How it started
There is no clear starting point, only many beginnings. Tracing back the origin of my interest in both physical play and dance improvisation is like looking in a family album and trying to make a coherent (and often imaginary) story out of the incomplete fragments of childhood. There are many traces: like my interest in dance from a young age (I was five years old when I started my first dance class) and the fact that movement itself has been a vessel for me to express feelings and to find shelter in turbulent times. Going through major life changes, my deep interest in movement remained. Still up today, I can enjoy simple movements of the body that serve no purpose and that are only done for the sake of enjoyment. Raising my arm in the air for example, softly and gently, following its trajectory, and engaging with what presents itself in the moment.
Besides my personal interest, I also have a long-term professional interest in dance, creative movement exploration, play, children, and pedagogy. I studied dance/choreography as well as pedagogy, and teaching university students has been one of my great pleasures in the past ten years. The same is true for young children. I am fascinated by the way children move through the world. For them, the body is close-at-hand (maybe because they are smaller) and their attention is naturally directed to the sensorial-tactile aspects of their surroundings. Tim Ingold and Jo Vergunst (2016, p.4) state that children focus “on the near-at-end” and they possess “a boundless curiosity in everything in the vicinity – which they want to reach out and touch as well as look at”. For young children, movement itself is the vehicle for exploring the world.
This artistic research is shaped around the messiness of daily life, as the physical play events of my own children form the departure point of my research. It is an art practice that takes place close to home, it is immediate and intimate, as I am a mother, artist and researcher at once. In many ways, these small instances of physical play can be seen as micro-adventures, the small little things in daily life that happen spontaneously and that trigger a playful state. Playfulness resides in the intimate, non-habitual connections that are temporarily established between the body and its surroundings. Play, one could say, is full of apparent contradictions. “It is lighthearted and exuberant, but also serious and intense.” (Gordon & Esbjörn-Hargens, 2007a, p.1) It is spontaneous, but it also involves strategy and planning. It is safe and risky. It is actual and virtual. It requires attachment and detachment. It is easy and it is difficult. It is precisely play because these apparent contradictions can exist beside each other – and they can do so because play (just as dance improvisation) has no material interest, nor a direct goal (Huizinga, 1955). As a result, both play and dance improvisation take place within their own boundaries of time and space.
Even more, in play and dance improvisation participants can practice their skills and broaden their movement repertoire in ways that exceed the daily and habitual in every possible way. With this I mean, that a trained dancer has acquired a set of skills, such as the flying-low technique, that has hardly any (direct) purpose in daily life. The same is true for play: a child can be a very good spitter, or good at stone skipping, brilliant at talking like Donald Duck or excellent at cannonballing (Mouritsen, 1998). In daily life, this is of no importance at all, but in play it is.
For me, this is of the most important things of physical play and dance improvisation, namely to explore possibilities of movements (and skills) that have no direct purpose or function in daily life. First of all, physical play and dance improvisation allow us to expand and break from our habitual movement repertoire. Second of all, in both physical play and dance improvisation, movement is considered as a meaningful experience in and of itself (Sheets-Johnstone, 2003). In both physical play and dance improvisation there is a kinetic urge, an impulse and a necessity to move just for the sake of movement
Playing with Falling Leafs, 18 November 2018, Amsterdam
I am intrigued by the excessiveness of children’s movements (especially in play). It still has fringes and frayed edges as their movements are still a work in progress. Not too polished. Not so refined yet. Daily movements easily merge with the imaginary, and children often can find great joy just by moving and playing around. It is not easy to give words to, but I think that ‘pleasure in the flesh’, ‘sense of aliveness’, and ‘movement as a primary source for delight and joy’ come closest to what I try to grasp. I am indebted to the writings of dance scholar and Professor of Philosophy Maxine Sheets-Johnstone here. Not only because she connects movement/dance to phenomenology but also because she tries to find the roots of our bodily being in the world. Sheets-Johnstone (2015a) considers dance as the continuation of children’s bodily play, both take the kinetic/tactile-kinaesthetic experience as vital for sense-making processes. She states that “movement produces a high, an elevated sense of aliveness, a delight in the kinetic dynamics that is underway” (2003, p.416). Even more, play and dance improvisation require a readiness for surprise, flexibility and an openness to engage with the possibilities that arise in the moment. Both activities “open up corporeal-kinetic possibilities and thereby open up space for innovation, a field in which creative energies can surge” (2003, p.418).
I am aware that I sketch a rather romantic image of (physical) play and dance improvisation. However, play and dance improvisation do not always provide positive, or pleasurable experiences. Both can be demanding, there can be social and artistic pressure and it can potentially be risky (in terms of physical injuries). A power hierarchy might exist that excludes some children or beginners from participation. In the case of children’s play, bullying might occur or social exclusion.
Living Room Dance, 14 November 2018, Amsterdam
My artistic work falls under a growing tradition of female artists that have incorporated motherhood into their artistic practice, ranging from Sally Mann’s project ‘Immediate Family’ (1992) to Grace Surman’s ‘Film with Hope’ (2016) and Sarah Black’s ‘Isabel Shoes’ (2015). Along the way, my own artistic practice has made an important shift from performative work to photography as a main tool to capture the affective/kinetic markers of physical play and dance improvisation. In this artistic research project, I have brought several aspects of my personal and professional life together: art, research, play, dance, motherhood, and childhood. More than anything, this project has been an attempt to intertwine my daily, personal life with the artistic.
As a consequence, the research process itself is it at once intimate yet also distant. I am both an insider and an outsider, and especially in the first phase of the research (the living archive), the artistic practice is a home practice. The personal (being a mother of two children) and professional (being a choreographer and a pedagogue) are deeply intertwined. See, for example, the photographs on this page. The photographs are taken during our summer holiday (in 2017) in France, Lisseuil, in the backyard of our water mill. In the first photograph, we see my son caught in mid-air, the body suspended in the fall, frozen into an eternal falling. The photograph is about movement, fluidity (of being/becoming) and falling. Yet, at the same time, it is a spontaneous gathering of children who are having a good time at the trampoline – and the picture also shows that they are at ease with each other and with me (none of the children is looking directly at the camera, they have forgotten about my presence).
Sea Dance, 24 October 2018, IJmuiden