Our body recognises kindness: Moving, nature and labours unacknowledged

Abstract

This article takes us outside and explores how creative practice research might act as a counter flow to the unrelenting drive for metrics within the neoliberal university structure. Through an unfolding reflexive walking practice of somatic awareness and attention shifting, the article proposes deliberate off-task outdoor activity in nature as a site of micro resistance and female agency. It considers the conceptualisation of distraction that is afforded by walking outdoors as a way to shift meaning potentials where an activity that might be perceived as off-task is far from purposeless and discusses ways such activities engender and discovers their own meaning. It examines how the sensory play afforded by the outdoor practices in nature constitute self-kindness and discusses the necessity of nondiscursive meaning through two performance research projects. The final section, reports on the conception of the performative encounter Moving out of Door (MooD) as an action of kindness, by asking: How might I design a performance that enacts this shift into a state of self-kindness for others?