Vicky Hunter, Professor in Site Dance BSMP, and CCCI Affiliate outlines her recent experience at the University of Malta’s annual School of Performing Arts Conference in Valetta.
In March 2025 I attended the University of Malta’s annual School of Performing Arts Conference in Valetta. The theme of this year’s conference was participation in the performing arts. CCCI funded my conference fee, and I contributed to a curated panel on the theme of Embodiment, Experience and Participation. My paper title ‘Bringing the Body with You’ implies leaving visual and conceptual approaches to knowing or understanding environments in the background, and instead to foreground embodied feeling and knowing, and enable felt connections between body and environment to come to the fore.
In the paper I explored my practice of facilitating embodied experiences in site-based movement workshops. This work engages participants with lived environments through the body, fostering human-nonhuman relations in urban sites and nature spaces. Drawing on examples from working with participants in the UK, Spain, Lebanon, Malta and Ireland I articulated how ‘site-based body practice’ (Hunter 2021) valorises embodied spatial practice and instigates corporeal dialogues between bodies, sites, and group members.
In the presentation I reflected on how moving together facilitates social bonding and connectivity through the group events. I suggested that this comes from a temporary sense of solidarity and communitas that emerges through the workshop activities. And, in particular, the transitional moments in which we walk from one site to another, pause in the in-between moments and take our goodbyes at the end of the session.
The paper contributes to a book chapter in development for a forthcoming edited collection with Routledge publishers titled Our Dance Democracy edited by Sara Black from Liverpool Hope University, in 2026.