Embodied Reflection in Artistic Practice
I perform, I resonate, I move, I reflect - the potential of this doing is entangled with (often inaudible) words, with tangible sounds, visual imaginations, and bodily gestures.
The third RAPP Lab at the Hochschule for Music and Dance Cologne focused on the tacit dimensions of the sensorial-emotional and social knowledge of and in artistic practice, research, and education – in try-outs, in workshops, in interdisciplinary and dialogical sessions, in discussions. In this variety of setups, the Lab explored how we as performing artists can approach, experience, and analyse music and dance making from perspectives of embodied reflection. In the context of the six different methodological perspectives the whole RAPP Lab project gives on the topic of “reflection”, the Cologne Lab puts the bodily apparatus in the centre of its interest.
One aim was to share and discuss methods and practices that may contribute to a deeper understanding of reflexivity in artistic doing as a holistic phenomenon that always departs from states of moving, hearing, sensing, mobilizing the known as well as the unknown. One of our guiding principles was the attempt to avoid easy separations between sound, movement and language, intellect, and body as much as possible - while being aware how deeply ingrained such polarising structures still are in Western economies of knowledge, art and education.
Based on the specific profile of the HfMT Cologne, in which music and dance programs work in practice and research side by side and in collaboration, the Cologne RAPP Lab was able to provide a diversity of frames to playfully experiment with the question: how do sound and movement open research perspectives for one another? In other words, how can we re-work habitual techniques through each other’s methods and make the familiar unfamiliar again? Or what does it mean to explore rituals such as stepping on stage as a mechanism to pose questions about non-binary takes on what has traditionally been addressed as the ‚mind-body-split‘?
The third Lab was dedicated to the probing and exchanging of methods in which the various dimensions of embodied reflection in artistic practices in music and dance are encouraged and stimulated.