Principal Investigator

Dr. Eline Kieft works as Research Fellow for the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. She combines her passion for anthropology, qualitative research methodologies, shamanic paradigms, experiential pedagogies, movement as a way of knowing, and her intimate knowledge of the dancer’s body. Eline is also Associate Editor of Dance, Movement and Spiritualities, and a qualified Movement Medicine teacher. Looking forward to hear from you: info@elinekieft.com

Co-Investigators

Ben Spatz (they/he) is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner working at the intersections of artistic research and critical theories of embodiment and identity. They are the author of several books, including What a Body Can Do (2015) and Race and the Forms of Knowledge (2024), as well as founding editor of the videographic Journal of Embodied Research. Ben has been affiliated with the Universities of Huddersfield, Leeds, Oxford, and CUNY and is now an Assistant Professor in Creative Practice at University of Birmingham. Their ongoing Judaica project explores diasporic and decolonial jewishness through performance, writing, and video. For more information, please visit www.urbanresearchtheater.com.

Doerte Weig’s fascination is to in-earth how human physicality relates to socio-political transformation and ecological awareness. In her artistic research-creation, Doerte combines ecosomatic practice, anthropology (PhD), environmental humanities, and performance, Doerte moves with the notion of socio-somatics, referring to our ancestors’ egalitarian practices of keeping power circulating as part of ecosystemic thinking-doing. For Doerte, nurturing this kind of ecosomatic aliveness speaks to issues around human and planetary healing, (re)generative cultures, relational intelligence and decolonial approaches to power. Check out Doerte’s work at: www.movementresearch.net and her latest audiovisual editorial project at: ‘Listening with Earth – Ecologies of Embodiment’.

Mentor

Dr. Simon Ellis is a dance artist. He is from New Zealand but now lives in London, and is Associate Professor at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. His recent choreographies are Pause. Listen (2014), Recovery (2014), and We Record Ourselves (2016). He also works closely with Colin Poole as Colin, Simon and I, and their latest work is Our White Friend (2016). Simon’s current focus is on the ways in which screen culture and the rise of screens are changing dance and choreographic practices, ideas and understandings. https://www.skellis.info.

Advisory Board

Prof. Vero Benei, Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, advocates embodied research at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris and will input to the project in her capacity as an anthropologist, with extensive fieldwork in Colombia, as well as her experience as a dance facilitator.

Dr. Jerome Lewis, Reader in Social Anthropology at University College London, will offer the toolkit to anthropology students at UCL. Through his extensive research experience with the hunter-gatherers in Central Africa he has an excellent grasp of the needs for embodied training as preparation for fieldwork.

Dr. Thomas Groß, Director of the Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security (CCCS), a UK academic centre of excellence in cyber security research. Being a movement practitioner himself, he includes movement in student supervision sessions, and his expertise from an entirely different academic discipline will inform the applicability of the toolkit to other areas than ethnography and social sciences.