Embodying concepts: moving thought, spatializing process
Doing Things With Theory is a project inviting groups of University students from different discipline backgrounds to reflect, act and move together in an intensive workshop facilitated by an artist-researcher. The first workshop brings together students from the Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies of the University of Vienna (in collaboration with Freda Fiala & Adam Czirak) and MUK – Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (in collaboration with Esther Balfe and Nikolaus Selimov). The workshop will be facilitated by researcher, artist and educator Alexandra Baybutt.
This workshop aims to expand each student’s sense of what constitutes embodiment and how this is deployed. Through facilitating two groups of students to learn from each other and reflect upon their own skills and interests, creative somatic movement tasks will focus on a specific thematic each day: body, self, other; adapting; situating; spatializing; sharing. Drawing from embodied research methods in the wake of researcher-practitioner Ben Spatz, references will also be made to social research methods, choreographic scores and the participant-observer techniques that characterise Anthropology. Texts will be worked with as a catalyst for question and research-formation, developing individual and collaborative processes, and as references beyond the frame of the workshop, to continue their propositions into the future.
works as a movement educator, researcher and artist. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London in the Institute of Advanced studies. She studied contemporary dance at Laban, London, and performance and culture at Goldsmiths. In 2020, she completed her PhD at Middlesex University on the imperceptible politics of contemporary dance festival curatorial praxis in the former Yugoslav space, supported by ERASMUS+, and involving 18 months of fieldwork across various countries, most extensively in Serbia and Slovenia. As a registered somatic movement educator and a practitioner of the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System since 2010 she has taught on movement analysis programmes internationally, as well as teaching somatic movement, improvisation and choreography to actors, musicians and dancers in professional training and Higher Education contexts, and in private practice in the UK. Dramaturgical work includes for choreographer Tania Soubry, and for Maya Felixbrodt/Moving Strings.