Walk of Life Training in Non-stylised and Environmental Movement

Abstract

This article, written from inside the practice, is intended to offer an insight into the Walk of Life Training in Non-stylised and Environmental Movement. It commences with the antecedents of the programme. The structure, intention and underlying principles of this practitioner-level training in movement practice (rather than performance or teaching) are elucidated. The training is grounded in an experiential understanding of the body and the inter-relationship between the moving body, the self and the ‘natural’ environment. It is a process designed to embed an individual, ongoing and shared movement practice for participants from diverse creative backgrounds. An examination of the approach to the body and to space – including the integration of seeing in movement practice, and the inter-relationship between practice in the studio and on site – is provided. Helen Poynor’s exposition as founder and facilitator of the training is followed by a lively contribution from artist-researcher/movement artist Paula Kramer. Drawing on her memories and movement diaries from the Foundation and Continuation Training Programmes and the current development of her movement and research practices, she carves out which aspects of the training have left the strongest traces in her work. Established artist and mover/performer Hilary Kneale closes with a personal case study examining how the experience of investigating a specific project in the Mentorship Programme, alongside fellow practitioners also grounded in the Walk of Life training, opened a new understanding of her embodied working process.

Keywords:

• non-stylised
• movement practice
• environmental/site
• training
• Suprapto Suryodarmo

Notes

1 Sumarah is a Javanese form of meditation which had a significant influence on the work of Suprapto Suryodarmo. He encouraged his early students to attend sessions when training with him in Java (see Romano 2013).

2 This is a reference to Suprapto Suryodarmo’s spoken terminology when teaching.

3 The use of scores and the terms ‘resources’ and ‘valuaction’ are derived from training in Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP cycles (see Halprin 1969; Worth and Poynor 2018).

4 This work on the levels is derived from Suprapto’s early work with walking, crawling, lying, and from Susanne Christmann, one of the pioneers of his work.

5 I am using the term ‘natural’ loosely, distinguishing it from the built environment, to refer to environments where elements such as earth, tree, rock and sea predominate.

6 This is a reference Suprapto Suryodarmo’s spoken terminology when teaching.

7 Ibid.

8 Both ‘moving-dancing’ and ‘body-body’ draw on Suprapto (Prapto) Suryodarmo’s work and vocabulary. I have written more extensively on the former in my PhD (Kramer 2015, 149–151), Helen has written more extensively on the latter in an article dedicated particularly to encountering and developing the practice of body-body (Poynor 2014, 221–230).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Helen Poynor

Helen Poynor is an independent movement artist specialising in site-specific and autobiographical performance and cross-artform collaborations. She runs the Walk of Life training and workshop programmes in Non-stylised and Environmental Movement on the Jurassic coast in East Devon/West Dorset. Helen is acknowledged as a teacher by Anna Halprin and Suprapto Suryodarmo, with whom she trained. She is a mentor for established and emerging dancers and practitioners and a guest associate teacher with Tamalpa UK. Helen has contributed chapters and articles on her work to numerous dance publications including the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices. Helen is a registered dance movement therapist and somatic movement therapist. www.walkoflife.co.uk

Paula Kramer

Paula Kramer is an artist-researcher and movement artist based in Berlin. She holds an artistic PhD in Dance (Coventry University) and was a post-doctoral researcher at Uniarts Helsinki (2016–2019). Her work explores intermateriality through site-specific outdoor movement, rooted in Amerta Movement (Suryodarmo) and Non-stylised and Environmental Movement (Poynor). She collaborates with materials of many different orders as active agents in the creation of movement, performance and choreography; as well as daily life practices and sense-making. She publishes widely in the context of artistic research through bodily practices and is a board member of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices. www.paulakramer.de

Hilary Kneale

Hilary Kneale is an independent interdisciplinary artist, who works in collaboration with others from different fields. She is a published writer, movement practitioner, educator, guardian of Vision Quest, and healer, living within her own quest to remember the true nature of interrelatedness. Her work is widely body based and includes performance and ritual in the landscape, calling strongly to the ancient stories held deep within the earth. Having trained to embody, develop and teach practices with support of the work of Helen Poynor, and Northern Drum Shamanic Centre, she inhabits ways of opening the body, heart and mind, that reawaken the native soul. www.hilarykneale.com