Deep Flow: A Tentacular Worlding of Embodied Dance Practice, Knowing, and Healing

Abstract

Deep Flow is an embodied dance practice that explores performative phenomenologies by entwining two different sets of practice: phenomenological research and artistic research that increases our sense of well-being, linking it to the aims of the Creative Public Health Humanities. It is an artistic praxis that is enfolded in a world of the human and nonhuman, and activated by a performative phenomenological framework, tentacular worlding, in which to explore both sets of practice. The entanglement of phenomenological methods and strands of research practice such as embodied dance practice, creative expression, and analyses of visual, verbal, and biometric data provides ways of researching through lived phenomena. These processes set into action through “doing” deepen our understanding of how performative phenomenologies and embodied research may be used to create knowledge from a first-person lived experience. The model should not be seen as a one-dimensional form but an ever-evolving emergent process, a worlding of lived experience, research, phenomena, practices, and creative embodied expression to configure, dance as a way of knowing, well-being, and healing.