Abstract
Becoming Un/Stuck
The article begins with a practical problem that grew during extensive, longitudinal fieldwork in the south Wales ex-mining valleys in the United Kingdom. We detected a strong affective resistance from many teen girls to speaking in interviews about the place where they were growing up. We experienced their resistance as a visceral, corporeal and affective form of communication that manifested itself through gestures such as slumping across the desk in expressions of deep weariness. In these one-to-one interviews conducted in secondary (high) schools, some girls appeared to be deadened, as if life was being drained out of them. In effect, their bodies refused to engage with our research task. The affective charge of the ‘slumping body’ concerned us and reminded us of the many other ways girls had indicated corporeal and psychic stuckness (Ivinson and Renold, 2013a, 2013b). We puzzled over what more girls’ bodies were doing other than signalling a reluctance to take part in the research.
Across our work, movement and being stuck emerged as themes linked to gender and we speculated that place played a role in the gendered movement patterns we detected (Ivinson, 2012; Renold and Ivinson, 2014). During the early phases of our research, we conducted over 60 interviews, 12 focus groups, a series of walking tours and film making events with young people aged 13–16 years. Quite frequently boys talked of roaming far and wide across expanses of territory around the valley on bikes, scooters, skateboards, quads and motorbikes. While some girls spoke of horse riding, mountain biking, running and dancing, many told us that they gave up physical hobbies as they entered their early teen years. Giving up movement led us to pay attention to moments when young people seemed to collapse physically and psychically. Their gestures seemed to communicate in ways not available to conscious awareness or verbal articulation. To explore girls’ movement tropes, we decided to focus on corporeality and started to work with a choreographer specialising in improvisational dance and physical theatre. This article is a creative exploration of the dance/movement workshops we orchestrated with choreographer Jên Angharad to explore stuckness and to experiment with what more the girls’ bodies knew and could do.
We begin by setting the scene with some historical considerations of the gendered history of valleys communities while introducing the philosophical concepts we have used to think with. In the following sections, we describe the design of the workshops and focus on events that enabled us to inquire further about gender and movement. We weave our experiences of taking part in the workshops with the choreographer’s reflective commentaries on her pedagogic practice and philosophical concepts to create a series of cameos to speculate about how the history of place infuses teen girls’ movement repertoires.
Speculations of the ‘More Than’
We are interested in embodied knowledge communicated through performativity and affects such as those we detected when girls slumped across the desk. We came to explore this knowing as a kind of prehension that indicates more than what can be literally or explicitly stated. To work with the ‘more than’ spoken, we adopted a speculative research stance 1 (Coleman et al., 2019; Springgay and Truman, 2018; Van der Tuin, 2019; Wilkie et al., 2017).
The question of whose and what kind of knowledge counts, and especially in education, is often addressed within the broad realm of pragmatism linked to John Dewey. In our study, the term ‘more than’ derives from Manning (2012, 2013, 2016) and Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of ‘pure experience’. Brian Massumi (2011: 10) describes pure experience as a relational composition of a multiplicity of forces from different worlds/disciplines/fields, some of which are not available to human sensory perception. Embodied forms of knowing expand thinking beyond cognition and recognise a kind of thinking-feeling (Massumi, 2011: 11) located within the relational process of immediate ongoing experience. Thus movement and bodies are not confined to a unitary organism or a bounded individual (Blackman, 2012). Instead, habits and persons come into being through relational matrices or processual assemblages. To capture this, bodies might be imagined as vibratory (Henriques et al., 2014). In our study, we refer to vibrations to highlight traces from the past that quiver and resonate within embodied movements.
