Dancing Place

Dancing as dialogue: a study of movement and place that explores the fundamental entanglement of humans and the environment through dance. Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore intertwines dance ethnography, Black feminism and a new materialist lens to explore movement scores as methods and tools for a practice of eco-somatic, place-based art-making. The book examines research processes that explore somatic awareness, offering choreographic movement scores as methods for sensing and belonging within the world around. Dancing Place blends scholarly text, storytelling and poetic prose to discuss embodied dance methods that offer a reflective engagement within the environment, establishing a framework for understanding how movement both emerges from and shapes the places we inhabit. An essential resource for dance practitioners, spatial planners, ecologists and environmental scholars, Dancing Place opens pathways for understanding dance as a method of reciprocity and deep relational practice. ‘This is a beautiful book! Akinleye and Kindred articulate a trans-corporeal practice of site-specific dance, inviting us to imagine new worlds where cities and seashores are danced as modes of connection and community. This is an inventive, provocative and inspiring text that culminates in a manifesto for creating choreographic scores as methods and practices for ecosomatic, place-based research that embraces relationality and collaboration across bodies and places.’ Stacy Alaimo, author of Bodily Nature, Science, Environment and the Material Self The book explore how dance practices can be embodied through relationships with the environment. The book begins with discussing somatic experiences of being in place; including discussing a sense of belonging to the environment through responsive movement. The second part offers infrastructures (scores) for generative movement drawn from transdisciplinary workshops. The book presents text, poetic prose and image. Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore reveals the collaborative choreographic making process as a way of being in the world. In the book the authors story their experiences of working with scores as ways of noticing, sensing and bringing focus to moments within the assemblage of environments of which we are a part.