Dancing Place

The book explore how dance practices can be embodied through relationships with the environment. The book begins with discussing somatic experiences of being in place; including discussing a sense of belonging to the environment through responsive movement. The second part offers infrastructures (scores) for generative movement drawn from transdisciplinary workshops. The book presents text, poetic prose and image. Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore reveals the collaborative choreographic making process as a way of being in the world. In the book the authors story their experiences of working with scores as ways of noticing, sensing and bringing focus to moments within the assemblage of environments of which we are a part.

Dancing as dialogue: a study of movement and place that explores the fundamental entanglement of humans and the environment through dance. Dancing Place intertwines dance ethnography, Black feminism, and a new materialist lens, using movement scores as methods and tools for a practice of eco-somatic, place-based artmaking. These scores manifest as embodied dance methods, guiding a reflective engagement with and in the environment and offering a framework for understanding how movement both emerges from and shapes the places we inhabit. Adesola Akinleye and Helen Kindred invite readers into choreographic processes that explore somatic awareness, offering movement scores as a reference for sensing and belonging within the world around us. The book blends text, poetic prose, and story-telling as well as a collection of generative scores drawn from transdisciplinary workshops to critically assess how dance emerges through deep engagement with place. A necessary resource for dance practitioners, spatial planners, ecologists, and environmental scholars, Dancing Place opens new ways of understanding dance as a method of reciprocity and deep relational practice.