The More-than of Life
The request to ‘tell us’ about life in the valleys, deadened some girls’ capacities for expression seemingly because a verbal response was required. Recognising the limits of the interview method led us to adopt a movement modality in the next phase of our research. We speculated that the girls’ gestures and body-movement habits were replete with the ongoing life of the communities they live in. These communities grew up in places dominated by the rigours, practices and habits of mineral extraction undertaken in deep underground mining. The habits that were part of the ecologies of practice
2
(Stengers, 2019) and that make up the community matrix
3
(Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012) are composed of relational forces as multitudinous
The More-than of Inter-generational Transmission
Indeed, these communities have always lived close to experiences of death due to the inherently dangerous nature of coal mining. Unpredictable movements in rock and highly combustible methane gas caused frequent disasters. When the last remaining working mines were closed in the mid-1980s, violent clashes between the Thatcher government and the mining families left a legacy of inter-generational trauma. Multiple attempts at economic regeneration have failed and recent policies reductively imagine the valleys as tourist destinations. Remains of industrial buildings including pit-head wheels, washeries and chimneys have been dismantled, erasing the physical presence of coal mining activity. We have written elsewhere of this as the trouble, a haunting, that lies beneath physical, psychic, corporeal and geological surfaces that will not be stilled (Ivinson, 2014a; Ivinson and Renold, 2016; Renold and Ivinson, 2015, 2019). Now that the mining industry has gone, the loss of the community’s
The More-than of Movement
People have physically extracted coal from the ground in the valley regions of south Wales for hundreds of years. While men’s bodies were a source of masculine pride, women’s labour was valued primarily in relation to the male labour it reciprocally facilitated. Gendered bonds of sociality formed the fabric of community life and its survival (Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012) and this gender dynamic is still in play today, for example, in the way women often publically protect the dignity of male ex-workers faced with unemployment, social stigma and poverty (Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012).
People are rooted in experiential fields and in this case, the geology of the valleys, the industrial past, bodies and human affiliations were, we speculate, deeply imbricated. Traces of these refrains hover in the multiplicity of what Deleuze (1994) refers to as ‘the virtual’ in contradistinction to the ‘actual’. Affective practices (Walkerdine, 2010) such as techniques of hewing rock underground or washing clothes on Mondays above ground are rituals that carry traces of past practices that vibrate in movements.
We suspected that immanent in the girls’ movements were traces of the past that allude to the agile, fit, labouring male body that is relationally opposed to refrains of femininity (i.e. the assumptions of what girls/women’s body can do or become). These legacies infuse current practices, hobbies and gendered movement patterns (Ivinson, 2014b; Ivinson and Renold, 2018; Renold and Ivinson, 2014) and partially shape possible future movement repertoires. We us the term ‘hovers’ to signal that it is never a straight forward carrying on of past practices so much as more elusive vibratory traces of the past. We speculate that the mining past hovers in gestures, jitteriness and hesitations, sometimes making bodies stuck, defensive, sick, tired and broken as we share in the forthcoming cameos. We can imagine the movement repertoires associated with coal mining communities lingering in the present as affects, intensities and vibrations. The ‘more-than’ here points to processual life where the virtual includes a history of masculine, industrial labour.
The Virtual in the Act
We sensed immanence manifest in girls’ hesitations on the edge of movement, as a jitteriness, as fleeting micro movements that can be glimpsed as if they hover in-between the virtual and the actual. Manning hints at a temporal folding; the non-chronological, non-divisibility of matter as a ‘folding-through of time in the making’ (2013: 37). Virtual refrains linger and might become part of the in-act of a body as it wells into movement. Manning’s concept of ‘in-act’ captures a sense of the virtual elements, refrains and vibrations that accompany or ‘in-form’ what becomes manifest as an actual movement. The unconscious elements of the in-act may include refrains from the past that are not available to conscious awareness.
The brutality with which the miners were defeated has left a lasting scar and complicated gender relations. For example, communities retain a nostalgic view of the male labouring body as ‘real work’ (Ivinson, 2012, 2014b; Ivinson and Renold, 2018), yet in times when women, more often than men, have jobs. Manning’s concept of ‘prehension’ alludes not only to that which somehow the body knows yet not consciously but also to elements that belong to the collective movement of life, rather than to individuals. We explore this further in the fieldwork cameos below. However, there will be more intertwined in girls’ experiences of movement than the virtual refrains of the history of industrial labour. We turn next to other molar affects.
