Expanding Empathic and Perceptive Awareness: The experience of attunement in Contact Improvisation and Body Weather

On the edge of undoing: Ecologies of agency in Body Weather

“…Recently, in dance and performance studies there has been increased attention on analyses of performance practices through 4E cognition approaches (Blair and Cook 2016;Christensen et al 2015;Sutton and Bicknell 2020;Pini and Deans 2021). Of particular relevance to my own study, the notion of agency has been addressed by 4E theorists in the context of improvisational dance practices (Bresnahan 2014;Merritt 2015;Ravn 2020;Ravn 2021).…”

“…This chapter is based on my direct engagement with BW, as practiced during a year-long fieldwork period in New South Wales, Australia, in 2016 and 2017. I adopted a cognitive ecological framework and a phenomenological and ethnographic approach (Downey 2010;Downey et al 2015;Leach and Stevens 2020;Ravn 2009;Ravn and Hansen 2013;Tribble and Sutton 2011;Pini, et al 2016;Pini and Pini 2019;Pini 2020;Pini and Sutton 2021;Pini and Deans 2021). This methodological approach included somatic and kinaesthetic participant observation and the analysis of the accounts of BW performers encountered during my apprenticeship.…”

“…1 By addressing some salient principles and training features which characterise the practice of BW, as observed and practiced during my fieldwork, I discuss how agency is understood and experienced in this context of practice. Based on numerous conversations with BW performers and members of Australian Body Weather dance company De Quincey Co in which they describe their lived experience of dancing 'stillness' in the dunes, I emphasise the way this dance methodology cultivates a somatic attention that expands beyond the body of the performer, stretching out to the broader environment (Pini 2019;Pini and Deans 2021). I argue that agency in BW emerges as a capacity for sensing and 'undoing' rather than 'controlling' the body, developed through attention toand in relation tothe surrounding environment.…”

Embodied Learning in Physical Activity: Developing Skills and Attunement to Interaction

“…The growing amount of research focusing on how senses and attention take shape in the process of incorporating skills confirms this and illustrates how the incorporation of skills involves the development of sensing and ways of attending to these sensations. Examples of these descriptions include Gunn Nyberg's work on experiential aspects of embodied learning (Nyberg et al, 2020) and on the somatic grasping of practical knowing of free skiers (Nyberg, 2015); Bluhm and Ravn's analysis of middle-distance runners' expertise in handling their sensation of non-injurious pain while running (Bluhm and Ravn, 2021), and several analyses of how professional dancers use their sensorial awareness when practicing and performing (e.g., Ravn, 2017;Ehrenberg, 2021;Pini and Deans, 2021).…”

Cognitive Ecologies of Presence(S) in Three Different Dance Forms

“…To provide a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of stage presence in its complexity, I extend the investigation to other performative traditions and consider its experiential situatedness in a specific environment and cultural context. Through a cognitive ecological and ethnographic approach, in this paper I present an investigation of variations of presence (Noë 2012) in three different dance practices and choreographic contexts: I briefly address the case of the Ballet National de Marseille during the transmission of presence and kinaesthetic knowledge in the staging of Emio Greco's piece Passione (Pini and Sutton 2021), Contact Improvisation (Deans and Pini 2022) in the case of independent groups of contacters in Italy (Bologna, Ferrara, and Arezzo) and Australia (Sydney, NSW), and Body Weather, a radical movement ideology developed by Japanese choreographer Min Tanaka in the context of the company Tess de Quincey and Co. in Sydney and Bellambi, Australia (Pini 2022;Pini and Deans 2021).…”