ResDance Series 11: Episode 5: The practice of response: Reflections from the Student cohort of the MA Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism Programme

ResDance

Students from the MA Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism programme share reflections on how embodied practices serve as tools for so

Key takeaways

• Iona discusses using queer and body-based methodologies as blueprints for community building.
• Rhiannon Colvin highlights the importance of somatic practice in preventing activist burnout during intense crises.

Main topics

• Somatic Practice
• Social Justice Activism

Notable quotes

We cannot sustain our social movements if we cannot sustain ourselves.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how dance and somatic research provide regene

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Many thanks for all joining me today and I'm going to start by asking you to introduce yourselves and say something about your area of research interest or practice. Speaker 1 (0:08) Hello my name is Iona in English and Iona in Welsh. I speak both English and Welsh and I am based in Cardiff, Cymru which is Cardiff in Wales in the UK. My work really lives at the intersection between performative improvisational practice, site responsive work and somatic practice and I'm looking particularly at how queer methodologies, body-based methodologies, site responsive work can offer us sort of blueprints for collective modes of becoming and community building. Speaker 4 (0:51) I'm Eve Dent, I'm based in a rural part of the UK in the West. My research interests are basically kind of an eco-somatic practice, but mixing in visual arts into disciplinary work. And at present, really trying to look at methodologies and ways of working that Speaker 7 (1:12) foreground the way nature practices and what Speaker 4 (1:16) we can learn from those and learn in research methods as well. Speaker 6 (1:19) Hi Gemma, great to be here again. My name's Ruth Pethy-Bridge and I'm a unit leader on the MA Dance Participation Communities Activism and my research background has really been in community dance practice in the UK. That's kind of what my PhD looked at and was really critiquing notions of community and trying to figure out how we might create it through certain choreographic methodologies. And now I'm getting interested in all kinds of things, not least driven by all the wonderful students that we encounter on this course and all the kind of brilliant, juicy topics that they bring with them. Speaker 5 (1:53) My name is Adni Sethi. I live in Ahmedabad, India. I have an interdisciplinary practice from museums, space making, narrative structures to performance, dance. Speaker 5 (2:10) I think my primary curiosity has been around cultures of violence and how they're perpetuated in the world and what are the ways in which we can respond to them but really through in a sense a deep diving into really understanding the nature of violence first and so I come I come to dance also with that curiosity of where does this kind of impulse for violence sit within us maybe Speaker 2 (2:39) I would offer to go next I'm Jo Parks I am the co-writer and course leader of the MA Dance Participation Community's activism. I have worked for 30 years as a community dance artist in many different settings. My current research is focused around working with the practices of collective decision-making and collective composition that have grown inside of that practice over decades. and moving them into public space as a direct meeting with the occupation of public space by the far right. So looking at how collective decision-making processes, which emphasize the humanity of the people in the group and are brought into critical dialogue with power inscribed in space. Speaker 2 (3:35) how this can be a way to reoccupy public space. Speaker 7 (3:40) Hi, so I'm Rhiannon Colvin. I'm based in Bristol in England. And my background is both as an activist in social justice movements and as a movement practitioner. So my research at the moment is bringing those two different threads together. And I'm exploring how... dance movement and somatics can support activists to prevent and recover from burnout and develop a more regenerative relationship to their bodies and their change making practice Speaker 3 (4:08) Great, thank you. What a wonderful group of people that we have here today. So one thing I've picked up in your introductions is that you either use the word respond or responsive, or you're inferring it, how you described your practice to me, this idea of responding. So perhaps my first question or provocation is about how your practice... uses that word respond or how you use the word respond in your practice I Speaker 1 (4:38) think for me having trained since I was a child in practices and techniques that are to some degree didactic in that you're trying to become and embody a certain vision or form of what a dancer should be for me there was a real shift which has probably occurred over time but from dance and performative practice I then went into working in social justice movements for a really long time and trained as a participatory teacher of English for speakers of other languages with people who'd come from all over the world you know refugees and asylum seekers and forced migrants and it was really through that training that I realized that actually like top-down approaches don't work, you know, and also can be incredibly harmful. And so actually the real learning happens when you are shining a light on what people bring to the space and how much communication really occurs, yeah, non-verbally through the body and how much we can really, you know, work together in that sense and achieve sort of this commonality of understanding and then how texts can come in at some point. but it is informed by what is already there. And I think from that and sort of then learning more about the