https://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/events/performing-lives-with-barbara-formis/

Pragmatics : Practice : Praxis is a three-day workshop that brings together artists and researchers from Europe and Australia. Its aim is double: first to explore how different forms of practice are deployed and given value in the fields in which we work; second to create space for cross-fertilization and experimentation by sharing, transferring and then implementing researchers’ established methods and tools, thus producing new hybrid models of practice.  

The workshop begins with this keynote presentation from Barbara Formis, titled 'Performing Lives':

Thinking is a bodily and immanent practice. As a speculative and abstract dimension of human understanding, philosophy is traditionally considered to be in dialectical tension with physical experience and as such philosophers have often disconnected ideas from movements and gestures in so far as sensibility was habitually thought to be an obstacle to clear reflection.

In contrast to this conventional perspective, this talk attempts to show that not only do we constantly think via gestures, movements and physical experiences, but also that there is no need to disconnect a concept from its own embodiment once the concept has emerged. The concept remains immanent to the body. Passing from Wittgenstein’s idea of “form of life” to the pragmatist aesthetics initiated by Dewey’s idea of “art as experience”, I propose an analysis of the philosophical framework of postmodern dance (Yvonne Rainer) and of Happenings (Allan Kaprow), in order to underline the theoretical and conceptual research that is already at work in the field of performance, the latter being understood as a sensorial dimension intrinsically linked to ordinary life.