The Creative Body Memory in Covid’s Time. A Participatory Pedagogic Methodology with Site-Specific Dance and Performance in Urban Places

Abstract

Given the social circumstances arising from the COVID-19 health crisis, we developed a participatory pedagogic methodology involving body experimentation and performing arts to explore ‘body memory’ as a tool for redefining new affective bonds and adaptation processes within urban environments and public spaces. This experimental methodology, addressed to community participation, involves exercises of body movement improvisation, physical theatre techniques and site-specific dance. We aim to draw an arc of cumulative learning and individual and group awareness that should facilitate a critical rediscovery of everyday urban experiences inside a ‘body-place-community’ dialogue. In the performative exercises, we inquire about a ‘creative body memory’ composed of conscious, temporal, and cognitive knowledge built on interpretive fragments, images, and mental representations; and an embodied unconscious and extemporal one, built on emotional and adaptive ‘body-place-community’ connections. This methodology was tested in a pilot laboratory addressed to a group of adolescents living in Raval’s multicultural neighbourhood (Barcelona) and some of them at risk of social exclusion. It was implemented with the collaboration of ‘Xamfrà, Raval’s Music and Performance Centre’ in the context of Raval’s summer youth activities organised in July 2021.