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ABSTRACT
Dina Robinson
ABOUT
Autobiography
I am a contemporary dance artist who has delved in many aspects of this field including performance, choreography, screendance making, facilitating and research which has led me to study my MA Dance degree at the University of Chester. I was classically trained in ballet, modern jazz and tap before training in Simonson technique, David Zambrano's low flying technique and a variety of Somatic Practice methods such as Skinner Releasing Technique taught by Manny Emslie. It is this body-mind integration and subjective experience which defines my authentic practice reveling in the phenomenology of the sentient being and its relation to the environment. I am particularly interested in using this to augment organic individual moving identity whilst working collaboratively and cohesively.
Area of interest
My practice revolves around the notion of touch as it is considered to harvest life itself through its active and intersubjective processing enabling us to understand ourselves in relation to our surroundings. It is sensed by everyone but each experience is subjective to the individual and therefore used in dance making and performance we can harvest individualism, embodiment, authenticity and experimental play.
Although commonly used in Contact Improvisation my tactile practice works with solo agency and a somatic mode of touch offering only awareness rather than weight transference. My research began with implementing my own tactile framework consisting of imprints, traces and varying dynamics to offer an insight into our cutaneous sense of touch and how this manipulates our dynamics and spatial decisions. The imprint method has now been documented through motion tracking and an ethnographic study to visualize my findings. Expanding on this I worked with self-touch, sonic vibrations and the cyclic processing between objective scores and subjective experience as a choreographic method to induce myself and the spectators into the same tactile phenomenon. This led to the piece 'Touch Between...' to be created.
My mission
"Touch has been taken for granted as [...] a medium for the production of meaningful acts, rather than meaningful in itself" (Classen, 2005), however touch is what defines the body augmenting a sense of self, connections between others and situating ourselves within our surroundings. It is not only receptive but responsive and therefore, for me, is the definition of embodiment, so I ask myself:
"Why, as artists, do we hone in on visual stimuli rather than the one perceiving sense which is experienced by all as a method for acquiring knowledge, social interactions and a way of living?"
This portfolio of research and findings will attempt to alter this perception and open up a whole sensory field of touch we have perhaps never experienced before, or at least as a creative methodology. I hope it will expand the potential of touch within ourselves, the environment and between one another by serving as a virtual collective hub where we can be in touch as well as touching.
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