With Janice Parker
How can we reclaim the movement that is rightfully ours? – a small act of protest and resistance.
Dance artist Janice Parker’s current practice is focused on finding ways of giving back to people, the movement that is rightfully theirs. By this she means the natural expressive language of the body, and each person’s innate capacity to connect to, know and own this for themselves. So much of movement practice is commodified and commercialised and seems to belong to the marketplace more than the person. It is time for us to reclaim that and make it our own.
This unfolding enquiry involved a series of outdoor movement workshops for ordinary human bodies, time spent exploring relevant written and visual materials and connected themes, and also responding to the needs that arose due to the pandemic.
Listen to four performance artists at different stages, in conversation about loss of connection to our innate capacity for moving and for movement; on who can dance where, and who is allowed to; on whose movement we value and on what might be holding us back from moving fully and freely in the full volume of our bodies in our public, civic and our private spaces; and how might we regain some of that as a quiet act of resistance.
With Bishop Down, Gudrun Schmidinger, Tabitha Dearie and Janice Parker
Producer and Editor, Amanda Aitken
We met almost weekly on-line over the summer months sometimes two of us, sometimes all four, depending who was available when and what else was going on in our lives. The process was open, fluid and responsive, each of us bringing questions, thoughts and reflections both from personal experience and from other social and political perspectives. The podcasts are the result of these conversations, recorded over a morning and pulling together some of the key thoughts that surfaced and resonated for us all.
I am heartened by these voices and perspectives, and about how much the body and its movement matters. Enjoy your listen and I hope that as a result you feel more connected to what has been lost and to claiming your own potential for moving and movement in whatever way is right for you – Janice Parker
Janice Parker is an award-winning independent dance artist and choreographer. In the past 40 years she has created a vast body of work. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, working locally and internationally, her primary passions are threefold: to develop and strengthen each person’s natural movement potential; to create art that deepens the possibilities of our feeling, thinking and imagination; and to create personal, social and cultural change. All art has the potential to be an act of quiet, or noisy, activism.