Molar and Molecular Affects
While historical legacies of industrial mining set up local practices that dictated body movement repertoires for men and women, ‘molar’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987/2014) social conventions police the range of body comportment, rhythms of movement and habits available to women and girls in societies (Young, 2005). Molar and molecular (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987/2014) refrains intertwine and contribute to the virtual refrains of valleys community life. The term ‘molar’ signals dominant lines such as patriarchy dividing space into public and private (e.g. Pateman, 1988). In mining communities, molecular refrains further striated space into below and above ground. While Young was particularly concerned with patriarchy, characterised here as a molar force, capitalism, also a molar force, was acting locally in the deterritorialised flows vacated by prior industrial practices such as corporeal masculine labour. Apart from drug abuse, communities battling with austerity are reterritorialised by commercially driven, highly sexualised body cultures; desiring machines (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987/2014) that tell girls they need to have a specific kind of body, body parts and extensions of body parts, to be valued. Dominant images of hyper-sexual, technologically enhanced bodies (Malins, 2011) and fashion are constantly (in)forming girls via social media. These exist in local valleys cultures along with extreme forms of social stratification that produce rigid striations of wealth and poverty between groups in society. Capitalism codes bodies ‘in terms of their functional capacity to effect flows of labour: that is, in terms of their exchange rather than their moral value’ (Malins, 2011: 178). Our longitudinal work in valleys’ communities has given us glimpses of the kinds of neoterritorialising 4 taking place in ex-mining communities where new beauty industries such as nail bars regenerate community life. Furthermore, bodies forged through industrial labour are now pathologised as useless, dysfunctional and a drain on society.
Futures Immanent in the More-than
Finally the ‘more than’ hints of potential futures that escape the molar constrains of the past.
We took a future oriented approach by designing the workshops to enable experimentation and emergence so that ‘minor gestures’ (Manning, 2016) could be intensified, stretched and potentially reconfigured through attentive choreography and improvisation. That is, the immanent potentiality of the in-act also suggests that what emerges as a movement may be more than the past. According to Manning every experience is: …always a complex intertwining between what is absolutely what it has become or is becoming (an actual occasion) and what is in the realm of potential and can express itself…(Manning, 2015: 114)
Moving Methodologies: Attuning to the More-than of Movement in Dance Workshops
In the last week of the summer term when regular school classes were suspended and alternative activities were provided, we offered a 4-day workshop led by a choreographer specialising in movement improvisation and dance theatre. The secondary (high) school was in a valleys town in south Wales where we had been working on the Young People’s Understanding of Place project 5 and the activity was offered to thank participants. The workshops created an opportunity for us to pay attention to corporeality and movement, through an explicitly embodied ethico-political praxis 6 (Borovica, 2019a, 2019b; Ellingson, 2017; Hickey-Moody, 2017). The invitation to the workshops was extended to all girls in the school and read, ‘If you feel like moving, if you feel like jumping, swaying, running and creating stories with your body, this activity is for you’. Eighteen girls between the ages of 12–16 years signed up.
We had built a strong relationship with choreographer and dancer Jên Angharad who lived and worked in the valleys and was bilingual. Through her work in south Wales and the many workshops she had run with groups of all ages, Jên had become attuned to the corporal patterns and traumatic affects that carry legacies left by the way the mines and steel works were so abruptly closed down and industry came to an end. Jên had developed a pedagogic approach specifically tailored to the movement repertoires of young people growing up with complex lives which include persistent or deep poverty, the stresses and struggles of their parents’ and carers’ lives which sometimes included partnerships breaking down, mental ill health such as depression and caring for disabled adults, siblings and extended families. She recognised the ways young people’s bodies were territorialised by the inter-generational trauma of the past.
