ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the aesthetic – and bioaesthetic – practice of British choreographer Russell Maliphant (b. 1961), whose engagement with holistic practices on a therapeutic level (Rolfing, for example) transform – indeed shape – the quality of the motion he and his dancers nurture. From martial arts and attention to biotensegrity (a way of understanding the structural interpenetration of living matter) to concern with ecological and architectural or relational aspects of everyday movement, Maliphant’s work, this chapter argues, embodies a mode of askēsis, in Greco-Roman terms, after Foucault, a training or practice in living, and also spiritual philosophy, a way of apprehending the challenge of everyday living as openness to balance, or ease, or fluidity, inasmuch as these cohere with the perpetual search for the integration of motion and rest (metabolē). Also understood in terms of zētēsis – research, inquiry – this choreographic practice meshes health and a continuous search for living form.
