So I stroke the thighs towards the knees and let my hands collapse into the floor. Fingers collapse, and then I turn my hands, the heel of that hand and my elbow fell and buckled.

What dance offers is an intervention into how the body is disciplined.

It's quite nice just to move.

The body is always in relationship to discipline. We're all trained, that's how we come into our bodies, the training of our parents, the training of our social groups.

Now I'm carving with my elbow in space. Movement for me and dancing is deeply philosophical. And I'm letting my ribs let go and I'm releasing so that my head comes to fall on the floor.

The politics of the soft body is that softness should be applicable to all bodies.

I'm just really interested at the moment about this idea of movement as a way of encountering the nature of our beingness. For some reason, this light makes my foot flick up like a reflex almost.

Rather than listening to hustle culture, which yes, says we need to be firmer harder, more resilient.

My fingertips twitch.

Maybe it should be going to its natural state, which is softer.

Dance offers a way to think through those disciplinary practises, to soften them.

I start to soften and breathe and that makes my spine and my pelvis arc back as I let go and release. I'm just enjoying myself really.

Work is making us sick. Long hours, burnout, anxiety, a wreaking havoc with our bodies and a study last year found that work stress is on the rise in Europe. Soft Life sprung up online as a refusal to put our body through the wringer in the name of productivity.

I do think with the workplace there is this expectation of the way that the body has to perform. It's not a body first ideology, it's a work first ideology. My name is Jameisha Prescod. I am an artist, filmmaker, writer based in South London.

Jameisha Prescod was part of this year's Hyperfunctional Ultra Healthy Programme at Somerset House Studios.

A lot of my work, no matter what the format is, explores illness, disability and how that interacts with one's identity. The office space, that environment is often not that great for many bodies, but it doesn't matter, you have to sit in it. Or even retail, you have to stand, "I don't care, it looks unprofessional." So the body has to conform to that. Regardless, whether you're disabled or non-disabled, different people need different things. I have a chronic illness called lupus. It's an autoimmune disease and one of the symptoms is fatigue and some of the symptoms are joint pain.
So when I'm pushing my body to the limits to try and be in this hustle culture to succeed, in the end, it could mean one month in bed. The problem is though, is that I still thought I could hustle out of the chronic illness and so there was a big part of after my diagnosis where I just worked extra hard, really, really, really hard because I was just like, "well, people are not going to want to hire me because I'm disabled, so I'm going to have to work harder." I felt like maybe I could hustle myself well.

Softness is tactile, it recenters our relationship with the physical. In this episode, we look at what that means for the body and artists who are reconsidering ways of being.

I'm Florence Peak, visual artist, dancer, choreographer.

How can movement help us get inside different ways of being? Florence Peak is an artist in residence at Somerset House Studios.

The hustle, the grind, all those things I really notice in terms of contraction and tension in my body. I'm really lucky to have access to modes of being and relationships to the body through dance and sematic practises. So shall I just... Yeah. Sematic being of the body. Collapsing in my left side by my wrist. Which is an opportunities to actually process that level of adrenaline. Softening again, softening and head softening. Softening into the floor. A way of being in the world that is out of what's this producing? ... Is a release and relief. Relief. And for me that's highly political. That's deeply spiritual even. Let's take our awareness to the skull.

Florence is trained in Skinner Releasing Technique

Developed by Joan Skinner in the sixties.

It's a somatic practise that uses poetic imagery and sound to encourage the release of tension in the body.

The tissues of the face soften over the forehead, over the cheekbones and along the jaw. And it's where really the experience of the body is privileged over the look. One of the primary purposes is this idea of softening. Through softening, I am alive to readiness. The breath as white mist spirals out through our limbs. Something like that.

Dance practises don't emerge independently from other cultural moments. My name's Martin Hargreaves and I am currently head of Choreographic School at Sadlers Wells. A key moment for softness as resistance within dance practise is actually through Isadora Duncan at the turn of the last century. She's a really key figure for thinking through how softness can resist certain forms of productivity.

Plié. Relevate posset. Up and down, up, down other leg.

Part of what Duncan's responding to is industrialization. And a certain notion that both factories and ballet, she links those two things, are regimented forms of production. She even says that bodies are becoming like merchandise. She's trying to propose a dancing that moves away from imitation to inward discovery and finding out how your body is formed, what your body wants to do, which then gets its real full expression much later on in somatic practises.

I think when we're we're talking about bodies, I think we also have to be quite careful about abstraction.

3D microphone to tuning fork. Left side, left side, left side, right side, right side, right side.

Her vacant and wobbling face flattening into each other.

Because we're not just talking about anybody, it's not this floppy, malleable thing that can be kind of taken apart. Bodies belong to people, bodies are people.

Hold the spine in the palm of one hand and gently hold the leaves open with the fingers of the other hand. Alternate. Sweep your hands up from the base of the back, either side of the spine over the shoulders and stroke smoothly down with your fingertips to the start the lower back.

So my name's Elona Seger and I'm an artist and studio resident at Somerset House.

Malleable agents.

An abstraction is used as a instrument of social organisation. Things like statistical analysis and quantification hides people behind numbers, behind data.

