This is a ground-breaking new book that re-considers a range of trajectories of influence across the established canon of twentieth-century practices and challenges conventions of performer training historiography.

The book explores the pioneering radical sensing work of Elsa Gindler (1885–1961) and the practices of five women inspired by her. Moving from the early twentieth-century Physical Culture movement, through Modern and Postmodern dance training in Europe and North America to contemporary devised theatre in the UK, this is the first book-length study of Gindler’s pedagogy in relation to performance. It will allow trainers, arts practitioners, theatre, dance and art historians and students to understand previously unexplored gaps in the knowledge of performance, Somatics, philosophies of knowledge and their co-development. Identifying how feminist ways of knowing and being are embedded in practices of body awareness, the book brings Gindler’s unique practices into dialogue with philosophies drawn from pragmatism and phenomenology and explores concepts of concentration and Gelassenheit, situation, gestalts of breathing, negative epistemology and phronesis to create a picture of Elsa Gindler’s work as situated, context specific and inter-subjective.

Drawing on the author’s 30 years of experience of training in practices inspired by Elsa Gindler, the book allows theories and practices to converse and merge building a rich, and multi-dimensional perspective of performer training, rooted in practice, but in dialogue with academic understanding. Woven throughout are practical experiments for the reader to try, and analyses of performances and previously unpublished workshop material and notes. Beyond performance, the book locates Gindler’s work within the wider context of social and ecological crises and suggests that this radical sensing practice can be used as a quiet way to make a difference in the world.