Contact improvisation as a foundational learning tool for contemporary performers : singular complexity

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This artistic research dissertation employs the principles and practices of contactimprovisation in a literary performative to describe and demonstrate this somatic form'spotential as a complex system of embodied knowing. For strategic and thematic purposes,chapters in this dissertation are referred to as Streams.The First Stream motivates the methodological approaches and emergent strategiesemployed in the researcher's simultaneous practices of teaching, researching and writingabout contact improvisation.The Second Stream is offered as an oral testimony of the researcher's attempt to findpractical solutions for the increasing complexity apparent in her work environment during thelast two decades. It is written primarily as a first-person narrative with references by othersomatic and contact improvisation practitioners embedded in the body of the narrative andpresented as personal subconscious/collective unconscious interjections.The Third Stream uses a locally-emergent artistic research strategy termed SecondaryPrimacy to critically and creatively engage with existing literature. The observations oftheorists and practitioners from the researcher's own context (theatre and drama), as well asfrom a diversity of interrelated disciplines (including psychology, sociology, evolutionarybiology, quantum physics, pedagogy and visual art) are presented in an autonomous authorialvoice employing the performative strategy of what if. This strategy serves to demonstrate theresearcher's experience of the link between personal subconscious and collectiveunconscious motivations for action and exposes the transdisciplinary ground upon whichmany of the ideas and observations voiced in other Streams, in particular about contactimprovisation as a complex system of embodied knowing, are implicitly dependent.The Fourth Stream discusses contact improvisation as a complex system foregroundingthe particular characteristics of nonlinearity, paradox, emergence and additional capacityintroduced in the Second and Third Streams.The Fifth Stream demonstrates convergences and overlaps between contemporarytheories about agency, embodiment and transformation as they may apply to educators intertiary educational performing arts contexts. This discussion is interspersed with accounts ofthe researcher's own attempts – through her performing arts educational practice - tounderstand agency and transformation as workable elements.The Sixth Stream is offered as a personal philosophy of action. The implicit values andstrategies of the researcher that were exposed in previous Streams are here distilled andpresented as affirmations and Actions motivating the sustained use, by the researcher withinher localized educational context, of contact improvisation as a foundational somaticapproach for performers.In keeping with the positioning of this dissertation as artistic research, the literary framingdevices of a Foreword and Afterword are used to draw a reader's attention to the practicebasednature of the subject under discussion.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University