Rhythms of Connection: A call for feeling in Anthropology

by Stephanie L. Ellison

(former) Erasmus Master Programme “Choreomundus”

stephanie.ellison(@gmail.com)

Anthways, 2024 © Stephanie L. Ellison

Introduction

Movement, not pondering, brings new knowledge.

Bartinieff, 1980

This article explores a ‘reworlding’ in anthropology through a lens of rhythm and embodied wisdom, advocating for a shift in academic practices that embrace the body’s role in acquiring, interpreting, and affecting knowledge. Rhythm is here defined as our innate, multi-modal way of perceiving and interpreting the sensory stimuli of the world around us into meaningful information, establishing connections and relationships. In tuning into an awareness of rhythms through embodied practices, this is a call for doing in relationship with, embracing a physical approach to our understanding of human culture—an approach radical in its simplicity of engaging the body to illuminate fundamental connections with ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human. Such an approach offers a fresh perspective into human relationships and suggests that anthropology can lead academic innovation by integrating more physical and sensory-engaged learning into its curricula, fostering self-discovery and purposeful exchange by turning attention to the wisdom of what the world has to tell us. (Ingold 2013:1). 

Drawing on environmental ritual and dance fieldwork in Southern England, I illustrate how greater sensory awareness and embodied presence through processes such as ‘grounding’ and ‘staying open’ offer opportunities for meaningful connections in the field and other settings. With current research exploring embodiment frameworks for learning based on this concept of rhythm, the goal is to promote new pathways to knowledge, enhancing collaboration and communication within academia and beyond. Such practices, beneficial for researchers at all institutional levels, hasten a radical embrace of interdisciplinary approaches to meet a rapidly changing world with greater empathy and resilience, where feeling—not emotions per se but sensorial feeling—and the rhythmic patterns and narratives those sensory perceptions produce are as integral to anthropological understanding as traditional methods of direct observation and analytic discourse. As Donna Haraway says, “Reworlding requires the ability to engage with the world through sensory and material practices,” directly highlighting this need for an embodied approach (Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival, 2016) where in the deepest of truths “Knowledge ‘is always an engaged material practice and never a disembodied set of ideas” (Haraway 2004b: 199–200, Haraway’s emphasis).

Understanding Rhythm

When asking for a definition of ‘rhythm’, the response is usually related to music and tempo, heard with our ears. Music powerfully encapsulates our understanding of rhythm, but there is much more to it beyond listening. In a recent lecture, Susan Magsamen of the John Hopkins Mind Arts Lab notes that humans possess way more than just five senses, closer to fifty (Magsamen, 2024). Music is not just an auditory experience but is multi-modal and includes, at the very least, our vestibular and tactile senses (Judge, 2019: 89). In short, we feel rhythm. Expanding beyond its musical relationship, one might begin to recognise rhythms across different forms, feeling them through various senses (Cheyne, 2019), from the strokes and colour in Van Gogh’s paintings to the rhythms of the smells and feels of an autumnal walk.

It is understood that humans process about 11 million pieces of sensory information per second while consciously only processing 40 to 50 bits per second (Wiliam, 2006). Considering this, rhythm could be associated with the perceived objective patterns (Cheyne, 2019: 265) of information consciously collected through our senses. In this way, rhythmic patterning may allow us to find meaning in the most pertinent, conscious information, recognising narratives, relationships, and affordances for existence. 

Rhythm is our heartbeat, our breath, our friend’s walk from far away, how we sleep, the languages that we speak, how we interact with co-workers and loved ones, the cities that we come from and the places we live now, our roads and signs, our meals, in the rising and setting of the sun, our seasons, topographies, local flora and fauna, our governments, our art, and the stories that we tell. Consider that a baby often learns to bounce and sync to musical rhythms or with others before they can walk, and current research points to the critical engagement with rhythm even earlier, in preterm babies and while in the womb (Provasi et al., 2021). Everything is rhythm, and connecting with such patterns appears critical for survival. Rhythmic patterns underlie everything and shape the perceptions of human relationships within ourselves, each other, and the greater world.

