Somatic practices, in their self-reflexive nature, emphasize the body-mind unit as well as a self-awareness that embraces “self” as a bundle of sensations, actions, emotions and thoughts. Drawing the consequences of Georges Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and Karen Barad’s understanding of entanglement, I wish to open up the promise of somatic practices and explore the hypothesis of relational somatics, as an embodied, self-reflexive practice of relationality. Relating implies living with alterity. The Other is always unknown, forcing us to acknowledge the existence of an experience that is not (completely) shared. Relational somatics would thus actively embrace and articulate the awareness of partiality and ignorance with the other inputs composing experience.

This an aesthetic and technical project, more than a therapeutic one. The stakes will be to elaborate an entangled/relational understanding of “the soma” (self-aware and dynamically entangled sensations, thoughts, relationships etc.) through the development and study of dance practices that perform it: produce, activate and make it appear. As an artistic project it must embrace invention and artifice; as a research project it means paying attention to the frictions between projected and lived experience. Taking up Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self, I wish to design a reflected practice of dance, as a technology of the entangled self.