Background: The creative use of reminiscent music and natural movements were reported to have positive effects on the well-being of older adults with cognitive impairment. Objectives: To explore the effects of the intuitive movement reembodiment (IMR) program on the quality of life (QoL) of older adults with dementia. Methods: Data collected from 22 participants were analyzed: group 1 (mild dementia), group 2 (moderate dementia), group 3 (advanced dementia). All study groups participated in 10 weekly sessions. Self-reported QoL ratings were gathered through using the World Health Organisation (WHO)-5 questionnaire, alongside qualitative evidence recorded through onsite observation. Results: Statistically significant improvement in QoL was demonstrated after session 6. The qualitative analysis showed that the IMR sessions provided a sense of humor, imagination, and intuition that motivated the participants to dance and interact with joy. Conclusion: These preliminary positive findings need to be replicated in a larger randomized controlled trial.

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This article sets out to describe an eco-somatic improvisational danced encounter with the ruins of a 150-year-old migrant dwelling in Aotearoa New Zealand. Interwoven into the description of the project are ‘author’s notes’ as she makes links with the crisis of homelessness and displacement of refugees driven from their homes by war and famine. She asks what it means to reside, dwell or take up residence in a new place; how we might perform our belonging or our alienation; what it might mean to relocate, rebuild a sense of home and what remains of this sensory world amongst the ruins that might be uncovered through improvised dance. Finally, she suggests the ways in which intuitive danced engagement with particular space/place might reveal sensuous narratives of the past, supporting current practices of site-based intuitive somatic improvisation as valid academic practice-based research methodology. The research brings together the voices of writers from performance theory; somatics; phenomenology; social geography; architecture, archaeology and visual media; and those of the author as participant observer and the dancers as inquiring artists.

This article presents the inter-disciplinary improvised performance series Shared Agendas, an annual event at the University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand, as a vehicle for reinforcing effective democratic community interaction. I am referring to interaction that is inclusive, open, non-hierarchical, non-judgemental and socially responsive and responsible. In couching these inclusive spontaneous events as a form of academic meeting, where members work together to solve problems and find a common ground of understanding or agreement, I contend that the artists involved are practising the kind of socially concerned democratic process that we might wish for all groups, organisations or nation states worldwide. Dance therapist Adwoa Lemieux (1988) suggests that, within a danced improvisation, any difficulties and conflicts of interest are evident, physical, real, immediate and therefore immediately resolvable. In this form of community engagement, the conversation is directed towards co-operation, mutual sharing and communication between the performers, technical personnel and the viewers as active critical witnesses. Because of the intense engagement and preoccupation with the process by all participants, including the audience, this kind of performance meeting becomes what Schechner (1988) terms, a 'living entity' or microcosm of society. In describing this theatre of inter-relationship, I draw on the literatures of art and social justice theory, deep ecology, cognitive biology, somatics, perception psychology, education and dance in order to support this discussion. PreambleAround 20 years ago, as I was preparing to move to Dunedin from Auckland to take up my current position, I received a strange phone call on our yacht landline asking what I, as the new dance lecturer, was planning for Dance's slot in the Allen Hall Lunchtime Theatre programme. Having no idea what this was, I spontaneously announced that it would be called Visitations (since I thought my contract would be temporary), and it would be a totally improvised inter-disciplinary event (prompted by the kind of work I had been making and teaching) involving members of staff from across a number of science and arts disciplines and other local artists

Sondra Fraleigh has described the body as bounded by skin and having form, yet merging, relational and metamorphic (Fraleigh 2012). In this article I draw on the making of a short four-minute film Anima (2005), 1 co-directed by myself and videographer John Irwin, in order to discuss the ways that the intuitive sensuous soma may be presented in film. The purpose of the film was to explore ecological notions of perception, to engage the viewer in 'relational seeing' (Sewell 1999) and to lead the eye downwards and inwards in order that the viewer might perceive human skin and rock, seaweed and hair, land, ocean and body as the same yet distinct, separate and merging. At the same time, what is revealed in the film by the solo female dancer is the soma, whole and articulate, part of the ecology of place, and 'place' itself.