The art of making choices : the Feldenkrais method as a choreographic resource

Description

This document contextualises the practice-led Performance as Research (PaR) project 'The Art of Making Choices: The Feldenkrais Method as a Choreographic Resource'. It demonstrates how the included artistic submissions form an organic whole and substantially contribute to knowledge to the emerging trans-disciplinary field of 'Somatic Informed Dance Practice' (Brown 2011). In an organic, fluid way the document interweaves interpretations of The Feldenkrais Method, a leading twentieth century somatic educational practice, with examples of applications and resonances of such applications within my choreographic practice. The document sets out how my research contributes to the field by exemplifying a dialogic relationship between a 'somatic educational practice' and an emerging 'somatic dance practice', revealing how The Feldenkrais Method can provide an empowering and agency-constituting process for dance-makers and performers within somatic-informed contexts. The proposed trans-disciplinary PaR-methodology, draws on non-linear modes of enquiry and knowledge-creation as tools for embodied choreographic questioning. The document discusses how the undertaken research makes explicit a multi-dimensional range of theatrical applications of The Feldenkrais Method. Drawing on Complexity-Theory considerations this research suggests that The Feldenkrais Method itself offers an embodied, critical, emancipatory and inter-subjective process of discovery and choreographic thinking to the participant and, within performance making contexts, supports collaborative processes of self-organisation of a dance-eco logy, as a process-of-enquiry within a process-of enquiry.