To further highlight rhythm’s depths in human culture, American philosopher Susan Langer defines rhythm not as binary, interval beats expressed in a two-dimensional sine wave, but as concatenations or groupings of elements (Langer, 1967:323). “The main source of all functional continuity must have been the establishment of rhythms. Rhythmic concatenation is what really holds an organism together from moment to moment” (1967:323). Langer also notes that rhythms are made up of endless groupings of both smaller and larger rhythms. (1967: 323) For example, a single person possesses countless small rhythms, including breath, heartbeat, and blood flow, and larger rhythms of a family, community, city, and culture. Langer also notes that although rhythmic repetition is perceived, it is not exact in its moment-to-moment replication (323). Like two snowflakes, a rhythmic pattern might contain no points of exact repetition; however, perceiving greater patterning might be necessary for our life on Earth. Rhythm is more dimensional, complicated, and pervasive than we might initially think, and even more difficult to define (Tenzer, 2019: 213). 

Rhythmic attention as a method

Thus far, rhythm is understood as perceived patterns derived from groupings of sensory stimuli that foster human relationships and affordances. This brief conceptualisation could extend broadly within anthropology, offering multiple avenues for inquiries. Henri Lefebvre, in his ‘Rhythmanalysis,’ posited rhythm as a method for understanding the patterns that characterise the flows of time and spaces we inhabit. Similarly, Michael Tenzer suggests an anthropological approach to human interactions and relations through rhythm that “considers human rhythmic production in its interaction with social order, the environment, natural order, and the capacities of the body and consciousness to synchronise and unite people through rhythm” (Tenzer, 2019: 201). Additionally, rhythms might be observed in the embodied features of mimetic ritual processes, such as movements, gestures, and postures, along with utterances like sentences, words, and sounds (Bell, 2021: 396).

Despite various applications, this article focuses on tuning the rhythmic attention of the researcher through embodiment. In parallel, Tim Ingold emphasises that observation requires more than just looking; it involves an attention formed through both ‘exposure and attunement’ that joins with subjects in mutual exchange, guiding each other’s attention in a practice he describes as one of ‘correspondence and care’ (Ingold, 2023). He argues that acquiring wisdom entails turning towards the world itself to attend to and learn what it has to teach us rather than merely acquiring knowledge (2023). Building on Ingold’s ideas, this essay expands into a few practical ways by which anthropologists can deepen their embodied awareness, enriching their perceptual engagement in relationship with.

Using rhythm as a structural lens in anthropology foregrounds the body and the senses as the foundational elements of inquiry. If rhythms encompass all human activities, then an embodied inquiry must be a starting point for the researcher. As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone states, “The body is not often recognised as being conceptually alive, as already being attuned in fundamental and essential ways to the world and of its own corporeal-kinetic realities” (Johnstone, Corporeal Turn, 2009: 224-225). Johnstone, too, underscores a need for rewording anthropology, advising that “we would do well to pay attention to movement and to probe nature’s dynamic strategies through experiential and experimental methodologies” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 334). 

We all have inherent capacities for being ourselves in our bodies. However, training one’s instrument for the situation at hand is critical. Nicholai Bernstein called this “tuning to the emergent task”, and notes’ the essence of dexterity lies not in bodily movements themselves but in the ‘tuning of the movements to an emergent task’, whose surrounding conditions are never precisely the same from one moment to the next (Bernstein 1996: 23, original emphasis). For researchers, whose bodies are the tool of relations in the field, training and exploring the body and sensory awareness opens possibilities for new knowledge, flexibility, resilience, and empathy in their work. Training a rhythmic perspective in anthropology facilitates a dynamic exploration of how the researcher’s embodied wisdom attunes to other humans, their environments, and broader systems with which they interact and co-evolve. 

The following sections provide a glimpse into this methodology through personal rhythms, embodiment practices, and exchanges during fieldwork. Beyond this, there is a brief consideration of embodiment challenges in discourse. It is worth noting that sensory and embodiment practices are deceptively simple to state but profound in practice. 

My Rhythms

When you change the body of somebody, the concrete body of somebody, you change his or her way of perceiving the space.

McHose, 2003, p.34

Hubert Godard’s quote encapsulates my long-held fascination with how bodily experiences establish and shift perceptions, physically changing us — a phenomenon I have witnessed and experienced firsthand. As a Pilates and movement teacher for decades, I have worked with people to move more efficiently and rehabilitate injuries. Pain is the sensation that most tunes us into our interoceptive sense — the internal feeling world. As with any skill, after years of practice, I could perceive structural patterns and stories in the body — a pain in the left shoulder might be related to an injury in the right knee, or a person’s neck or shoulder tension could be more directly linked to an accident from twenty ago than to their desk posture today. Bodies are whole, complex, and fluid, with layers of possibilities. I cannot ‘fix’ someone’s body, but I can perceive certain rhythms, and together, we can collaborate on reorganising their patterns of space and movement. The question becomes one of how and is unique to each person and situation. 

