“Fluffy edges, dough and resonating bodies”: A somatic perspective on the connection between music and dance / Franziska Boehm (2020)

This practice as research study explores, through a phenomenological lens, the relationship between Polanyi’s idea of tacit knowledge and the variously-informed phenomena of somatic experience. The open-ended creative process that is the context of this thesis interweaves voice, movement, drawing and writing. Through these different forms of embodied somatic articulations, a web of possible meaningmaking processes emerge, which nourish the key area of enquiry in this study: that meaning-making appears through the relationship between tacit knowledge and the
somatic experience.

Essential recalibrations of the creative process due to COVID-19 led to an integration of digital and filmic elements into the research and informed the final creative outcome of this study: the online performance getting here : being here. Although the aim was not primarily to cultivate documentation as an artistic practice, the different kinds of knowledge encountered and generated, the nature of the online work and the remaining archive stimulated new pathways into the realms of artistic documenting.

An undercurrent in this thesis, which originated out of the archiving nature of the online performance, is the exploration of the academic format as a further visual artistic expression. This undertaking is explored by embedding an artistically informed substructure into the academic writing regulations.