A Moving: Embracing Felt Sense Practices and the Not-Yet Known

AbstractThis dissertation serves as a guidebook, leading readers through scores and embodied inquiries that can be applied to movement practices in a group, in pairs, or solo. The scores and practices aim to help readers develop a bodily knowing and felt sense; engage with the not-yet known; open to an embodied process of relational dynamics; and, ultimately, embrace unique expressions of movement, or what I call a Moving. The experience of sich einlassen, roughly translated to mean a total immersion in a process, encompasses these entangled states. In the first chapter, I present scores to help readers recognize sensations and get in touch with felt sense, which shifts the way we filter information, altering how we perceive our surroundings and selves as we attune to situations. In chapter 2, I introduce the concepts of settling, slowing down, and sich einlassen, as well as the Midline practice. The explorations in chapter 2 build on felt sense scores from chapter 1 to help readers experience a Moving. In chapter 3, I analyze the Rope Practice, and I apply concepts and explorations from chapters 1 and 2 to the practice, including how practitioners can harness attention and use felt sense with an object. In the fourth chapter, I examine the for_rest score and the methods of collision and fragmentation, investigating how they may shape the experiences of performers and audiences. Readers will discover that a Moving is a practice anchored in skill and occurs in a spectrum of expressions. It is transient and non-replicable, and no two experiences of it are the same. Yet, a Moving is a repeatable practice that offers infinite possibilities for experiencing sensations and movement.