Sometimes it helps to change a story. For example, a client might note one leg as their ‘weaker leg’; however, I might suggest reconceptualising that leg as ‘the support leg’, providing essential stability needed to perform expressions with the other leg. Subtle narrative shifts like this can change one’s relationship with their body, opening opportunities to explore new rhythms of being in the world. 

Another way of affecting change is by accessing a sense of imagination and sensory memory. For example, imagine wearing a headband with 15 giant, silver helium balloons tied to it. Take a moment to feel that sensation. Gently move your head so the balloons shift. What do you notice in your posture, neck, or someplace else? By using your sense of imagination, sensory memories, and interoception, changes in space occur both inside and outside the body, experienced by you and perceived by others. There are rhythms to your space and movement. 

Another means for changing embodied patterns is by exploring new rhythms of doing. The musician and educator Heinrich Jacoby once made a group of his students spend time exploring “hand and arm-like” things they might do with their feet – drawing, opening doors, and picking up things (Jacoby, 2018: 356), finding new possibilities of support from the lower body and the ground. (2018). As Jacoby put it, “Only when you try things out for yourself do you acquire some idea of what is possible for all of us” (2018: 338). 

Dance and movement scholars have long considered the connection between human movement and our engagement with the world. Andrea Olsen articulates this well: “Bodies are part of Earth. Humans co-evolved with this planet, and our perceptual and movement systems are embedded within every landscape and cityscape we inhabit. Orientation to weight and to space informs inner and outer movement. As dancers, we don’t create movement; we participate in a dynamic, moving universe” (Olsen, 2014: 2). Echoing this sentiment, Kimmerer La Mothe emphasizes the inherent impulse that “Humans are nothing more or less than an impulse to connect,” and that our movements are not just actions but are responses that create and become patterns of sensing and responding. These patterns relate us to our environment in human-sustaining ways, educating our senses to possibilities and ranges of perception (La Mothe, 2015). She elaborates, “If the act of sensing and responding is first and foremost a process of creating and becoming movement patterns, then how humans dance—the patterns of movement they rehearse—educates their senses to particular possibilities and ranges of perception” (La Mothe, 2018: 131).

In preparing to enter the field, I made time for new movement practices, like taking tai chi and occasionally dancing with my dance anthropology colleagues. In tuning my body and its movements, I attempted to shift my rhythms, practising more presence and flexibility in the moment. Collaborating with the embodied wisdom of others in my work is only possible by first staying grounded in my own embodied experience and then staying open and curious about others, with empathy and not knowing. These also happen to be essential qualities for an anthropologist in the field.

Rhythms with others

By offering these ceremonial practices, it helps those that come along feel into it. And be enlivened and lifted back into the feeling of that oneness and that unity, and that's very helpful and very healing…most humans don't feel they only think they feel. I'm saying this because you're so interested in the body. And so that's really relevant. So, we only think we're feeling something. Are we really feeling it, really? If we were really feeling, we wouldn't have allowed what's happened to the planet to happen. We couldn't bear it because we'd be feeling her (Julia, 6.20.22 interview).

This conversation with Julia stays with me. We met during my master’s fieldwork exploring ritual movement and dance practices in relationship with local water resources in Southern England. Julia was part of an activist community, Friends of The River Medway (FORMed), an interdisciplinary group of lawyers, activists, environmentalists, artists, and spiritual leaders who “unite practical and legal action with the sacred” to “create projects that serve the River, her inhabitants, and their local community” (Friends of the River Medway, n.d.). Julia is an artist, a Water Shaman (she notes, lacking a better term) and a Spiritual Practitioner from a long line of women. In 2021, FORMed hosted a community May Day celebration and water ceremony, where a Water Goddess, sculpted from local Wealden clay and dressed in flowers blessed with participants’ intentions, was gifted to the Waters of the Shalebrook, which flow into the Medway River. Julia, with another artist, sculpted the Water Goddess, and Julia facilitated the ritual and May Day festivities. What follows are a few rhythms of the places and people, specifically through processes of grounding in my own embodied awareness and staying open to others and the environment. By highlighting these two spatially embodied processes within sensory experience, I aim to do two things. First, these moments express embodiment practices and rhythms as applied by this researcher. Second, to turn attention to Julia’s call for more feeling in our relationship with the earth. I call upon moments from May Day, other water rituals, and community efforts to honour their local water resources, rivers, and springs, reviving a culture of stewardship and care. I share their knowledge through my experiences, offering cues for how researchers can alternatively tune into the rhythmic patterns of connections.

