So… it's possible that we're just going to have three different materials… like, all throughout.
This article explores how the felt sense of touch, as engaged through the enabling constraints of the Argentine tango duet, can facilitate an experience of kinaesthetic listening in the spaces emerging between the dancer’s inside and outside worlds. The author’s habitual perception of giving and receiving touch as a tango dancer is destabilized by framing a series of somatic experiences in settings where customary tango conditions and assumptions do not apply. This involves experimenting with methods and tools of inquiry borrowed from contact and contemporary dance improvisation. The article argues that when practiced as a form of kinaesthetic listening, tango is conducive to a process of sensing and feeling together. In this process, it becomes possible to be touched both physically and affectively by the movement impulses negotiated between the partners. This possibility unsettles the reductive idea of one’s body as a separate entity preceding the encounter.
Crosswalk is a site-responsive performance conducted in the middle of a pedestrian crossing in the inner streets of Melbourne and exposed in the homonymous video attached to this article. The performance – an experiment with the duet dance form of Argentine tango – emerged out of a practice-based process of inquiry. My failed attempt to find my tango in the city while finding my place in the city through the tango becomes a drive to explore the nexus between learning and the experience of publicness and defuse the rationalist reliance on the isolated cognitive individual as the key pedagogical agent and target. I argue that, in Crosswalk tango worked (or could have worked) as a reverse public pedagogy through somatic connection not only between dance partners but also with the broader environment. Becoming vulnerable to the otherness of the outside world is one way of promoting diversity and fostering plurality.
Looking for ways to address and attune to the urgent ecological crises of our age, this special issue problematizes the notion of the “more-than-human” and explores the nexus between ecology and embodiment across different artistic disciplines and traditions of embodied research. The editorial evokes our ecosomatic processes of co-editing with the more-than-human, and we offer a poetic commentary alongside video excerpts from the authors’ works, which weaves connective tissues between the works. We conclude by discussing ecologies of embodiment as a bodily felt and cognitively thought generative space between certainty and uncertainty, knowing and not-knowing, sensing and naming.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.