What More Do Bodies Know? Moving with the Gendered Affects of Place

Abstract

This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. We started with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gender body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time become actualised in girls’ habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos are presented: room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and the dance of the not-yet. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place, and the virtual potential of movement.