Dancing Place

Dancing as dialogue: a study of movement and place that explores the fundamental entanglement of humans and the environment through dance.

Dancing Place intertwines dance ethnography, Black feminism, and a new materialist lens, using movement scores as methods and tools for a practice of eco-somatic, place-based artmaking. These scores manifest as embodied dance methods, guiding a reflective engagement with and in the environment and offering a framework for understanding how movement both emerges from and shapes the places we inhabit.

Adesola Akinleye and Helen Kindred invite readers into choreographic processes that explore somatic awareness, offering movement scores as a reference for sensing and belonging within the world around us. The book blends text, poetic prose, and story-telling as well as a collection of generative scores drawn from transdisciplinary workshops to critically assess how dance emerges through deep engagement with place.

A necessary resource for dance practitioners, spatial planners, ecologists, and environmental scholars, Dancing Place opens new ways of understanding dance as a method of reciprocity and deep relational practice.

Author Biography

Dr Adesola Akinleye is a choreographer and artist-scholar and co-artistic director of DancingStrong Movement Lab. Adesola has created dance works ranging from live performance that is often site-specific and involves a cross-section of the community, to dance films, installations, and scholarly texts.

Dr Helen Kindred is a choreographer and dance artist-scholar, and co-artistic director of DancingStrong Movement Lab. Helen creates dance works that centre around somatic-based improvisation practices in performance in relationships with site, text, people, and environments.