Dario Cottica (Italy) is a professional flutist, pedagogue, and certified somatic practitioner of the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System. He is currently doing his PhD at the Department of Music and Movement Education/Rhythmics and Music Physiology, under the supervision of Stephanie Schroedter and Susanne Ravn (University of Southern Denmark). He is active as a performer in the fields of chamber music, contemporary music, and improvised music and movement, as well as in improvisational theater. As an educator, he holds a position as flute teacher in the Italian public education system, and teaches movement workshops for performers and laypeople of all walks of life.
 

Knowledge in Movement: An (auto)ethnographic and phenomenological investigation of Laban/Bartenieff somatic movement practices for instrumental music education
Musicians widely suffer from playing-related musculoskeletal disorders and technical and expressive limitations due to the lack of a proper movement pedagogy in instrumental music education. My research aims to support and facilitate instrumental practice by integrating it with the embodied knowledge of practitioners of the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System (LBMS), a practice of somatic inquiry that provides a unique framework to experience and understand human movement.
Somatic practices are a network of contemplative trainings that cultivate the awareness of the moving body and deliberately research embodiment processes to address physical and technical problems. Despite their effectiveness in educational and therapeutic settings, as well as in professional training in performing arts, they remain largely unexplored at the academic level, particularly concerning the cognitive processes and epistemological positions that underpin them.
My investigation starts from an autoethnographic study about my own subjectivity and situatedness as both musician and LBMS practitioner, combined with an extensive anthropological and phenomenological exploration into the perceptual experience of nine
LBMS experienced practitioners. Phenomenological and enactive concepts facilitate the analysis of rich descriptions of specialized embodied experiences and their situatedness, gathered over a period of nine months through participant observation and interviews within LBMS training sessions.
The analysis reveals that, for LBMS practitioners, the perception of the moving body is given as a fundamentally multimodal, culturally-mediated, and historically-structured experience. In particular, the sedimentation of sense-making processes of bodily movement involves not simply motor habits, but whole existential modes that weave together phenomena of corporeality, affectivity, and ideality. These processes are constituted at intersubjective and discursive levels, highlighting how there can be no natural, neutral, universal body, but rather bodies that are intrinsically cultural and embedded in sociolinguistic and historical contexts.
By clarifying the ways in which a specialized movement practice cultivates the perception of our embodied subjectivity, this study can hopefully advocate for a wider inclusion of contemporary somatic education in more accessible programs in instrumental music education and practice. This can address the reality that musicians are indeed movement professionals, and can make music education enactive: that is, acknowledging that learning transforms people throughout their dimensions of embodiment and affects how they relate to each other and the world. This research can also foster a reciprocal integration of LBMS knowledge and Dalcroze Eurhythmics. The ultimate goal of this study is to lay the groundwork for a novel pedagogy of the moving body for musicians, rooted in somatic movement knowledge.
In addition, somatic movement education has much to offer to phenomenology, enaction, and critical pedagogy. A somatic movement practice works as a space for critical interrogation of processes of constitution and sedimentation of bodily subjectivity, cultivating
an epistemic attitude oriented toward the pursuit of bodily and expressive freedom. Sociocultural practices and meanings are indeed incorporated into the sedimentation processes that constitute moving bodies, often embodying and perpetuating unfavorable or oppressive institutional spaces and social norms. Somatic practices instead invite critical reflection on processes of embodiment, thereby offering a pragmatic and transformative dimension to contemporary discourses on emancipation, equity, and justice.