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Helsinki, Finland
Extended Mind Practices: Dance as Research
11-15th December 2017

photo : Jamus Wood

presented by UniArts, Helsinki:

“What if it’s not the mind that lives in the body but the body that lives in the mind?”

In the discourse of philosophy of mind there is renewed interest in hypotheses that consider consciousness as a fundamental property of our universe. This is in large part a response to the ongoing failure of neuroscientific research to solve the “hard problem” of what consciousness is and how it works.

These approaches, though diverse, can be subsumed under the term panpsychism from which it follows that everything is both interconnected and to some degree sentient.

Since consciousness is central to somatics, I am curious what implications working within this paradigm might have in the field of somatically oriented dance and art making practices?

My intuition is that such a paradigm shift in reformulating the relationship of mind to body might open up post-somatic practices where the body is not experienced from the inside but rather as a physical presence situated within a larger field of mind. And perhaps where connectedness assumes more importance than individuality.

In this workshop I offer a number of dance and movement practices that I have been collecting and synthesising, devising and revising over the past few years. The intention is to examine how the felt sense changes when we reformulate the mind-body relationship. This could be especially interesting for anyone engaging with post-humanist and perspectivist theories in their artistic practices.

There are limited places available for guests – for more info and how to apply visit the Uniarts Open University web site

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