Jên skilfully attuned to individual and group dynamics as she worked with the untrained body-movement tropes and ticks that participants brought to the workshops. These became the cues from which she built patterns of exercises that both drew attention to elements of movement repertoires and extended them. She often used humour and physical caricature to exaggerate what came to her attention. Her deeply intuitive practice enabled her to adapt to whatever she felt was required to support, enliven and interest participants. For example, she seemed to be able to feel the energies that entered the room when young people were tired, hungry, downbeat or overly excited. Observing her practice gave us a sense of how she could feel the subterranean beat of the place as it reverberated through young people’s bodies. In workshops, we witnessed how she worked gently with the rockings, holdings and foetal foldings that we describe below. The workshops built the movement patterns that became a dance and by the fourth day the girls had gained enough confidence to perform it in front of the rest of the school.
Although we were not dancers (one of us had been trained in ballet and gymnastics in her childhood, she no longer practices), we both participated in the workshops so that we could feel with our bodies what Jên was inviting the girls to do. As Henri Lefebvre suggests, ‘The rhythmanalyst…must first listen to his[sic] own body. he[sic] learns rhythms from it, in order consequently to appreciate external rhythms’ (Lefebvre 2004: 19 cited in Spinney, 2006: 716). Participating also enabled us to build trust with the girls.
We video recorded the workshops by placing small cameras on tripods in three corners of the hall. In the pauses between the exercises, we took the opportunity to initiate ethnographic conversations prompted by movements, events or feelings that surfaced in the workshops (e.g. a girl sitting out; gaining confidence; learning a new move) and occasionally girls confided in us unprompted. There was a considerable amount of chat and banter as well as peer group disagreements in the pauses. We contend that the movement enabled girls to grasp forming feelings incipient in improvised movements bringing them closer to consciousness and occasionally to articulation. We kept field notes about incidents and specific events that attracted our attention.
After the workshops, we watched video footage with Jên and she interpreted movements with us. The video enabled sections to be slowed down and speeded up which brought patterns of behaviour and micro-dynamic gestures to our awareness, such as ‘the hold’, ‘the wiggle’, ‘the leap’ and ‘the dance of the not yet’ which we explore below. We treat these gestures as non-arbitrary points, or chances to think with, speculate and imagine (Stengers, 2019). The process of mapping gestures and identifying processual assemblages has taken a long time and we have grappled to find adequate concepts to think with. We have been feeling, thinking and moving with the writings of Erin Manning in particular on our journey. The following section called ‘room dancing’ elaborates the concept of milieu which we use to illustrate elements that make up processual assemblages (Blackman, 2012) which often involve embodied elements or include aspects that are beyond the immediately perceivable.
Milieu: Room Dancing
In her concept of milieu (2013: 110), Manning challenged the oneness of the self and the self separated from the environment. In the first cameo, the environment is the school hall where the movement workshops took place. Manning suggests that we do not populate space, extend into space or embody space – instead, we ‘create it’ with each movement we make (2012: 15). Accordingly, our experiences of the school hall were in-formed with our moving bodies because bodies in motion have no fixed position from which to view the room, the environment and the world. Yet moving involved sensing and feeling the atmospherics of the school hall and can be imagined as a kind of ‘worlding’ (Manning, 2016: 15). An extract from our field notes provides a flavour of the experience of worlding the hall as we paid attention to forces of light, heat, fabric, excitement and nervousness that ebbed and flowed creating an atmospheric milieu (Figure 1). The sunlight entering though large arched and rectangular windows at one end of the hall, travelled through the air patterning the wooden floor with horizontal blocks of light and shade, hatching bodies and blinding eyes. As bodies moved, subtle stroboscopic effects dappled them with dark and light spots that in turn were modulated through the white or blue of T-shirt fabric that absorbs and reflects a different range of wavelengths. We, and the 18 girls were of different sizes and heights, so proportions such as floor to ceiling, wall to wall, body to body, were experienced differently. Some of us felt tall and others felt small in relation to each other. Some girls chose to sit on the floor in huddles, others on the low benches lined up against a wall, while others sat on crash mats or just stood. Groups formed and reformed as conversations were started, overheard, proliferated, interrupted and restarted. Noises buzzed and echoed as ideas were mumbled, passed around in quick fire repartee or screeched loudly in excitement. Some utterances circulated and gained a narrative momentum while others stopped and died. Heat emanated from our bodies on that hot day inside. Feelings of anxiety were experienced in the pit of the stomach, the back of the throat or the crook of an elbow creating affective flows of waiting, expecting and uncertainty. We were potential energy, folded-in, doubled-up, self-protecting, arms reassuringly tucked around torsos, holding, hugging, hiding.
