Output details

Footwork: Pedestrian Feelings in Performance (2011-13)

Research Project Description

This project uses performance as an investigative paradigm to examine Daniel Heller Roazen’s proposition that thought and touch are correlative aspects of an animate human consciousness. Concerns for touch are often addressed to or by the hand. However, this manual predominance masks the extent to which other tactilities make the world tangible, providing the ‘ground’ for knowledge about it. Footwork considers touch between foot and floor as the basis for an embodied sense by which practitioners ‘ground’ their work, but also, in various modes of ‘walk-through’, as the mnemonic basis for ‘re-feeling’ it. Having outlined the area of investigation in a scholarly article, the research refracts a range of scholarly perspectives on touch and pedestrian practices through a performative enquiry – Footage – generating findings in the form of a further scholarly article, a short film and a performance.

Research Imperatives

To develop interrelated performative and critical engagements with pedestrian touch.

To performatively and critically examine embodied bases of ‘groundedness’.

To use the specificity of pedestrian touch to engage theatre and performance studies with wider critical debates in sensory studies.

Peer Assessment/Quality Indicators

Seed-fund of £2,400 awarded by London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange.

Professional research and development workshop series with choreographer Claire Whistler and performers from the Dancers in Landscape collective at Bunce’s Barn, East Sussex (http://dancersinlandscape.blogspot.co.uk/).

Research Outputs

‘Getting Things Off the Ground: Pedestrian Feelings’, Performance Research: On Foot, 17.2 (2012), pp.12-17.

Footage – performance with Clare Whistler in Battersea Arts Centre/BAC’s Freshly Scratched season, 8 July 2013.

Footage – online short film launched November 2013 (http://vimeo.com/greenandpleasantfootage).

‘Footage: Surface Feelings’ in Nicola Shaughnessy (ed.), Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being (London: Methuen, 2013), pp.159-170.