Dr Jenny Roche, Associate Professor at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance (IWAMD) at the University of Limerick has been a guest academic at VCA Dance in February/March 2025 during her sabbatical. During the course of her visit she presented on her research into micro-phenomenology and dancer knowledges, and conducted workshops with undergraduate and postgraduate dance students. In this post Dr Jenny Roche describes the Micro-phenomenological Interview Method and expands on her work.
Dancers embody complex states of awareness in creative process and performance that are informed by a broad range of interoceptive feedback as imagery and sensation. This immersion in non-linguistic and non-rational spaces, allows for deep diving into embodied experience through the affordances of physical expression and creativity. I have been using the Micro-phenomenological Interview Method to explore first person accounts of these experiences from dancers across various contexts. Developed by Claire Petitmengin , this interview method seeks to find a rich description of a singular lived moment through asking the interviewee to ‘evoke’ the memory of this moment and track the sensorial input as it was appearing to the interviewee at the time. This enables the interviewer to examine what happened in detail and to assist the interviewee to develop a granular description of the unfolding of the event. One purpose of this research is to highlight the knowledge that dance practice and performance builds over time and to ultimately explore how this might be more accessible to non-professional dancers across a range of ages and levels of ability.
I also draw on the field of Ideokinesis, originated by Mabel Elsworth Todd in the early 20th century, which utilizes imagery to support correct posture and functional movement. This imagery is conveyed through the use of metaphors, which allow for creative interpretation rather than strict adherence to a physical rule. This approach moves from the premise that the image conveyed by a teacher creates a response in the student to recreate this image in their own body without a conscious activation of individual muscles. If the description is sufficiently resonant, the body interprets it more easily. The use of imagery can bypass our self-conscious limitations and allow participants to respond creatively through movement, to create more enjoyment, imaginative play and easeful physicality. The research connects to this field of exploration, once the imagery has been generated through the micro-phenomenological Interview. I intend to explore this potential further to develop creative workshops that increase well-being through the use of imagery in movement, informed by micro-phenomenology.
Other applications of this work include the project Expanded Fields, a collaboration with Ruth Gibson, Bruno Martelli and Mel Mercier, exploring how dancers’ descriptions of moving can inform a Virtual Reality space that audiences can then enter and experience. I have also used the approach to identify dancers’ skills through a workshop in Tanzkongress 2022 in Mainz, Germany, whereby the following descriptions of dancing skills arose from micro-phenomenological inspired reflections:
· The capacity to hold different realities simultaneously by moving between real and imagined environments within a performance setting;
· lucidly navigating states of euphoria and heightened awareness;
· modulating bodily states to evoke a state of receptivity and trust in another dancer when teaching them choreography;
· the capacity to let go of a moment of heightened intensity and come back to a sense of their normal self;
· being aware of the layers of a particular choreographic moment by somehow experiencing the multiple iterations of the choreography as it collapses into one memory.
These descriptions attest to the sophisticated embodied knowledge that dancers cultivate in their training and professional practice, made evident through the workshop tasks.
In recent workshop environments at the ImPulsTanz Festival in Vienna 2024, I used these tools to explore how to map touch, and to evoke imagery as a means of unlocking movement possibilities and bring the dancing body into flow. Opening sensory perceptions through this focused attention brings awareness to how internal and external environments can lead us into movement. I found this particularly effective at the Public Moves class, a group open to the general public, with no dance training required.
My visit at VCA Dance in February/March this year has involved conducting micro-phenomenological interviews with Dance faculty and associated artists, and teaching workshops to undergraduate and postgraduate dance students. I am collating a series of micro-phenomenological interviews with dancers for analysis, to build towards a new book on the topic as well as to inform other aspects of my research.
In my workshops at VCA, I used a teaching approach developed in my work with MA Dance Performance students at the IWAMD. Students were guided through a series of tasks adapted from the micro-phenomenological interview to produce a written reflection on a lived moment. This text informed movement creation, through drawing on the language that emerges from the reflection which is often quite poetic, as the interviewee utilizes metaphors to articulate experiential states. I then supported the dancers to create movement improvisations from the state they had described as well as to create performative responses to the improvisations. The workshops ended in discussions on the method and the kinds of insights they produced.
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