Room dancing.
The unfolding events on that day in that hall were cogenerated with traces of past experiences of feeling nervous. It is these half-felt, half-remembered feelings that work below the level of consciousness and linger as affective traces that are both integral to, and create experiences that keep feelings-in-movement, moving.
The hall held possibilities for multiple series of events that might foreground or background experiences of heat, the glaring light, the shape of the room, the hardness of the floor, the crash mats, gravity or talk all working as feelings forming, not yet ‘landed’. These forces are elements of the milieu that have potential to become actualised in acts. They signal excesses that remain in process as virtual forces. Our nervousness was heightened because there was, as yet, no stated intentional purpose to our being there beyond the original information leaflets about the workshop. Initially, we had no ideal model of what a dancer or mover might be. Past experiences of anxiety inhabited present feelings of nervousness as prehension; as a ‘more than’ of movement captured by a paradoxical sense of being one and multiple at the same time (Manning, 2013; Simondon, 1989). The next section explores a gesture we called ‘the hold’.
The Hold
Waiting to start the activities, we were struck by the way the girls stood. We noticed it first in Megan (pseudonym) as she hovered on the sidelines at the edge of the hall, self-consciously holding herself, as if stuck, while constantly checking to see if her best friend was nearby (Figure 2).
The hold.
The protective body holding became a refrain that emerged whenever Jên asked the girls to stop moving. Instinctively, arms folded around stomachs and across guts. The tummy holding gesture seemed to be a body fold: an affective comforting feeling of flesh on flesh. It might have signalled a need to feel a physical reassurance as a ‘second skin’ (Esther Bick, 1987, cited in Manning, 2013: 2) (for more extended exploration of this gestural fold, see (Ivinson and Renold, 2020). Grabbing their bellies seemed to act as a bulwark against disorienting experiences of the new. In holding themselves in this posture, girls seemed to be re-orienting themselves as if checking where their moving boundaries were while holding them(selves) in place. Arms seemed to shield and
Warming Up, Moving and Jittering
As Jên worked with the girls in the school hall, we witnessed corporeal movements repeating themselves and spreading around the room. The first day involved a series of activities that Jên devised as she got to know the group. In the warm-up exercises, Jên invited us to walk round the hall, sensing where we were with respect to the other bodies while giving verbal feedback about our spatial distancing. In the pauses between exercises, we observed the girls’ jerks, ticks and jittery moves such as constant a-rhythmic touching as they pulled their T-shirts over their bottoms, little motions of dragging their hands through their hair and patting their heads and thighs as if criss-crossed by the regulatory forces of embodied feminine surveillance. Jên found ways to exaggerate some of these and by drawing attention to them moved us further into them, enabling awareness and modulating our energy. Slowing down the video footage allowed us to notice how these micro-rhythms re-emerged in the pauses. These body-forming ticks seemed to reach beyond any one girl as if belonging to a collective, embodied memory. We speculate that these gestures carried something that has been felt in the past that had become habits in the present. These almost imperceptible jerks and body ticks involve a durational fold of past, present and future; of girl-becoming-valleys.
