Routledge Creative Bodies in Therapy, Performance and Community: Research and Practice that Brings us Home

Creative Bodies in Therapy, Performance and Community champions several diverse and innovative approaches in the professional engagement with the creative body as a catalyst for change in therapy, education, somatics, and performance. With contributors from the wide-ranging fields of performance and visual arts, psychotherapy, dance and somatics, this book articulates practice-based experiences in a creative language. The readers are invited to move from the process of reading, into the experience of being in and making sense of the world through a moving body. The book meanders purposefully through practice-led embodied approaches in research that generate new knowledge, methodological frameworks that have emerged in response to the needs of different contexts, as well as oferring a window on first-hand experience as practice.The book will appeal to a wide range of practitioners and trainees in dance movement psychotherapy, arts therapies, counselling and psychotherapy, somatics, community practice and performance. Review ‘Frizell and Rova’s book is fizzing with ideas, thoughts and bodies of all kinds that continually touch, move and morph into new assemblages. The book is unsettling – in the best sense of the word: questioning, probing and deconstructing established binaries and norms, and in the process revealing new vistas of humanity’s capacity for compassion, connection and depth. Reading this book was a stirring experience for me, not dissimilar to that of reading David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, which is high praise indeed.’ - Dr Farhad Dalal, psychotherapist, group analyst and author, UK‘Caroline Frizell and Marina Rove have brought together an inspiring collection of voices that weave a picture of contemporary embodied research and practice as creatively, politically, critically and evocatively alive and kicking. As co-editors, authors and co-authors of chapters, they bring a spirit of spontaneity, inclusiveness, warmth and humour to a complex and rigorous intersectional enquiry. The book spans a range of research, theoretical and practical approaches to creative, movement, dance and community psychotherapy, its contributors representing and working with a truly diverse set of people and contexts. This anthology walks its talk or rather dances it….as the construction of the book, its layers, and the dialogue within and between each chapter, shimmer and resonate. Each chapter takes us through steps of embodied knowing towards transformation that goes beyond the personal and into wider social change.’ - Roz Carroll, psychotherapist, trainer and author, UK‘Self-reflective, experimental and full of warmth, this collaborative book is a welcome example of creative non-fiction that deepens the project of integrating the embodied and the relational.’ - Jane Ryan, Founder and Creative Director of Confer, UK About the Author Caroline Frizell, PhD, is senior lecturer and researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as therapist and supervisor working indoors and out. She is committed to posthuman, eco-feminist perspectives, working at the intersections of dance movement psychotherapy, ecopsychotherapy, and critical disability studies.Marina Rova, PhD, is programme convenor, lecturer, and researcher at Goldsmiths University of London and co-founder of Arts Minded CIC. Her work is nourished by embodied and relational approaches to knowing and being-in-the-world and led by a curiosity about the developmental, existential and socio-political contexts that shape our narratives.