Grounding

A grounding process can unfold on many levels. It can be personal, like a first cup of coffee in the morning or a walk between meetings. Somatic movement practices, such as contact improvisation and Authentic Movement (1) often start with a process of grounding or orientation — arriving to meet yourself where you are right now. Authentic movement practitioner Andrea Olsen notes, “If we do not take time to give our body-level intelligence the support it needs for orientation, we waste time in distraction. Can you feel your feet? Is your spine relaxed and free? Is your breathing calm and deep? This three-step sequence helps create the conditions in your nervous system for clear thinking and communicating” (Olsen 2022: 31).

When I first met Julia in person the day before FORMed’s May Day celebration and water ceremony, we exchanged hellos, and she immediately had me orient to the landscape, requesting that I go off alone and have “a sit” and “tune in” to the space. I found a patio chair between a house and the stream and sat alone. It was awkward. I travelled far to meet these people, and they were working, and here I was sitting by myself. But I quickly realised I was not alone; my senses began to notice the place. I was here to meet the landscape and water as much as the people. You can feel this unfolding of noticing in my fieldnotes as I sat there:

"There are mowed grass fields, wildflower meadows, and wooded spaces with paths. The Maypole is set up in a wide-open space where the grass is mowed. Amongst all the spaces, a long and gentle brook, The Shalebrook, flows across the length of the property, with several Asian-style garden bridges traversing the brook where one can cross over to the other side of the property. All the plants seem to be in bloom. A dazzling array of colours and shapes—daffodils, bluebells, dandelions, and violets. The dappled sunlight through the trees scatters little beams of light around the water and the flowering wild garlic, highlighting the buzzing bees and other insects. Birdsongs peppered the air, and a few workers are quietly whistling or humming while they work. The space is peaceful beyond words, feeling like the most perfect Midwestern Day. The spring days of home that I miss. I suddenly feel a longing for childhood. It's completely enchanting." (Fieldnotes, 31.04.22)

Grounding includes orienting oneself to a sense of safety and support and knowing one’s physical location in space and gravity. From there, connecting with others and to an environment flows easier.

Staying open

This grounding interaction was an anchor from which to go out into the field, expanding into a relationship with community members and the environment. When not talking to others or attending events, I actively tried to cultivate a personal relationship with the landscape. Taking in the shape of the ground and plants, the animals, and the urban layout and architecture. I walked almost everywhere — to local springs, destinations recommended through local interactions, or just wandering around town, exploring the sensation of the ground rising to meet my feet and enjoying the process of tuning my awareness. If possible, no earbuds, phone maps, or tech distractions, attempting to avoid the focused, narrow gaze of staring at my phone, creating eye tension and, generally, a certain ambivalence to the greater world. While walking, I kept my head lifted, practising a soft peripheral gaze, taking in as much space as possible (Bond 2018). My other senses and movements tended to follow. I would experience an opening of muscles at the base of my skull, a refreshing feeling after time spent at the computer.

Wandering and getting a little lost, albeit safely, helped to create a heightened awareness of others and the environment, a sense of wonder of the place, and a curiosity for new rhythms. In this way, it often leads to unexpected opportunities. For example, in the middle of Ashdown Forest, I met Katharine, an Eurythmy teacher who uses the movement practice as a physical therapy modality. Our random encounter led to an evening of dance performance at Emerson College, followed by tea and an impromptu movement session, where Katharine taught me a water choreography she had workshopped for FORMed.

"I went for a walk and decided to try and get lost in the woods. It was 6 pm. The ground is full of mounds and hills with round centre holes. Human activity happened here, but I'm not sure what. I get a magnetic, pressurised sensation in these woods, like the air before a thunderstorm. I was dismayed at not seeing wildlife other than birds and the errant squirrel. But suddenly I heard a noise. I stopped, and there in front of me were two young deer! They quickly trotted away. Soon after, I heard more rustling, but this time it was a medium-sized brown dog. Soon came the dog's owner walking behind him. As she passed, we said 'hi' and I commented, 'Your dog certainly knows where he's going.' She stopped and turned to me and said, 'It's funny, I never see anyone in this wood. And you're American?' We started talking, and it turns out she is from California and teaching the Eurythmy teacher training workshop at Emerson College. I told her about my studies. As it happened, she said, there was an Eurythmy performance at Emerson College that very evening at 7:30 pm and would I like to go with her? She would give me a lift. Of course, I said yes! Her name is Katherine" (Fieldnotes, 4 August 2021).

