshops. In my work I am looking to decentre anthropocentric views of the human, to undermine hierarchies of being and to trouble power relations. With this embodied thinking, I facilitate movement explorations between the human and the more-than-human. 

 

I take an experimental approach and develop the scores I use for facilitating sessions from my own movement improvisation practice encountering the architecture of environments I am practicing in. I activate my relationship with environments through contact improvisation, slow-somatic movement, dreaming and encountering the land as a partner in dance. The prompts and invitations I offer to facilitate guided movement are often inspired by the movements of companion species I meet along the way, landscapes, elements and other objects. The practice offers exploratory and playful ways into the body as a site for listening to the inner self by tracing sensations, moving from impulse and allowing the body to speak through writing, mark-making and storytelling.