Jên invited us to walk fast, then slowly, with one arm extended, then on tiptoes and then crouching. She altered the speed, tempo, extension and positioning of our moving bodies as if running through Laban’s dimensions of time, weight, space and flow (Laban and Lawrence, 1947). Reflecting later on video footage from this session Jên said: I’m sensing the different energy moves in the walking around – I’m using their movement repertoire and extending them - still using the same repetition of that movement – this is feeding back. I take from what they are presenting – picking up on their energy levels.
The Wiggle
While walking with us around the room during the afternoon session, Jên detected and focused on one girl’s move – a barely perceptible wiggle that emanated from the hips. The girl was one of a group who had been uneasy and stiff in the initial exercises. With her body Jên mimicked and exaggerated the wiggle. The amplification created a perturbation that attracted other girls’ attention. We watched as the wiggle spread like a contagion across the room as one girl picked it up from another, mirrored it as if trying it out and by doing so passed it on. It circulated from body to body flowing around the room like an affective wave dissolving boundaries between the one and the multiple. The wiggle’s fluidity signalled a loosening of the stranglehold of tough body repertoires incorporated by girls living in harsh places exemplified by the ‘female masculinity’ (Halberstam, 1998) of street dance moves. The wiggle gave the first hint of a softening of movement opening up possibilities for other ways to be.
From Wiggles to Clear Lines
Jên gathered us in a line in front of her and focused on our energy levels. Reviewing the video footage after the workshop, she explained: This is how I sense where their energy is on the first day. To have them form a line, I can get a sense of who is not feeling up to much at the beginning of the day, who is up for it, quite alive. This is important to how I work individually and with the group. If someone is moving but not feeling their movements at the beginning – I don’t judge – I see if it changes by the end of the day. To develop clarity of movement – it would be like creating clear lines on a piece of paper. When a person is trying to move – the body is wrapped in habits – so you don’t see the clearly defined lines and the audience also does not see it – so as a performer you do not have a sense of intention and emotion – it is about trying to acknowledge them and then dissipate the busi-ness – so the sense of self in that space becomes clear – so when I am moving my arm – my whole attention needs to be on that movement –the ticks and habits – detract from that.
The fidgets, like squiggles on the page, are the ‘unfelt sensations’ (Manning, 2013: 78) that permeate habits. We speculate that habits such as tugging a T-shirt and the hold described above are body comportments that came from everyday experiences of living in the valleys. Valleys’ girls are caught between the non-legitimacy of feminine confident autonomy (Young, 2005) and the social tropes of fit, hyper-sexy, body images reproduced in popular culture and social media that show girls everything they are not (Renold and Ivinson, 2015; Ringrose and Harvey, 2015; Ringrose and Coleman, 2013). These criss-crossing vectors of contemporary femininity territorialise bodies making it difficult for girls to inhabit their bodies with purpose. As Young writes, for a girl to ‘open her body in free, active, open extension’ is to ‘invite objectification’ and this ‘objectifying regard’ is ‘what keeps her in her place’ (Young, 2005: 44). The shift from unconscious to mindful movement is a technique found in contemporary improvised dance (Ravn, 2017). The shift from hesitation to forming feeling is an edging towards inhabiting the body with purpose which Deleuze and Guattari refer to as singularity.
The Leap
On the second day something quite surprising occurred. As Jên began her usual warm-up exercises, some of the girls spontaneously join in. Megan, who was awkward and apart from the group the day before, began to move through the space with speed, height and grace. We glimpsed the transformative potential of movements such as pumping arms and leaps across the expanse of the hall floor. Megan’s body became fluid and suddenly anything seemed possible. We watched as other girls picked up movements from Jên and started to improvise more freely, displaying a vitality we had not witnessed the day before (Figure 3).
Dance of the not-yet.
The hall had become a place of experimentation and freedom where girls were liberated from the molar institutional requirements of sedate comportment, hesitations and acquiescent body gestures. Freed up, they experimented with edgy moves by playfully queering the pornified hyper-sexualised moves redolent in contemporary music videos (Lamb et al., 2013; Renold and Ivinson, 2015). We contend that the girls needed to feel these violent, provocative, sexualising moves to inhabit their bodies differently by feeling and forming movements that are not publically legitimated, particularly in the sanitised context of the school (Quinlivan, 2018). In these moves, some of their suppressed feelings of oppression might have been re-felt with intentionality enabling their bodies to be less territorialised by patriarchal and valleys’ tropes.