Perhaps surprisingly, many such encounters took place, which I attribute to staying open. Staying open naturally exists in a sense of wonder, curiosity and not-knowing. This is where new rhythmic connections are usually made, conversations happen, and new patterns are perceived, resonate, and move in sync. An experience with Michael, another interlocutor, exemplifies rhythmic resonance:

If there was anyone who metaphorically embodied the properties of water, it was Michael. He is one who goes with the flow. Adaptable, shaped by all he encounters, but nevertheless continues onward, driven by gravity or flow or purpose. His base rhythm throughout our day together is a steady and regular pulse of walking, talking, and picking up trash with a trash picker. We went along like this, talking for some time, and then there'd be a rest. A stop. A piece of trash, other people who crossed our path, or a particular destination. And then it would be back to the regular beat. (Field notes, 8 August 2022).

On this day of hiking around the border between East and West Sussex, I noted not only my interactions with Michael but also my sensory experiences and our mutual exchange of ‘correspondence and care’ with the places we visited. 

On one occasion, we hiked to a relatively hidden iron spring. I was overcome by the deep green smell of the plants, the mysterious flower decorations with which someone had 'dressed' the spring, and even the iron taste of the rust-red water. Before leaving, Michael stuck a leaf in the place where the water flowed outward from the well, enhancing the sounds. He looked up at me and smiled with bright eyes, "So it's basically alive! Look at this! I just think it's amazing! I can hear the sound now! It's kind of like a 'thank you'." (Field notes, 8 August 2022).

These resonant experiences were enchanting and memorable, often instilling a sense of vitality and joy. I navigated short fieldwork by grounding in my rhythms and staying open to observing them in relationships with others and the more-than-human. In doing so, I honed my skills in the ‘art of noticing, something that anthropologists should do best (Tsing, 2017). As a result, I received many ‘Aha! experiences’—moments of resonance in collaboration with others and the land that allowed me to glimpse the wisdom and relationship of the community and its Waters.

Embodied Discourse

Until the foundational kinetic dimension of human life (in fact all life) is acknowledged, there is no point of entry for nonlinguistic corporeal concepts in analyses of ’embodied image schema’. 

Sheets-Johnstone 2009: 225

Maxine Sheets Johnstone highlights the challenge of prioritising the nonlinguistic, corporeal dimensions of human experience in anthropological discourse, dimensions that are not pre-conceptual but are already concept-laden and essential for a comprehensive understanding of cultural and social interactions (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 222). She notes that effectively communicating bodily experiences remains a significant challenge (2009). Perhaps in parallel, Heinrich Jacoby addresses this issue from a pedagogical perspective by observing that the more we rely on the cognitive “knowledge” of what to do, the less present we are in our bodies, often becoming disassociated from the vibrant, lived context of our actions (Jacoby, 2018: 356). 

Some approaches move towards the body in discourse. Thomas Csordas’ method of embodiment in anthropological inquiry remains foundational, focusing on analysing the cultural patterning of bodily experience and the intersubjective constitution of meaning through that experience (Csordas, 1993). For example, during an interview with FORMed founder Ellen, we discussed the sensations she experiences during ritual connections with the water and land. Ellen described “energy running through my body or even like chills. But I have learned to discern the different types of chills” (Ellen, 2 August 2022, interview). Furthering Csordas’ ideas, Clare Petitmengin’s micro-phenomenology offers a form of explicitation interview that delves deeply into the fine details of experience and sensory memories (Petitmengin, 2016), such that one might conduct an hour-long interview on the experience of taking a sip of tea. In the field, I experimented with a survey based on Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics to elicit sensory language from participants, attempting to help them articulate bodily sensations and rhythms in connection with their movements and experiences. This survey was based on Korzybski’s idea that individuals experience the world through a blend of sensory capabilities, past experiences, and conditioning, highlighting that life is initially processed on a physiological-neurological level before being translated into verbal expression (General Semantics, n.d.). 

Like the body, rhythm, too, is experienced in process activities, exemplifying qualities of ongoingness, emergence, movement, growth, and learning (Hasty, 2019: 234). This persistent dichotomy between our cognitive attempts to ‘fix’ and the inherent fluidity of rhythm and bodily experience underscores the critical need for a paradigm shift to integrate more dynamic aspects into educational practices. By drawing the body itself forward and allowing discourse to flow from there, we might begin to bring academia to the body. Rhythm as a foundational structure can facilitate a starting point with which to situate new learning frameworks, enhancing the depth and relevance of anthropological practices and understanding of our own cultural knowledge-making in relation with.

