Academic Research

Movement Matters – a Seed Research project 2023

Movement matters: moving together in the first 1001 days of life’ (2022) is a seed academic research project by a collective of alumni community dance artists and existing BA students from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in association with THRIVE (a UCLan research centre), Dance Consortia North West and the Creative Practice Research Academy.

We put together what we hope will be a helpful short resource guide for community artists collaborating with higher education institutions and research centres. You can learn more about the project and download the Top Tips document here.

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University of Central Lancashire

MA Dance & Somatic Well-being: Connections to the living body

Searching for Soul in a Time of Loss: Dancing Myself Home

Abstract

This paper is a personal narrative inquiry through the use of somatic movement and art-based practices as a means to explore my own personal loss of a parent and a re-discovering of soul through an awakened emergent sense of the divine. This exploration of embodied grief looks at what emerged into consciousness through image, metaphor, and movement. Influenced by Heuristic research, with a subjective, phenomenological perspective. By embracing the transpersonal and transformative, my living, enspirited body reveals to me a truth of myself connected to the great mysteries of the universe, opening to direct embodied experience of the sacred.‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious’ (Jung 1954: 265).

Please enquire to read the paper in full.

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