Short Abstract:

This practical workshop will investigate the body and boundaries, focusing on the skin as a porous surface marked by experience. How to extend ways of thinking and feeling with the skin? We will move, listen, talk and question through movement and mark-making.

Long Abstract:

We are interested in skin as felt experience, and the notion of 'boundary' something that connects as well as divides. This has emerged from diverse fieldwork, with contemporary dance in Switzerland and in relation to nuclear ontologies in post-disaster Japan.

Outline (90 mins)

• discussion considering different perspectives of participants. We will frame our experiments in 'workshopping' as a mode of knowledge generation and inter-disciplinary research.

• Practical activities will develop through experiments with a single exercise: collaborative 'body drawing', in pairs. Such activities are prevalent in art therapy and live drawing events that combine contemporary dance and the visual arts.

• movement experiments drawing on contact improvisation and yoga

• mark-making - drawing experiments that operate within the expanded field of drawing and thinking-through-drawing.

• This exploration will open up a discussion of relationships through skin eg "skinship" (Adis Tahhan 2010) :

o What impressions/feelings/thoughts/imaginaries arise?

o How does skin connect to past/present and future experiences?

o What personal or collective stories narrate skin?

o What kinds of relationship could be generated by 'skinship'?

• These questions will shed light on ways of understanding the role of skin, its capacity to connect and divide at the same time, and presumptions about the skin as a "boundary" of the body.

• Please bring cloths you feel comfortable to move with. We will be dancing barefoot/ in socks.