Friday, January 20th, 9 a.m. London time/10h, heure de Paris
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord, 20, avenue George Sand, 93210 La Plaine Saint-Denis

Christine Leroy (1st speaker) and Marie Mazzella Di Bosco (2nd speaker).

– Christine Leroy – Researcher and teacher in Philosophy/Phenomenology, Paris I and Paris 8 University

Phenomenology, Contact Improvisation, and Clinics: Lived Bodily Boundaries

In this paper, I shall talk about the process and the results of an ongoing Dance-Contact Improvisation clinical experimentation with teenagers suffering from anorexia, through a phenomenological perspective on their lived bodily boundaries. These teenagers often feel neither limited nor defined, overflowing, even in dilatation beyond themselves. The aim of those of Contact Improvisation dance workshops was to evaluate if such an experience of gravity can improve their feeling of being individuated and reduce their disorder in their relationship to both other people and their own body.
After presenting the theoretical fundamentals (phenomenology, psychomotricity) of my investigation, I shall explain the elaboration and implementation process of the workshop research. Finally, I shall analyze the data collected to date, both via psychological questionnaires and (micro)phenomenological interviews.
My aim is to highlight the way in which a phenomenological apprehension of the body experienced in Contact Improvisation as well as its gravity can contribute to clinical research on such psychological pathologies played out on the somatic terrain.

– Marie Mazzella Di Bosco, Researcher in anthropology, University Paris X/Nanterre

What is “healing” in the context of “free-form” and “mindful” movement practices like 5 Rhythms Dance or Movement Medicine? An ethnographical and relational approach.

While they are not officially considered as therapeutic practices, 5 Rhythms Dance, Movement Medicine and other “Free-form mindful dances” are somehow situated by their participants as a way to “heal oneself”, to “heal the connection” to others and to the world at large, to repair past traumas, physical and psychological blockages, to take care of oneself and others. Through collective and improvised danced movement, amateur dancers take pleasure of course, but also harshly “work” on themselves along a path of personal transformation within a collective ambition.

In this presentation, I will focus on the use and representations, within the movement practice, of a specific body part, namely the “belly”, as a condensed example and exercise for thinking, in order to question this pattern of healing and care mobilized by the dancers. What does it mean concretely and what are the processes leading to this experience. The account is grounded on a four years intensive fieldwork within these practices milieu ; my approach is anchored in anthropology, within a participatory, sensory ethnography and a relational perspective.

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