pedagogy of the oppressed, it really felt to me that responsivity is really at the core of a body-based practice. And so I've had fantastic opportunities to sort of develop that work and that thread of research, working with artists like Emmeline Clayton and Seraphine1369. I work with site responsive experimental performance collective tactile Bosch that are based in Wales and yeah, just being given and working of course in community first and foremost, and just had these wonderful opportunities for, you know, layering and adding and reflecting on how to me, the response responsivity by which I mean attention to what is there and like finding those magic moments within a pedagogical setting. is really at the core of any of the practice I think. Speaker 3 (6:53) And so this notion for you being responsive isn't just about your position or role and how you approach your practice but it's about the space you're situated, the context. Speaker 1 (7:03) Create contexts in which people are supported and enabled to feel confident to respond to each other and I think also like play is a core part of that. in responding there's also the permission to like make a fool of yourself get things wrong and like there is no wrong you know it's all discovery. Speaker 3 (7:23) Do you want to share anything about this idea of responding or being responsive? Speaker 7 (7:28) I can jump in because it links to what Iona is saying I think a question I and many of us have been holding during the course is like how do we respond to these really really challenging times that we're living in all across the world and My question particularly was like, how do I support the people that are responding? Working with activists, working with people that are seeing the rise in climate change and fascism and genocide and putting their bodies on the line in all these different ways to resist, to stop that state violence, to be in solidarity, to build different futures. And what my experience is and also what I witness in social movements in the UK, but I think it can be the case in many parts of the world. is that it's really hard work on your body to be responding to the levels of intensity of crisis that we're facing. So I have this really strong sentence in my research of we cannot sustain our social movements if we cannot sustain ourselves. And sustaining ourselves is a body-based practice, both individually, but also crucially collectively. Speaker 7 (8:35) That's what I was really interested in exploring, like how do I create the space to work with both individuals and a group to keep doing this work? The answer is not to stop doing this work, but how do we respond in a way that is not harmful to ourselves, that does not repeat capitalist norms of, you know, harder, faster, better, stronger, like does not run ourselves into the ground? How do we actually build different ways of being with each other and our bodies as we respond rather than replicating a lot of the harmful patterns? When you say that word, it's like there's these layers of responsiveness, right? And how do we respond in ways that take care and build different Speaker 3 (9:12) cultures as we do that? Speaker 5 (9:14) And Speaker 3 (9:15) what's interesting about that for you is that, well, for me, is that burnout is a physiological concept usually. So when we think about burnout, we think of it in a way you're talking about is a kind of societal layers. It's the layers of what makes us rather than just like a bodily experience. Speaker 7 (9:33) Yeah, and the research that I draw upon, the field that I draw upon, politicised somatics, is very crucially trying to make this point. There's a lot in the West, a lot of focus on like individual healing or like if you're burnt out, it's your fault. It's your body's fault. It's kind of very individualistic. And what this field does is say, no, we're going to look at the multiple political, social factors, environmental factors that are leading, you know, capitalism is exhausting. just living in it but like resisting it also you know so that's also why I think my response but our responses need to be collective because we need to be naming that of course we could do individual things to shift but we also need to be doing collective things to shift these bigger systems that are burning us out in the first place so that that collective framing and I think that's there in the course for all of us this this idea of community and participation and like not doing it alone. feels really crucial in that response. Great thank you other thoughts or sharings? Speaker 6 (10:33) I had a thought which was I guess it's an extension of the word response or to respond which is responsibility and I was thinking about I mean some of what Rhiannon's spoken about already like points to that thing of like who feels responsible to try and step in to change certain systems or to create and activate communities, for example, or how do we take responsibility for ourselves? But I think it was Emmeline Clade, who is a very kind of well-known UK dance artist and academic and performer, who first introduced me to responsibility as a kind of double pronged word with a hyphen in the middle, right? And so... there's something around like who has the ability to respond like or the capacity to respond and under what circumstances which links to burnout but also to the kind of yeah the social injustices that are across the kind of global north and south and so I think there's something around like the yeah the kind of qualities of response that how resourced the responses are that kind of come into that and it's definitely something that we encounter in this learning community is kind of very much learning around things like risk and response and repair that how they mean very different things in different cultural contexts and not asking for responses to be the same, like and not asking for them to have some sort of uniformity of that is actually