Dancing Place intertwines dance ethnography, Black feminism, and a new materialist lens, using movement scores as methods and tools for a practice of eco-somatic, place-based artmaking. These scores manifest as embodied dance methods, guiding a reflective engagement with and in the environment and offering a framework for understanding how movement both emerges from and shapes the places we inhabit.
Adesola Akinleye and Helen Kindred invite readers into choreographic processes that explore somatic awareness, offering movement scores as a reference for sensing and belonging within the world around us. The book blends text, poetic prose, and story-telling as well as a collection of generative scores drawn from transdisciplinary workshops to critically assess how dance emerges through deep engagement with place.
A necessary resource for dance practitioners, spatial planners, ecologists, and environmental scholars, Dancing Place opens new ways of understanding dance as a method of reciprocity and deep relational practice.
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Thank Yous
Chapter One: Concrete, Water, Flesh
I, You, We
Relationality
Bodies, Humans, and flesh
Dance as method
Transcorporeality of the assemblage
Eco-somatic
With and in Assemblages
Beginning
Chapter Two: Everyday Scores, Feedback Scores, and Choreographic Scores
Concrete: Everyday city scores
Water: Feedback scores
Flesh: Choreographic Scores
Summary
Chapter Three: Proficiencies in Emergence and Infrastructures
Water: Longshore drift and emergence
Concrete: Lido layers and infrastructure
Flesh: With-in the beach
Summary
Chapter Four: Presence with-in Scores
Flesh: Presence is at the periphery
Water: Presence as emergent intensities
Concrete: Performance and the opacity of choreographic-scores
Summary
Chapter Five: Eco-somatic Collaborations
Flesh: Being in process with-in processes
Concrete: Co-authorship and accountability of collaboration with things
Water: Fluid collaborations, flow of authorship
Summary
Chapter Six: Score Methods
Water: Iterations of scores
Flesh: Doing scores
Concrete: Knowing scores
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index