Creative Articulations Process (CAP), devised by Vida Midgelow and Jane Bacon, is a body-based creative process that invites you to delve deep into your interests and questions whilst exploring new ways to approach and communicate them, giving time and space for you to develop your creative skills in attention, moving and writing.
This workshop is open to all ability levels, even if you have no experience of working with the body but are curious; you may also be an experienced dancer, performance maker, somatic practitioner, artist/researcher, teacher or someone with a spiritual or psychological background, interested in working creatively with and from the body. We invite you to ask what your moving and dancing/being is doing in the world for you and/or for others.
The “facets” (or steps) of CAP cycle and repeat:
Situating: (what I know today about) what brings me here, where I am…
Opening: giving space and time to what is…
Delving: (I wonder) what interests me …
Raising: working to render what I have and/or what I do…
Anatomizing: working to expand/broaden/trial/clarify what calls to me today
Situating: (what I know today about) what comes next…
(and so on…)
This workshop will take place across two weekends, and you can attend both, or just the first one.
20 & 21 January Part 1: Creative Articulations Process, an Introduction
(Can be attended as a stand-alone foundation)
We will introduce the practice, principles and facets of the Creative Articulations Process. The workshop will offer a place and time to hone attentional awareness of experience and enhance your capacities of creativity and articulation. Shifting between moving/being and writing/graphing, we will explore felt sense, somatic and languaging processes to enhance capacities to be fluent in and about our moving and felt experience of ‘human’ being.
3 & 4 February Part 2: Creative Articulations Process, a Deepening
This second weekend will entail delving further into the multifaceted and rhizomatic forms of CAP in relation to your own practice. It might be that surprising new materials, ideas or questions emerge. It might be that you simply allow yourself to come closer to yourself just as you are. The process is iterative and cyclical, bringing to consciousness and into creative being/mattering, that which may have been obscured/hidden.The process will enable you to become more articulate in your current practice and enquiries as well as providing space for you to face and work with stuckness that manifests in your life/research/creativity.
Creative Articulations Process has been developed by Jane Bacon and Vida Midgelow over more than twenty years in the Choreographic Lab and also prior to this as part of their teaching in Higher Education contexts. It was developed as a method for undertaking Practice as Research and is informed by Gendlin’s Focusing, Authentic Movement, Movement Improvisation and Processual and Somatic approaches. Jane and Vida are committed to facilitating work that stays close to the body and seek to bring to consciousness that which might otherwise be hidden or overlooked as physical, emotional, intuitive, and perhaps even ineffable activities. Please see here for more information about CAP including publications and performance work.
Vida Midgelow, PhD, is Professor of Dance and Choreographic Practices and Dean of Doctoral School at University of the Arts, London. Vida lives in Derbyshire and has over 25 years experience facilitating and lecturing in performance. Her work focuses on practice research methods with a particular emphasis upon embodied experience, improvisation and articulating choreographic processes. She is a committed educator and mentor, undertaking dramaturgical, curatorial and consultancy roles for artists and organisations. In addition to her research and movement practices Vida is a Thai yoga bodywork practitioner.
Jane Bacon, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Dance and Somatics at University of Chichester, Jungian Analyst, Focusing trainer, teacher of the Discipline of Authentic Movement and artist/maker. All her work – academic, creative and therapeutic- is deeply informed by her experience of working with Janet Adler, Jung’s work on the inexplicable inter-relationships of mind, body and spirit, Gendlin’s notion of the ‘felt sense’. Over her long career she continues to return to the complexity of articulating our embodied experience.
Authentic Movement
A practice of allowing movement to arise unpremeditated. A mover/s with eyes closed, and in the presence of a witness/es turns attention to their experience without the input from the visual world and waits to notice and then ‘to be moved’ by internal impulses that exist in the present moment following and noticing the subtle movements.
Janet Adler developed her approach (the Discipline of Authentic Movement) which focuses on the invisible, mystical or spiritual power and potential of this practice. Jane is on the faculty of Adler’s training called Circles of Four.
Further Links:
Discipline of Authentic Movement description
What is Authentic Movement
Felt Sense
“A felt sense is an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time–encompasses it and communicates it to you all at once rather than detail by detail.” –Eugene Gendlin
“An emotion is often sharp and clearly felt, and often comes with a handy label by which you can describe it: ‘anger’, ‘fear’, ‘love, and so on. A felt sense, being larger and more complicated, is almost always unclear… and almost never comes with a convenient label…” – Eugene Gendlin
Jungian Analysis
Carl Jung developed his approach to psychotherapy based on the idea that every individual has both conscious and unconscious aspects and that we develop our personalities in certain ways because of the familial, social and educational environment in which we grow up. The result of this is that we can often feel unhappy, too one-sided, unfulfilled, depressed, angry, lonely or have some deep yearning or searching for something more meaningful. Jung believed this is because we have had to adapt as we grew up and sometimes have left behind some vital aspects of our Self/Soul. The key to finding and working with the ‘whole’ of who we might be and become, Jung believed, can be discovered in our dreams. Learning more about ourselves through dream analysis helps to see that our experiences are shared by others and these archetypal patterns help us to see and feel ourselves within a wider world view where we are a part of a past, present and future.