'Let's Improv It' - Introducing Somatic Experience to a Wider Audience

How do we share embodied knowledge and what are effective ways to introduce somatic experiences to non-dancers in the current era of data, disembodiment and technology obsession? These questions emerged during a collaborative research project ‘Let’s Improv it’ (Aug 2016), which focused on human abilities of understanding actions, intentions, and emotions of ourselves, and others. We explored the role, and perception, of physical and emotional touch, through an improvised movement inquiry, questioning how kinaesthetic empathy and multisensory perception allows an understanding of others through embodied knowledge. After a 5 day practice-lead investigation, we developed a 20-minute improvised somatic movement experience for non-dancers, delivered collectively by six facilitators using improvisation tasks, non-verbally, in darkness. With limitations on two dominant senses, we applied research which suggested that such environments enable the development of shared human knowledge, through embodied experiences. We planned a structured experience that allowed fluidity by facilitating organic transitions between the tasks through explorations. The group reached a sense of community through a shared run and a shared rest; an idea developed to offer an alternative experience of touch and movement. The closing discussion revealed an appreciation for the shared embodied knowledge, in contrast to our everyday immersion in a technologically mediated world, and how the project brought us back into our soma through bodily presence and touch. Our workshop drew from this project which facilitated a somatic inquiry for the mediated body. We aimed to share our strategies by recreating this unmediated, physical space, and inviting discussions on how shared embodied knowledge can attune us to our soma