RESEARCH - MOVING CONSCIOUSLY

After our festival contribution focus group, Sophie recommended a book to me, Moving Consciously (Fraleigh, 2015), to explore different somatic practices I want to implement into rehearsals to help create set movement. She said it was quite a heavy text to read so when I read parts of it myself I looked for specific chapters that could be helpful in the moment.

Why Consciousness Matters: Somatic Potentials and Expressive Imagination (Page 5)

This was the first thing that I came across when flicking through Sophie's bookmarked pages, and it drew me in as it started talking about the self. This idea of a relational self speaks to my stimuli of external perception and how we exist through the eyes of others. Though in rehearsals we have previously done written exercises in perceiving each other, I want to bring that back and then use the aspects that each dancer sees to create a version of each other's phrases where they are replicating it in their own style. This will add another layer to the repeated movement as for it to not become too repetitive and I could play with mixing up how many cycles of each different version they each do.

Why Consciousness Matters: Moving as Knowing (Page 20)

This paragraph made me think about setting a clearer narrative for myself in the individual journeys of the dancers throughout the piece and how their relationship is impacting that. I need to think about the experiences of the external self and how they can impact the internal, and how the internal self differs from the way it presents itself to the outside world. How do the internal and external blend together and what separates them? I also want to think about consciousness in a performance sense, for example, when I want Tilly speeding up towards the end, it's almost as if she is in an unconscious state of repetition in attempts to centre herself and nothing else (including Emily) exists to her in that moment. I want to look through what we have and think about the intentions and focuses of each section.

 Fraleigh, S. (2015) Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations through Dance, Yoga, and Touch. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. (Accessed: 07/05/2024)