Free bodily movement in a creative process: an autoethnographic inquiry

Abstract

This study investigates how bodily movement influences a creative process. The requirement for creativity in media companies is constant. Most people oversee or underestimate the value of bodily movement in the personal creative process. The first part of the thesis contains an overview of interdisciplinary research on creativity, creative processes, and the connection between bodily movement and creative processes. Human creativity is a field of study that reflects inner processes, this is the reason for conducting an empirical part of this study in the form of an autoethnographic inquiry. This research method allowed an immediate, holistic and intimate access to the primary data source – the self. The empirical part includes a preliminary 6-month investigation phase and free bodily movement experiments. The experiments were planned during the preliminary phase, their structure is based on a personal bodily movement experience and on the doctorate research of Gill Green “Fostering creativity through movement and body awareness practices: A postpositivist investigation into the relationship between somatics and the creative process” (1993) and Rosalinda Ruiz Scarfuto “Investigations into the impact of tactile perception on the artist's creative process” (2018). Free bodily movement enhances the body-mind connection, and through that, the entire body-mind system takes part in a fluid and spontaneous creative process. The challenge is to provide an effective frame-work supporting this process. The key elements of this framework can be grouped into three interconnected topics: space-time, safety, and constraints. During the course of my research, I discovered that the larger shifts in the social structures are needed for enabling the holistic body-mind attitude in a creative process. Though this research is an individual journey, the findings and ideas emanating from it can be applied much on a wider basis. As an example, I would suggest free bodily movement sessions as a means of helping Master's degree students struggling to write their theses in a socially isolated and sedentary environment.