Paper short abstract:

Rather than considering self-care practices as merely rational and prudent endeavours, this paper draws attention to the playful, subjunctive, and experimental mood implicated in the dynamic processes of sensing and making well.

Paper long abstract:

Rather than considering self-care practices as merely rational and prudent endeavours, this paper brings attention to the play-element, as implicated in the dynamic processes of sensing and making well. Drawing upon multimodal and autoethnographic research materials relating to movement improvisation practised during self-isolation, I explore how sensory resources were drawn into self-care processes in a subjunctive, experimental, and playful way amid a global crisis. While the domestic space confined and clashed with the dancers' habitual moving bodies, leading to bodily discomfort and frustration, movement improvisation emerged as a self-care practice that dynamically organizes sensory perception to reharmonize and retune the relationship between dancing bodies and their surroundings. As dancers improvised with sensory resources from everyday settings - such as with unexpected sounds, the space underneath a table, or within a camera's frame -not only did they cultivate an attentive body that attunes to their constantly changing surroundings, but the seemingly mundane spaces were also re-explored and reconstituted through the dancers moving bodies, expanding their sensory lifeworld within confinement. This process of improvisation was described by dancers as an 'endless workshop', implying a playful mood by which to attune to the ever-changing world, venture out into its ambiguity and indeterminacy, and act within it through experimenting with what could be. Play can thus be seen as a mode of engaging with the world that is concerned less with an end point than with an open path forward, thereby transforming uncertainty and limitations into potentiality in ways that support wellbeing.