Daria M. SEDOVA Independent researcher
e-mail: sedova_daria@inbox.ru
ORCID: 0000-0003-1716-4805
Mary Starks Whitehouse’s Experience in Forming the Practice of Authentic MovementAbstract: Authentic movement is a self-sufficient practice, a thing-in-itself. It’s not therapeutic, not somatic, not psychologic. The practice opens up space for exploration and integration of the various levels of the movement process. It doesn’t provide for the memorization and repeated reproduction of movement material. Movement sessions, direct experience and its realization is the essence of practice, which develops and separates into schools and particular branches.
Authentic movement originated in the 1950s in the USA from movement initiated by Mary Starks Whitehouse, a modern dancer and teacher, and was labelled «movement-in-depth». For more than 70 years of existence, the basic ideas were deepened and further developed by representatives of the first generation of students. Over the past few decades, the authentic movement was spread through the practice formats introduced by Janet Adler, one of Whitehouse’s students. The structure is simple: mover in the presence of witness closes the eyes not knowing what will happen next, what experience will arise; witness doesn’t know this either and is ready to welcome without evaluation and interpretation anything that will happen during a movement session.
The article explores the foundations laid by Whitehouse, the history of the practice; analyzes her personal publications, as well as her contemporaries’ and her followers’ publications – about the principles, the role of the teacher, the influence on the body formation of mover and becoming of inner witness.
The result is the thesis that authentic movement as a regular practice of connecting one’s mind and body, of experiencing inherent history, contributes to the formation of a unique movement vocabulary, the deepening of consciousness and awareness, the development of organicity and versatility of the bodily vocabulary and bodily reality of a dance-artist, therefore may be used as a method of searching for and reflection on the material while creating a dance performance.
Key words: active imagination, authentic movement, «movement-in-depth», improvisation, kinesthetic awareness, performance, dance, body, physicality, choreography.
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For Citation: Sedova,D. (2022) Mary Starks Whitehouse’s Experience in Forming the Practice of Authentic Movement. International Journal of Cultural Research, 4 (49). 22–34. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2022_4_22
DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2022_4_20