Abstract:
Tensegric embodiment seeks to understand how the somatic awareness of myofascia shapes our experience of and through the world. What kind of embodiment can be experienced through directing our attention to myofascia? The design principle of tensegrity, based on the elements tension and integrity, becomes the model for the fascial body-web or system and situates the material thinking of somatic-critical research in a framework of relationalities and interdependencies within us and around us. It speaks from a place of somatically informed dance practice and unfolds myofascia as a choreographic and relational resource. Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism, this inquiry argues for the validity of subjective, localised knowledge through the sensate in movement and touch: Somatic movement, as directed, situational, intentional embodiment, is a form of relational cognisance based on explorative movement and touch. Through somatic methodology, I inquire how the structure of fascia as connective tissue is being reflected in its function as the fabric of relationship. Adopting a tensegrity-based understanding of physical structure changes how we think of the body in relation to gravity, and provides a useful model to look at relationalities within the body. This practice-led research interweaves individual movement explorations and eleven meetings with a study group of dancers exploring topics such as liquid crystal, myofascia’s modulation of tone, fascia and environment, otherness and multiplicities, the inhuman, push and pull, and pain, among others. Based on improvisational dance scores, it leads to the participatory, site-responsive chôrography titled the matter of fascia at Lake Rototoa (South Head) in Aotearoa/New Zealand, in a process of tensegric chôrographic thinking. Being a chôrography, this inquiry draws on chôra, a thinking of place as “a wetnurse of becoming”, tracing back to Plato. Chôrographing seeks knowledge through a place/ region; in this case both myofascia and Lake Rototoa, emerging as the matter of fascia. The method understands somatic creation as chôrographing from a relational place within, not one of choreographing. In a reflective, poetic triangulation of Barad’s agential realism with Timothy Morton’s queer ecology as mirrored through the systemic aspect of tensegrity, this inquiry argues how the somatic-critical research on myofascia supports an eco-somatic, queer vie queer view of fascia as tensegric habitat, on how to continuously become and be on this earth.