This research explores embodied experience of the lived environment with a focus on the natural world. Experience of particular places is documented and collected within a performative assemblage.
The variability of energies, moods and emotions, and the particularity and patterns of actions all underline the complexity of one’s ‘self’ and our capacity to know and be known, to shape and be shaped.
In the installation the corporeal self with its structures, gestures and actions located within specific places is remembered and re-embodied. The body itself becomes a site – the sensory and remembering heart of experience, as Merleau Ponty reminded us, and thus subject.
The research is based on the poetics of the moving body. The methodology is practice-led with the process of collating, embodying and presenting/sharing being the primary methodological strand, with an accompanying written account that takes an auto-ethnographic form.
The written account foregrounds the somatic sensibilities of experience with in-depth descriptions, reflective documentation of the practice and the responses by others. This allows for phenomenological engagement, where initial assumptions and presumptions can be noticed and questioned.
The researcher examines her relationship with other beings/life forms and reflects on their behaviours and needs. Exploring the relationship of self and world from the perspective of participant in/with rather than agent on. The researcher asks how an empathetic attitude might foster this?
The research occurred in a rural environment that has been partially exploited for farmland and forestry. It has involved perspectives from other women, including dance makers and local rural residents.
The researcher traces the embodied narratives – not only those written, told repeated, and reshaped through day to day life – but those formed and performed as movement poetics reflective of a self as a becoming identity. The implication is that a self of a particular moment in life is as much a product of the collation and shaping of stories as it is the embodiment of many bodily attitudes, stances and kinaesthetic memories manifesting in that instant.