Movement Research is an organisation based in New York, they run workshops, classes and Laboratories on Movement and Dance as well as residencys and performance opportunities. The development of M.R. was closely linked to the development of the Judson dance Theatre and the performances that went on there. M.R. currently organise the performance evenings at the Judson Church. I visited two of the free monday performances which present works in progress by a range of emerging dance artists.
Each week I took part in KJ Holmes M.R. class a Gibney Dance called Body Mind Image. As a somatic practice the classes were aimed at personal physical inquiries around your bodies structure.
“Classes will explore image work of Ideokinesis (Andre Bernard), The Thinking Body (Mabel Todd), Body-Mind Centering® (Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen) through movement improvisations, meditations, tracings and readings of philosophical/somatic/poetic writings to render qualities, textures, thought processes, movement analysis applicable to creative expression, performance, and healing modalities.”
These classes were great and the returning to each one aided my understanding for different forms of using the body as a research tool. Each session focused on a single body part; The foot, The spine, The sacrum and the head. Using the Body Mind centering principle of Isolate to integrate, we worked as a group and individually to explore the possibilities and consequences of moving the specific body parts. Through explorations to then diagram studies K.J. emphasised how this explores research on macro and micro levels, the movement studies allow us to come at the anatomy with experience to contrast with and after a fuller image of these body parts and what they do. Below are some images taken from scoring my experiences of working with each part and the anatomical studies.
