I recorded this soundfile for showing and sharing my research on walking and embodiment, coming from the field of choreography.
I decided to record something that did not enter my PhD, but affected me deeply in the process.
I wondered how to add such a story in research contexts, and also ask other researchers from other artistic fields if they would experience something as well. I also wondered how to not skip the things that affect us deeply and declare them of no importance.
As I did share my story with peers and researchers, I received such deep, emotional reflections on social class, and even more stories about how institutional buildings create such vulnerable emotions.
British Library, a space for knowledge appreciation, could also become a space for exclusion and confusion. Through my voice narrative and our movements together, we will experience something that surprised and shook me at the British library. I invite you to walk with me (in our imagination) to the British library. When there, I invite you to explore the micro-movements happening in your chest, and how and what we experience when we search for the smallest movements. Socioeconomic issues are inherited through embodiment and memory. The experience showed that I or we cannot fully grasp how space, buildings and untold stories affects us. However, through my work as choreographer, I was able to interpret and share the experience I had at the British library. In my presentation I offer space for your own experiential interpretation.
The micro-movement in my grandmother’s chest – the tiny gestures of oppression
CC-BY-NC: Ami Skånberg
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Credits
Ami Skånberg, PhD in Dance from University of Roehampton, UK, is a performer, choreographer, filmmaker and teacher. She is a Doctor of slow walking. She walks slowly as a ceremonial, subversive act thanks to her studies with Nishikawa Senrei and work with Japanese dance in Kyoto since 2000. Her research interests are practice-led and concern gender codified movement practice, non-hierarchical processing of global dance techniques, and auto-ethnographic accounts from within the practice. She is the current Head of the Master’s programme in Dance Education at the Stockholm University of the Arts, and also works at Academy of Music and Drama at University of Gothenburg. Ami has co-chaired the Nordic Summer University Study Circle of Artistic Research with Dr Lucy Lyons. Ami often creates stage work and video (solo, and collaborative) based on her embodied life story in a particular theme. Her 90 min solo performance A particular act of survival received a performing arts award at Scenkonstgalan in Sweden in 2015.