History and Context

The Body in Residence as a project arose from our joint fascination with the relationship between mind and body. As the project evolved it was, more precisely, our individual and collective experience of the relationship between mind and body that became a central interest. The work has been shaped both by our original backgrounds, in dance movement therapy and fine art and our joint practice and training in movement/dance based improvisation and performance.

Whilst we are certainly interested in the critical discourse between holism and dualism it is the processes of sensing, tuning and training the physical body, intrinsic to movement practice, that have most strongly driven our curiosity. In our experience the simple yet multi-layered process of deepening sensory awareness produces an equal deepening in perception and insight about the world around us. This frequent observation has led us to explore and seek to understand more about the role of the body and sensation in forming our perception of the world – the phenomenological basis for lived experience.

In wanting to root our explorations in the body we have inevitably come to consider the notion of “embodiment”. Whilst this could suggest a kind of heightened state of mind-body unity it seems just as interesting, and as salient in lived existence, to consider experiences when mind and body feel dislocated. When the body feels like a carcass dragged around by an over stimulated mind or mental function is lost in a sea of pure sensation. What do these experiences tell us about how we know about ourselves and the world we inhabit? What is the relationship between objective knowledge of a body, say a medical perspective, and the subjective sensory experience that person has of their body? Do current environmental and social issues reflect prevailing attitudes towards the body and vice versa?

These are all questions which one way or another underpin our enquiry. The work produced through the Body in Residence is far more about opening the field of questioning than reaching conclusions and it seems right in prompting, provoking and interrogating these questions to reside in the body as the place where we inhabit life.