Buono and Gonzalez who explore “Bodily Writing and Performative Inquiry: Inviting Arts-Based Research Methodology into Collaborative Doctoral Research Vocabularies”, describe and elucidate arts/dance-based methodologies, practices and theories which helped me frame my own body-led, arts-based, research-creation. What was of particular relevance and interest to my own methodology was that Buono and Gonzalez modeled a somatic approach to dancing collected data which “holds immediate relevance for scholarship regarding body-centered endeavors” (Foster, 1995 Buono & Gonzalez, 2017 pp.6-7) and “considers the lived body” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962 in Buono & Gonzalez, 2017, pp. 6-7) in the sense-making process. “Somatics”, a term coined by Hanna (1986) is a field that studies the soma, the Greek word for ‘living body’. The field of somatics posits that the body is internally and externally self-aware in relation to sensory perception (Hanna, 1991). Bodily writing in the context of Buono and Gonzalez’s research, approaches the body as the primary investigator, perceiver, interpreter, and scribe. In other words, the body is re-centered in the research process and reliable as the “written” embodied expression of that research. The film, Chalk Moves – Body as Teacher and Scribe in a Pandemic is the embodied expression of my research and intended to stand on its own as the reliable “text” of my research.
How I worked with, made sense of and artistically represented the data was informed by choreographic, contemporary dance and performance practices. My choreographic process was influenced by Rudolf von Laban and his student – Irmgard Bartenieff. They developed a method of organizing and describing the elements of human movement. The elements of movement are organized in the following four categories – Body, Effort, Shape and Space. These organizing elements of movement supported a generative and pedagogical approach to interpreting, scoring, embodying and making sense of the COVID related data I had collected.
Contemporary dance practices are generally concept driven, generative in new movement creation, resist appropriation of movements from existing dance vocabularies, and transcend cultural boundaries. I engaged in contemporary dance and performance practices to approach the data both artistically and expressively. The resulting performance for film and the original sound score, together augment the sensory-perceptual dimensions of my research-creation.
Creating a performance for the camera and working with the footage in the editing process allowed me to engage in another layer of choreographic thinking and the meaning-making process. The filmed movement on the bridge, followed by the editing of the film score proceeded the composition of the sound score. The creation of an original sound score for the film was a collaborative and iterative process with my partner in life, Dr. Blake Martin. The curation of sound samples and the musical writing was influenced by the COVID context, my field notes, the visual-spatial score on the bridge, the movement, the edited film, as well as the natural sounds of the environment captured during the filming process.