Indeed, across the days, the girls began to talk about feelings of being kept in place. They started to express something of a visceral awareness of the gendered asymmetry valleys town made available to them. They hinted of their need to ‘out’ their feelings. For example, some said they yearned for the kind of cycles and motorbikes boys of their age already had access to. They talked of desperately wanting to go fast and experience an adrenaline rush. We sensed their anger through indirect comments, for example, in stories of being on a Roller Coaster, in which they spoke of the need for release, to ‘get out of your body’ and ‘to feel free’.
There were others who spoke of drinking alcohol or taking drugs, to ‘dampen’ their rage. They hinted of the need to suppress this feeling every weekend, because as one of them said, ‘it is burning us up’. In less public conversations, others disclosed more difficult issues. One girl spoke quietly of how her mother had lost two babies. Others talked of mothers’ bodies producing dead babies, which leaked into talk of what the body can and cannot do, of loss and when the body, ‘can’t take any more’.
Other stories emerged as manifestations of what the bodies can and can’t do. One girl shared a story of falling out of bed after a series of nightmares in which she described falling off a cliff edge and then asked us if she could sit out of some of the movement activities. One girl brought a note written by her mum to say she could not take part in any further workshops, because her doctor had diagnosed that she had, ‘pulled a muscle in her back’. Another girl told us on the second day, that she had a missing hipbone and gave us a letter from her mum saying she couldn’t dance. We were struck by the way mothers supported their daughters to withdraw from the workshops – repeating a mandate not to move. Yet, we also recognised that sometimes girls needed to be allowed to sit and watch, to rest bad backs and aching limbs and nurse sick tummies until they felt energised enough to join in again.
Valleys communities are milieux where loss is endemic. The land has lost its traditional function and no longer yields the minerals on which the local economy was dependent. Mining sites have been demolished and obliterated from view. Industrial buildings and railway lines have been replaced by museums, heritage sites and country trails. Land that had once been pitted and rough, dirty and choked with coal dust is now tamed, beautified and branded for the new tourist industry. Yet, feelings of loss have not left and we contend that these depressive unspoken, barely conscious feelings come to inhabit and score the bodies of new generations. We caught glimpses of the trauma of collective loss in the girls’ corporeal habits full of ticks, tummy holds and hesitations. Many teen girls are left saddled with a mourning that has not been properly addressed. In the next section, we move into a more upbeat note.
Dance of the Not-yet
On the second day, just before lunch, Cadi (pseudonym) called Jên aside into a private space in the corridor outside the hall. There were hushed whispers and the two returned. Cadi had told Jên that she would like to improvise to a tune of Jên’s choosing although it had to be ‘something upbeat’. Cadi prepared herself, stretching like an athlete before a long run and launched into an extraordinary two-and-a-half minute improvised dance.
As we watched Cadi spin around the room, we didn’t know what she would do or where she would go or move next and it seemed neither did she (Figure 3). We were drawn into her body as it became sound, rhythm and movement but also to the spaces grafted by her soaring limbs. Her moves seemed to be called forth by the space, light and rhythm of the room dancing.
She danced the immanent possibility of what more girls could become. She harnessed the folds of the in-between movements we had seen surging through the bodies over the last 36 hours, but which so often quickly become re-territorialised into stillness. In Cadi’s dance, they were present with a new intensity, enhanced by a total commitment that we could see, hear and feel. The dance moved us, and as we shared in the movement-moving it seemed to reach towards virtual possibilities. And when Cadi stopped moving, signalled by her final bow, the dance ended, and we were transfixed. Applause broke out. Then, as we felt the intensity of the dance lingering as a trace in the still, yet newly inscribed room, we clapped again.
