What happens when a dancer and an anthropologist meets by chance at a playground?
A playdate between two 3-year-olds in November 2017 becomes a coffee meeting between two mothers; one is a dance artist working in improvisation and the other is a medical anthropologist.
A coffee meeting discussing the need for more ‘body’ and embodiment in ethnographic fieldwork; for less hierarchy between text and movement; for more collaboration between artistic practices and academia turns into hours of studio time exploring the space between anthropology and movement improvisation. A short video-trailer of the collaboration is made
Eight months into the studio time a workshop inviting dance and theatre artists to play with ideas around blood and movement becomes a series of blog posts and audio tracks published on the Somatics Toolkit website.
A successful funding application to IMC Seeds funds in December 2018 actualises a two-day workshop in May 2019 with participants from anthropology, visual art, film studies physical theatre and dance improvisation to discuss and test ideas for an ambitious project about the hospital environment.
2020 begins with a presentation of the work as a short film 'How can it not be fantastic to be touched?' - looking at hospital environments as relational and ‘touchy spaces’ at the Touchy Subjects Conference in Copenhagen in March, and looks towards developing scores and ideas for future movement experiments at the cross-section of health and arts.
