Being Woman / Sandra Barefoot (2021)

This practice as research study focusses on the phenomena of embodied shame and resilience that manifests itself within women’s lived experience of prison. Using a phenomenological lens, this circular, multi-voiced, and multi-modal research draws upon embodied somatic articulations within the body, weaving an autobiographical response from the collective voice of women’s lived experience of shame and resilience. This research stemmed from an initial joint fellowship received (2018) from The Griffins Society in partnership with the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University – a fellowship investigating a traditional academic research process, focussing on a cognitive enquiry of how women of lived experience of shame become resilient from their shame. Shame lies within the embodied, primal limbic system – it does not present itself cognitively within the body. Hence, this research aimed to re-frame the traditional academic mechanisms of researching the phenomena of shame through a corporeal improvisational and somatic framework. As a situated embodied practitioner within a first-person perspective, I became the instrument of this research. In co-authorship with women’s recorded interview data, Being Woman became a solo performance outcome created from choreographic poetic scores in solo studio practice, inclusive of blind contour paintings, writings and audio recordings.