Reworlding anthropology through the thing itself

A pedagogy of embodiment through rhythm offers a transformative approach for the researcher to engage with kinetic realities in exploratory, playful ways while facilitating an attuning to our bodies and the bodies of others within anthropological research and education. “The growth of human knowledge, the contribution that each generation makes to the next is not an accumulated stock of representations but an education of attention” (Ingold, 2001: 114) that arise within processes of development (2001).

The call for more embodiment in relationships appears to arise not only in anthropology but also in other societal pockets, illustrated broadly in a conversation with FORMed founder Ellen, who mentions the importance of using physical experience in the ritual ‘doing’ within community ceremonies. 

"The most difficult thing in my experience about leading a ceremony is dropping people from their heads, their minds, into their bodies so that they actually have those sensory experiences. So, things like drumming, or using rattles or singing, or dancing, or praying. You know, meditation can be good, but it sometimes gets so people get too distracted. I think more physical things, where someone's actually doing something—making something with their hands, you know that kind of thing. It's a way of dropping people in and then they can actually ground in their body and then they can actually connect and have an experience" (Ellen, 2 August 2022, interview).

Ellen’s words harken to a sense of grounding, moving our attention back into the body, and from there, being able to move outward in relationship with, in this case, the environment. This ritual connection is also a process of tuning awareness through physical experience through a conduit of curiosity and not-knowing. 

I have often considered how rhythm and embodiment tuning could unfold in institutional settings to enhance creative pathways to knowledge, social cohesion and communication flow. In advocating for more embodiment courses in tuning the body, I began a research project in the summer of 2024, offering a series of public workshops. The workshops, combining lessons from fieldwork with my movement background, offered simple movement exercises supported by interdisciplinary research, encouraging participants to explore grounding, staying open, and tuning themselves into their sensory perceptions and body experiences in relationship with. The activities were designed to be approachable, encouraging even sceptical participants to engage and gently reigniting a playful sense of curiosity. Reflecting on FORMed’s May Day event, Julia, too, stressed the importance of the embodied celebratory experience of the May Day water ceremony: “Often in these times we’re told to be positive, but it’s only when you have this embodied experience with other people and in a special activity or ritual or moments such as this where you feel that warmth and you feel that joy. I think that can be transformative” (Julia, 20 June 2022). By the end of my first workshop, many participants expressed a willingness to be more playful and open, with a renewed sense of wonder for their physical experience, not to mention that new community connections were formed. 

The integration of embodied pedagogy in exploring rhythmic connection for researchers represents a significant shift — a reworlding of anthropology — towards a more engaged, empathetic, and holistic discipline. Ingold agrees “to grow in knowledge of the world is at the same time to grow in the knowledge of one’s own self” (Ingold 2018). By emphasising the importance of the body and sensory attunement, we reframe wisdom in academia, better understanding ourselves, communities, spaces and environments. This approach does not merely add a layer to anthropological research; it fundamentally transforms the disciplinary practices, encouraging a richer, more connected form of study that resonates with the complex, dynamic rhythms of life on Earth.

Statement of Ethics 

All people interviewed in this article have given their consent for this researcher to use our interactions and interviews and signed a consent form. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology was the institution responsible for this Master’s project. Choreomundus is an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree (EMJMD). It investigates dance and other movement systems (ritual practices, martial arts, games and physical theatre) as Intangible Cultural Heritage within the broader contexts of Ethnochoreology, the Anthropology of Dance, Dance Studies, and Heritage Studies. The program is offered by a consortium of four universities internationally recognized for their leadership in the development of innovative curricula for the analysis of dance and other movement practices: University of Clermont Auvergne (UCA, coordinator), Clermont-Ferrand, France; Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway; University of Szeged (SZTE), Hungary; University of Roehampton, London (RU), United Kingdom. Participants from privately funded public workshops in 2024 gave verbal consent and signed a form to use our interactions in research.

Endnotes

 (1). Contact Improvisation originated in 1972 by Steve Paxton, is a partner dance based on the principles of touch, momentum, shared weight and a point of contact (Zemelman, n.d.). Mary Starks Whitehouse’s Authentic Movement, also began in the 1970s, incorporates self-directed movement promoting wellbeing while exploring dynamics between a mover and a witness (Olsen, 2022).

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