• Friday, October 28th, 9 am London time/10 am Paris time
(the hour might change) during the Autumn of care organized with the LEGS, Université Paris 8/Caroline Ibos

• Campus Condorcet, with the full support of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Paris Nord

Centre des Colloques
Place du Front populaire, 93322 Aubervilliers cedex
Rez-de-chaussée

• Zoom : send us an email at movandcare@gmail.com

• Key speakers: Maurice Hamington (USA, Portland), Alexandra Endaltseva (Russia/Toulouse/EHESS), Christine Leroy (Paris I/Paris 8), Anna Westin (Canada/GB: St Mary’s University), Camille Buttigsrud (Denmark, Copenhague), Louis Klee (Australia/GB : Cambridge), James Rakoczi (GB: London, King’s College), Veronica Cohen (Lisbonne).

Morning: Discussion supervised by Anna Westin

• Speech 1: 10-11 a.m. Paris time:

Maurice Hamington – Professor of Philosophy, Portland University

Caring Bodies in Motion
 
Slowly but steadily, performance philosophy is embracing the moral framework of an ethics of care. Published works on the aesthetics of care are on the rise. The care aesthetic is something that we all can, and have participated in as embodied beings. Caring bodies are in motion, even when the action consists of attentively listening to someone. However, the embodied nature of care remains a vastly undervalued resource in a world that respects the cognitive over the corporeal. Specifically, acknowledging, valuing, reflecting upon, and habituating the body’s role in care can bring about richer care and compassion as well as a more caring society. The radical promise of care ethics can be unlocked by an aesthetic turn that offers much more than adjudicating moral dilemmas as traditional ethical approaches do. Instead, care and its aesthetic describe a way of being and knowing the world with significant moral implications.
 
This presentation begins by offering a performative theory of embodied care. In the spirit of Merleau-Ponty, this theory traverses the mind/body dichotomy to suggest that care is a performance of habits with intertwined corporeal and cognitive elements. It can be described as a performative theory because we are embodied beings who exist as both subject and object—we perform for others and ourselves. Accordingly, the presentation suggests that dance can be a powerful means for inhabiting and expressing care for the audience and the dancers. Iterations of caring actions are captured by our mind/body and dwelled upon. Such performances have the potential to be habituated not just as a rehearsed of movements but also as improvisational skills. Our moral imagination allows such skills to be mapped to new and dynamic circumstances. Few of us will become proficient dancers. However, we all can learn lessons of intimacy, vulnerability, and the recognition of physical cues from dance. These skills can foster our ability to care in rich and meaningful ways.

• Speech 2: 11am-12am Paris time

Camille Buttingsrud – Copenhague – Denmark

Listening to the body

Through the everyday care of their instruments – themselves as bodily subjects – many dancers develop a subtle ability to register and understand bodily signs, feelings, and reactions. This happens not only in themselves but also in their surroundings.

Addressing this form of bodily communication academically seems to open new doors in our understanding of the bodily. Could the knowledge of professional dancers, dance-and body therapists, and dance teachers, be useful in a broader care context? 

This presentation shares the findings of an investigation on bodily listening or registering, bodily communication, and bodily caretaking – found in dancers’ work on affection and body memory during rehearsals, in performance situations, and in therapeutical settings. 

The research is based on qualitative interviews with dancers as well as therapists, on philosophical theories on body memory (Fuchs, Casey, Trakas, Rowlands), on the phenomenological framework on subjective consciousness and the living body (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Zahavi, Colombetti), and on inspirational sources such as theatre theory (Stanislavski, Strasberg), and dance philosophy (Sheets-Johnstone, Foultier, Bresnahan).

https://ku-dk.academia.edu/CamilleButtingsrud

• Speech 3: 12am-1pm Paris time

Veronica Cohen – University of Buenos Aires /University of Lisbon

How to dance an Other 
In this paper, I am interested in understanding how the process of mimesis of an Other is produced through dance practice. I depart from an experience of teaching dance to 12 medical students at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. The practitioners were asked to dance their patients’ emotions. The article describing the workshop (“Observing the World as Dancers Do. Teaching Dance to Medical Students”) emphasizes how this practice had many beneficial effects on understanding their patients and thus improving the healing process. What is not clear in the description of this experience and what I consider has great importance for various fields, i.e. dance, dance applications, phenomenology, is how to dance an Other, which involves the following questions: how is the experience of becoming an Other by dancing?; how does an otherness appear in my body?; how does my “I” as a differentiated and unique individual produce a kind of shift that allows an Other, strange thing to appear?
In the process of mimesis, several problems arise, both philosophical and practical. Firstly, I will address how mimesis queries the Cartesian body/soul dualism. Here, I will set this in relation to “The Purloined Letter”, a Poe short story. Secondly, how is mimesis performed as a copy? This question will confront me with whether there are or not kinesthetic metaphors in these copies. And finally, I will take into account the always creative quality of mimesis to try to answer what, but mainly, how we learn in these situations.  

Afternoon – Discussion supervised by James Rakoczi

• Speech 1: 2pm-3pm Paris time:

Alexandra Endaltseva – Postdoc in socio-anthropology of food, CERTOP, Toulouse (with Anne DUPUY, CERTOP CNRS/ISTHIA, Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès)

Choreographies of good salting: Towards situated ethics of care in food practices

Grounding myself in the empirical data of everyday salting practices, I wonder how the politics and ethics of care work can be retranslated through an eating body – a body in motion for “good eating”, tinkering with fluctuating life rhythms, desires, pleasures, health obligations, and work paces. By empiricizing salt consumption within the context of everyday life, I challenge “medicalised ethics” of eating which feeds public health campaigns for salt reduction (“eat less fat, less sweet, less salty”), and not only. I challenge a universal and moral figure of a good eater – that which follows steadily the promoted healthy eating, who integrates nutritional norms in a consistent manner, without moving away from them in search for food pleasures. Instead, I retrace the choreographies of food work of care performed by eaters – shopping, planning, cleaning, taking care of, creating special occasions, loving, and improvising with what is available. I thus draw an empirical and situated figure of an “eater good enough”, engaged in a continuous oscillating work between care and neglect, in order to eat “as well as it is possible”. I claim this figure to be at the center of a situated ethics of care in food practices, moving through multiple vulnerabilities that food modernity brings around.

• Speech 2: 3pm-4pm Paris time

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.

• Speech 3: Louis Klee – Cambridge – On hospitality (abstract in progress)

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