Jane Bacon

Psyche moving: ‘active imagination’ and ‘focusing’ in movement-based performance and psychotherapy

This paper looks at how “focusing” (Gendlin, 1978) and “active imagination” (Jung, 1935) can operate to enhance one another in therapeutic and creative environments. These approaches to working with psychic material allow an embodied engagement with psychic material which encompasses all of the senses as well as a something more which can be understood in Jungs use and development of the term “transcendent function” and Gendlins belief that the felt sense is more than sensation. The relationship between these two approaches is charted and examined using case illustrations from the authors creative processes and facilitation work. This paper concludes that bringing these two methods together in creative movement environments is a powerful and often necessary tool for the expression of psychic contents.

Her body finds a voice: Authentic Movement in an imaginal world

Authentic Movement is a somatic and therapeutic practice often referred to as active imagination in movement. Some practitioners refer to the form as mystical, sacred or archetypal and so ascribe it a particular power and potential. This movement form, based on a dyadic relationship, is a unique environment to research such experiences. I will suggest that particular language skills and modes of articulation are needed to work in this territory. How do mover and witness work with these moving experiences and what means of speaking from and with these experiences can be useful? How can we speak from these experiences and images and not lose the primacy of both? I will suggest Focusing, tracking and poetic or symbolic articulation can help to provide a container for moving and witnessing experiences. The safe container allows for deeper exploration of more ineffable experiences. These are defined as subtle body, imaginal, mystical and processes of individuation.

Articulating choreographic practices, locating the field: an introduction

Framing and locating the aims and scope of Choreographic Practices and ‘The Choreographic Lab’ this article provides readers with an overview of recent debates around dance practices as modes of research. The lineage and discourses of practice as research are briefly introduced, with a particular focus upon notions of embodied knowing and the processes of speaking ‘from’ rather than ‘about’ movement. Such issues are identified and developed through references to the articles that appear in this first issue of this journal

Informed by the Goddess: Explicating a processual methodology

This is a self-reflexive approach to practice as research in dance and performance that draws on what Jungian Scholar and feminist Susan Rowland calls a ‘Jungian goddess feminism’ which is a kind of ‘experiment in the imagination’. This methodological and feminist approach is based on previous research into ‘authentic movement’. The article sets out a methodological approach and style of writing for practice as research that embraces and reconfigures ‘the Goddess myth’ by embracing subjectivity for its value that is comparable to and yet different from rationality. There are personal reflections, exercises for the reader and a theoretical frame braided throughout the article. Through this Bacon reflects on her doctoral studies to question why the emerging ‘spiritual’ aspects apparent in herself through her engagement with her fieldsite were not explored more deeply. A post-Jungian feminist frame of reference enables both a reconfiguring of essentialist readings of ‘Goddess’ and a theoretical space where spirituality is named, embraced and from which new understandings for practice as research in dance and performance can emerge.

Closer to the body: reflections on skript and extracts from collected writings

In this two part article we reflect upon the experience of writing-dancing with audiences and artists in the context of our installation work skript (commissioned by Dance4, Nottingham, 2013). Part one considers how skript engages embodied, felt sense, improvisational and collaborative modalities in relation to the act of writing. As such we consider the ways in which the particular interface of language and embodiment, which is the focus of skript, might allow a knowing of ‘something’ otherwise – be that something a sense of our own bodies, a dance work, a performance experience or perhaps just that moment in time. In part two we share extracts of some of the writings that were collaboratively generated as part of skript. We focus on the work of three performance/movement artists: Guy Dartnell, Miguel Pereira and Rosalind Crisp. These dance-writings are published as they were written in real time, in the moment of engagement. They are edited only for length and at times to correct typographical errors (but only if the errors seemed to disturb the flow of the ideas) rather than to simply ‘tidy’ the text or the grammar. The writings are relational, improvisational and at times fragmentary. For more writings see: www.writing-dancing.blogspot.com.