Spahn, Lea

Based on a practice theoretical research design, dance improvisation can be contoured as material-discoursive practice (Schatzki et al. 2001, Reckwitz 2003; Schäfer 2016); With an analysis of the performativity of situated constellations, the scope of analysis also encompasses non-human actors as co-participants. Against this background, individual embodied subjectivities are, firstly, de-centralized, and secondly, the question of creativity becomes one of collectivities. 

The research presented will discuss improvisation from the perspective of social practices with a feminist-materialist reading of embodied experience. Improvisation dance as an aesthetic practice occurs as intercorporeal and intra-corporeal event between habituated bodies and somatic willfulness, as discussed in recent feminist phenomenology (Landweer/Marcinski 2016; Spahn 2020). Combining kinsaesthetic, proprioceptive experience in constellation with other materialities, embodied experience can be observed as a relational and processual phenomenon.

I will discuss this relationality drawing on material from my current reserach project concerning the aging female body as material site of collective performativity. This research relates to Wuttig's soma studies (2016; 2020) in which she refers to bodies as agent matter and junction point of somatic experience and normative orders; it also builds on Grosz' (1994) material feminism with its concept of the Möbius strip which illustrates the inflection of mind and body as entanglement and problematizes dual conceptions of the subject.

Especially the aging female body has been neglegted in regard to its potentialities (Keller/Meuser 2018); as such, creativity is referred to as somatic and performative practice of bodies-in-transformation in material-discoursive collective constellations.

Lea Spahn is a researcher in the field of embodiment theories, (queer) phenomenology, arts education, material feminisms, practice theory and political ecologies. She teaches at Philipps University of Marburg and University of Music and Performing Arts of Frankfurt and is a core team member of the further education master degree „Arts Education at Schools“. With Bettina Wuttig and Joris Gregor she is co-editing the book series Soma Studies (transcript).

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