It was the energy with which Cadi threw herself into each move that seemed to re-enact and amplify the beats of the valleys community, while as the same time she danced to a different beat. It was not only the community beat, of women’s stilled, scored bodies, it attuned to a deeper beat when women transgressed the molecular codes of comportment, for example, when long ago, they hauled coal like horses from underground, when women donned men’s clothes to become active miners refusing to be stilled and when those bodies affected a different sexual stirring (Renold and Ivinson, 2014).
In dance, Cadi lived at the threshold, she interrupted the dominant, sedimented molar beats of the valley that hold girls in place. Her dance became an interval – a time-space manifold that momentarily existed as the ‘tingling of the tummy’ or as the rush of adrenaline that girls experienced when feeling free – when they feel preacceleration moving through their bodies. Cadi became rhythm – not
Not an Ending: Bodying Knowing; Moving with the More-than
We have suggested that girls came into the hall with bodies already disciplined with the molar, molecular and biorhythms of their valleys community. Girls’ body movement repertoires are crafted within the virtual ecologies of place that strongly shaped movement repertoires. In these ecologies was a heaviness of the past that is reactivated in the present as traces that mark and score bodies in ways that cannot be articulated yet could be glimpsed from how the girls moved. In our longitudinal work, we have been struck by the way girls seemed to lose the desire to move. They told us of giving up physical hobbies and forms of play as they reached their early teens. The girls came into the workshops with specific kinds of postures and comportments that affectively communicated defensiveness and feelings of being closed in, giving us a sense of them being stuck.
We speculate that the historical legacies of mining are part of the virtual forms through which teen girls’ body movement repertoires are actualised as they grow up. The deep molecular beats of community practices infuse habits and incorporate dominant molar expectations of femininities haunted by legacies of the strongly demarcated gendered practices associated with mining communities. We imagined the loss of corporeal joy of movement as their bodies acquiesced to expectations of feminine comportment rooted in the past and soaked with the heaviness of present troubles.
Human bodies are able to
Inter-generational legacies inflect affective body movements that can only be known and felt by adopting the stances, postures and moves of community members. We began to experience them a little as we shared the movement repertoires girls brought into the hall. As researchers we had to inhabit them within the milieu to feel their weight. We suspect that by taking the girls further into the defensive forms of self-holding and habitual postures, Jên was able to move the girls into remembering. By modelling and exaggerating gestures and inviting girls to inhabit them anew and with purpose, we speculate that some of the affective elements imbricated in movement habits were brought to consciousness. This attunement to the vibratory potential in girls’ bodying practices seemed to surface affects and opened up possibilities for transformation epitomised by Cadi’s spontaneous ‘dance of the not-yet’. We speculate that such new corporeal practices disrupt repressive regimes and enable the communication of a wide range of expressions, such as hope, frustration, anger and belonging. By enabling prehensive feelings to form, the incipient inter-generational transmission of loss comes closer to conscious awareness and a process of healing might eventually begin. Girls may begin to resist the gendered burdens of the past and dance to the more-than of a different/ial beat.
Coda
We feel that widening the purview of what counts as knowledge is critical to tackling all kinds of injustices, and specifically in the valleys, where economic regeneration is not taking place yet where all kinds of educational experiments are happening (Renold, 2018, 2019a, 2019b). In the era of the ‘Capitalocene’
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(Moore cited in Stengers, 2019), young people’s micro and macro political activisms are becoming vital to ongoing life. To legitimate their embodied and prehensive knowing we, researchers, have to take risks by placing ourselves in the midst of things and develop and communicate a praxis that opens the world to speculative hope (Renold and Ivinson, 2019). We leave the last word to Stengers, who describes speculative pragmatism as; …a form of experimentation which implicates ourselves in our present, requiring that one allows oneself to be touched by what the present presents in the form of a test, and allowing what touches us the power to modify the relation we entertain to our own reasons. (Stengers, 2019: 3, italics in original)
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
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