Embodied Movement Awareness: Articulating Structure & Flow across and through disciplines

Abstract

This workshop was based on many years of movement practices in theatre (with a specialized focus on somatic movement). Furthermore, it was based in larger research concerns around engaging movement at all levels of teaching and learning—not just as a means of getting from a to b, but as an overlooked and undervalued epistemology. This work also moves across disciplinary boundaries and allows for rich transdisciplinary concerns to work together connecting individual sensibilities to larger socio-political issues. The workshop offered methods of movement research from two recent projects. One project linked theatre students with archaeology students and focused on embodiment of skeletal structures and local landscapes. The other project engaged students from across a wide range of disciplines along with young children, teenagers and adults alongside professional dancers in the Cork iteration of the Global Water Dances (https://globalwaterdances.org/) project which linked individual bodies of water to larger questions of global water ecologies and social justice. The workshop offered a brief framework of these practices and epistemologies but the workshop was primarily a movement based exploration. A crucial point of introduction however, was that it is not about accomplishing some kind of virtuosic movement pattern which focusses on external aesthetics. Instead, ...