Queering the Somatic: Interrupting the Narrative - One Month away!

Friday Nov 1st & Saturday Nov  2nd  (at Middlesex University, Hendon London UK)

Helen and I are curating the Symposium 'Queering the Somatic: interrupting the narrative.' 

There will be workshops and discussion, some MAPP and BAPP alumni will be presenting work - come along and support them if you are near London (or make a trip to attend). 

Queering the Somatic: Interrupting the Narrative Symposium 1^st and 2^ndNovember 2019. Dance can be seen as a critical way of being in the world. For us dance emphasises the felt over the ‘named’, dispelling binaries and challenging Western constructs of the passive body. Queer theory is a field of critical thinking emerging in the early 1990’s drawing on feminism and queer studies to challenge social constructs and identities. Moving beyond the social constructs of the body both dance and queer theory offer a fluidity for narrating the lived experience; narrations that interrupt dominant stories of identity and how we move through the world.

Queering the somatic offers opportunities to explore, challenge and celebrate the act of dispelling binaries: mind-body, male-female, subject-object. 

The symposium is looking for contributions that might re-imagine, re-educate, re-think, reveal and allow us to re-create a world without the limits of binaries that reflect the somatic experience of Being in the world. 

Queering the Somaticis the third somatic symposium curated by Dr Adesola Akinleye and Helen Kindred, following Wright-ing the Somatic(2016), 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sh_fNd_jys&t=17s

and Narrating the Somatic(2018),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e1md6ejfK0

We hope; ‘Let’s imagine together we have all the money in the world and let’s let go of black and white, gay and straight, theory and practice and that all the gatekeepers have flung the doors open. Let’s focus on the arts, the practice and sharing. Understanding the world for a moment through someone else’s eyes’ (Akinleye, A. 2018)