Political Signatures: a short film / Intra-active Signatures in Capoeira : More-than-Human-Pathways Towards Activism
- Submitting institution
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Roehampton University
: A - Dance
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies : A - Dance
- Output identifier
- 4807729
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- Elsevier
- Open access status
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- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This practice-led research documentary film captures interdisciplinary research and activism (Allegranti and Silas 2020, 2017, 2016, 2014) combining dance movement psychotherapy, cognitive neuroscience and the Afro-Brazilian art of Capoeira. Framed by feminist new materialism and posthumanism (Manning 2014; Harraway 2012; Barad 2007), and as an antidote to global injustices, the film builds on key issues elsewhere in my research: foregrounding conceptual and political discourses that work towards counterhegemonic understandings of bodies, affect, brain activity and relating. In doing so, it captures the ‘Capoeira Lab’, a hybrid dance-psychotherapy-neuroscience space of fieldwork that included capoeira exchange, interview-discussion and EEG experiment - with 36 culturally diverse practitioners and leaders of capoeira in the UK and Brazil. The research process emphasises kinaesthetic knowledge production in an attempt to decolonise the 'cognitive empire' (de Sousa Santos 2018) and proposes distributed and ‘intra-active’ (Barad 2007) relating between body politics, technology and environments typified by the capoeira exchange (Allegranti and Silas 2021). Political Signatures are captured in the film by aligning audio narratives with visual vignettes of participants playing and witnessing capoeira (with EEG). The film invites audiences to ‘diffract’ in Barad’s (2007) sense, or read insights from psychotherapy, neuroscience and capoeira through one another. In doing so, it presents core counterhegemonic themes: self-other entanglement, intersectional body politics and the co-constituted nature of relating with human and more-than-human others. Its interdisciplinary methodology assists in mediating and enacting vital issues of more-than-human rights and tackling ‘health inequalities’ (Public Health England, 2017). It offers an anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic embodied practice, and contributes to expanding ways of relating ethically, with/in difference. It has been disseminated at the American Association of Dance Movement Therapy, Texas, and with research partners Project Bantu and the New South Wales Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors, Australia.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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