This thesis is written in response to adrienne maree brown’s question, “What would I be doing with my time and energy if I made decisions based on a feeling of deep, erotic, orgasmic yes?”.

Since reading Pleasure Activism in 2019, I have asked myself how I can apply this in the way I live my life. Here, I explore how I can bring the methods this question has opened up in my practice, including somatic dance, to my practice-based research.

My work captures traces of the body’s experience as a type of mark-making and I am currently investigating this through the digital lens and writing.

In particular, I am interested in generating images through ongoing focused research activity from which ephemeral moments arise that I show as works. They often seem slight but are the joyous moments from months and years of endeavour and focused immersion.

As a conceptual framework for this bodily enquiry, I am considering resistance and the body as a political construct. The methodologies I am using are intersectional feminism and critical dance theory. Brown’s answer to the question is community organising and activism and I want to make sure I remain loyal to the spirit of this.

This thesis moves through four vessels experiencing the layers of the body from inside where I explore somatic dance and pleasure, to the haptic surfaces and edges of the body and out into relationship with absence and the absent other.

The slower tempo of searching for a theoretical underpinning for my practice and allowing the body to drive the research, is a counterpoint to the fleeting experiences in the work.

Ultimately, I am curious to see how my ‘deep, erotic, orgasmic yes’ can make a contribution to others when applied to my art practice.

Somatic Dance / Haptic / Pleasure / Absence / Resistance

1. What theoretical context might complement the authentic, physical, and intuitive space of enquiry of my ‘deep, erotic, orgasmic yes’?
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3. What are the challenges in making my body and sense of intuition present in the way I approach practice-based research?
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5. What impact does this ‘making present’ have on the work I make?
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7. What does my body have to say in this practice-based research?
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9. What does my ‘deep, erotic, orgasmic yes’ offer other people?

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There have been three key moments that have shaped this practice from which multiple strands have grown; attending the Oracular Practice, somatic dance classes taught by SERAFINE1369 at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, observing and recording snail trails on the garden path in the mornings and reading Andre Lepecki’s writing which opened up the world of critical dance theory.

These experiences have helped me to start to explore methods through which I can bring brown’s ‘full-bodied “yes!”’ (brown 2019: 22) more centrally into my art practice by allowing my life-long movement practice to have an overt role.

The work I made for my RCA Contemporary Art Practice MA show in 2024, was the Dance Traces films where I recorded brief clips of me dancing and abstracted them using Adobe After Effects, layered with an ambient track I made in Logic Pro.

The idea arrived two weeks before the exhibition so I worked intensively to bring it together and the results surprised me.

I needed time to reflect on what had come through, how effective my methods had been in producing art for exhibition and how I could develop it into a sustainable way of working. The body of work I have made on MRes has built on the experience of making the Dance Traces.

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I see this writing as the beginning of a journey, laying out the potential next steps for my research.

Through four ‘vessels’, I share related reading, reflections on my work made during MRes, encounters with work by other artists and the body’s voice sharing related experiences.

The 'erotic' is kept implicit through this writing, in keeping with Audre Lorde’s ideas in the ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ essay in Sister Outsider, (1984, 2007), exploring the relationship between pleasure and creativity, and referenced by brown. The erotic is an area I intend to explore more fully in the future.

In the first vessel, I share references that open up the idea of the body, reflect on my work in progress This Body is Under Construction / This Body is Undergoing Planned Maintenance, Mona Hatoum’s Corps Étranger and the body’s experience of menstruating, included here because of its internal movement and ability to keep the body in a state of flux.

Descending into the body in the second vessel, I reflect on our internal experience, my Traces of Internal Landscapes films, Steve McQueen’s Deadpan and my body shares its experience of falling asleep.

We move to the surface, edges and borders of the body in the third vessel, where the cells linked together open out to receive objects and information. I discuss my Photocopier Traces work, Katrina Palmer’s Dark Readings Group: Pitch Dark and Live performance, and the body shares its experience of falling over (and going to its first pole dancing class with sore knees).

In the fourth vessel, we flow out of our bodies and explore the absent other. We can feel the traces of another’s touch and are aware when they are not there. I reflect on Unbecoming, a collaborative performance with Ishika Goswami, SERAFINE1369’s IV and the body shares its experience of afterglow.

In conclusion we reflect back on the research questions and consider wider society, our need to support ourselves within capitalism and our cross-species connections.

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This is a subjective and phenomenological study of my bodily and sensory experience and the role this has in my practice.

I have approached this through a type of ‘embodied reading’ this year, following the references in an intuitive way and allowing serendipity to guide me, e.g. I found Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance, by going to the library when I was tired, browsing in the dance section, and feeling attracted to the title. I had the book with me when I went to my next somatic dance class and the teacher said, ‘A classic, enjoy!’. It is a key text for this work.

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