Creative articulations process: a rhizomatic practice

The ‘Creative Articulations Process’ (CAP) is a methodology that offers ways of coming into knowing about and through one’s own dance practice. The research arises from Midgelow and Bacon’s long-term collaboration (see: www.choreographiclab.co.uk) and offers a new methodology for Practice-as-Research which has been taken up internationally within arts and university contexts, particularly, but not exclusively, in relation to dance and somatically informed practice/research. The research was initiated by the researcher's experiences of working with artists struggling to make available to themselves and to others the often tacit knowings of practice. It draws insights from somatic and creative practices of Janet Adler, Anna Halprin and Liz Lerman alongside the work of Eugene Gendlin and Antonio Damasio. It aims to offer a fluid yet systematic process to enhance connectivity between interior/exterior, implicit/ explicit knowings. To do this the research has sought to address how movement and ‘languaging’ can be brought into closer proximity and how, through a focus upon different modalities of attention, creative experiences and processes can be better understood. The practice research has given rise to six facets – ‘Opening’, ‘Situating’, ‘Delving’, ‘Raising’, ‘Anatomizing’ and ‘Outwarding’, as articulated in 2014 (translated into Portuguese 2015 and Spanish 2017). Following further work with dance artists, the practice has been extended to enhance the capacities of artists through the formation of three intersecting practices: ‘preparations’, ‘ground form’, and ‘extended form’. The research has been shared internationally in video, journal, lecture and workshop forms. This submission comprises of two outputs – a video documentary (2020) and an article (2014). It further includes contextual material from selected workshop intensives: UNICAMP (Brazil), Unicen (Argentina), Dance4, International Centre for Choreography (Nottingham, UK), University of Taipei (Taiwan) and Weld dance house (Stockholm).