Personal Text Public Body
“Allegranti calls us to pay attention to how the practices and discourses of dance movement psychotherapy, performance, film, narrative and feminist philosophy speak with each other; and implicitly she invites us to participate in this conversation ourselves. We cannot help but accept.”
Jonathan Wyatt, Professor of Qualitative Inquiry, Univeristy of Edinburgh.
Personal Text, Public Body was a three-year choreographic lab supported by Arts Council England and part of Beatrice Allegranti’s funded doctorate (UoR).
Through the use of improvisational dance, audio recorded interviews and discussions, the Lab vignettes explore a range of feminist themes such as the nature of boundaries, the links between private and public performance, the extent to which all social action is ‘performance,’ the way emotions are embodied, the embodied tensions between nature and culture, and the bodily expression of the self(s). Film vignettes are incorporated into Allegranti’s book Embodied Performances (2011).
DVD Production: 36 short film episodes
Artistic Direction: Beatrice Allegranti
Performers: Geoffery Unkovich, Jinji Garland, Silvia Carderelli-Gronau, Dominique Bulgin, Vaughan Titheridge, Tracey French, Valeria Sacchi, Matthew Trustman, Nigel Stewart.
Funding: Arts Council England, TVR Roehampton, Roehampton University, Nest Films.
Touring Screenings & Live Performance Installations: Performance as Research in Practice (PARIP), Bretton Hall; The Lounge Gallery, London (4 nights); Dance Diary Roehampton; International Dance on Screen Film Festival, Riverside Studios London; Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Porto, Portugal; Arts in Mental Health, Wanchai Cultural Centre, Hong Kong. There have also been screenings at various conferences including Kinesthetic Empathy – international conference organised by The Watching Dance Project