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Memory is different to habit. Creatures of the commonplace. We have archived ourselves in a future arcane alliance with the functional.

And I think this is something that's interested me for a really long time, bodies that are hidden behind the data they generate, they become data bodies.

Disappearing bodies within a mute and distort language.

A lot of my work is about the rigidity of systems, how certain infrastructures make bodies invisible.

We are balanced between tangible folds of breath.

Observe the bad habit in minute detail.

The healthcare system is a place where our bodies become hyper visible.

The idea of softness when you are a Black person dealing with pain especially is quite interesting.

But access to care isn't equal.

I don't want that strong Black woman narrative. I am strong, but I don't want the narrative out there because then you think I can accept way more than I think I actually can.

I have such a weird relationship with pain. I almost feel like sometimes it's my friend and it's my enemy.

The idea for On Black Pain came during one of the lockdowns. I was doing a lot of reading just about colonial medicine, ideas about Black pain, specifically that there's this notion that comes from slavery that Black bodies don't feel pain in the same ways as white people. It's documented in multiple medical articles and there was a study done focusing on America, but I imagine it mirrors here, that many doctors actually still believe some of those ideas. I had an own experience of having laparoscopic surgery and after I came out of it, I watched a white woman across from me get pain medication to take home, I didn't get any. I asked and they were like, "The doctor didn't prescribe you any pain medication." We had the same surgery the same day.

You're going through this thing by yourself and people aren't believing that it's real.

So I wanted to make a piece where I had three modern Black people speaking for themselves on their own accord about pain and how it affects them.

When I think of pain, I cannot not think of sickle cell. I've been experiencing the same pain for 33 years. I'm still mind blown. It doesn't get easier.

One of the people in it, she has sickle cell anaemia. She had a crisis, she had to be in hospital and was asking for pain medication and they wouldn't give her any. She was begging for it and the nurses were like, "If you keep doing it, I'm going to kick you out." And she was like, "I have to be soft because otherwise they're going to kick me out. They're going to say I'm aggressive. I'm in pain, right? I want shout and scream. And even with sickle cell, when I'm in the worst pain of my life, I have to somehow sometimes shrink myself to be soft so that they can have sympathy for me."

Black pain is so painful and Black pain is deep. And Black pain is like every other pain.

She ended up having to call an ambulance to go to another hospital because they wouldn't treat her. And what was quite sad is that within the pandemic period, a young man died like that. He had sickle cell, he called 999 while he was in hospital because they ignored him and he passed away. Pain makes us angry, the way we are being treated makes us really angry. I want to shout, I want to be annoyed, but as Black women, I don't think that we have the privilege of being able to do that because we're seen as strong, aggressive, scary, and we have a high pain tolerance. It's almost like we have to perform softness so that someone who is treating us can see the value in our pain and our humanity and actually then go, "You deserve sympathy. You deserve care." Which is why I think Soft Life is so important and it's why it makes sense that it was started by Black women because I think soft doesn't necessarily get put next to what we look like.

Softness tends to be related to ideas of placid or inviting or caring. And actually softness can be slippery, it can fall between cracks, it can be hard to grasp. The Body Blow was a long-term project that was made in collaboration with people with lived experience of asbestos exposure, asbestos cancers. Someone who's exposed to asbestos, they're stuck between these different ways that their bodies are framed, from the welfare and benefit system to the medical system where they've been treated, through to the language of litigation and law, because many of them are pursuing compensation claims. So they're constantly having to navigate these different languages that are both supportive and also obstructive.
But also think about whose bodies matter? To be exposed to asbestos, it tends to be related quite strongly to ideas of work labour that's quite invisible. So historically dockyard workers, factory workers. And in the contemporary, now that it's illegals and material, it's plumbers, it's electricians, it's asbestos removal workers. Something that is really unsettling about the projects and also the work that we made together was realising that the body archives a lot of those things. It takes about 40 years for asbestos to develop in your lungs, so the body becomes this awful archive.

How can the Soft Body challenge social hierarchies?

There was a real questioning of the hierarchies of dance cultures in the 1960s, a much more radical sense of democracy. Contact improvisation is a form developed by a dance artist called Steve Paxton. He became interested in the early 1970s in falling, in giving into gravity. And all of the classes begin with a practise that he named the Small Dance. And the Small Dance is a slow survey, inward survey, so often you do it with your eyes closed of checking how your body is always dancing, it's always relating to gravity,

What's up or down, what's in or out, what's...

The body is always in relationship to discipline.

Letting go in the base of the skull a bit more.

Dance offers a way to think through those disciplinary practises and actually it gives you the option to soften them and to rethink, "Well, is this actually good for the body? Is this good for me? Is this good for a society?"

Arm elongates and the arm let's go.

"What would happen if I work with others to fall, to give in?"

Releasing and softening in the ribs and in the stomach. I think I like to disengage this prescribed idea that we have of relationship to body.

For me, Florence Peaks work is radical in a whole range of ways. I think her attention to the materiality of the body as existing next to other forms of materiality and not necessarily in a high hierarchical relationship.

Maybe I'm touching this table or I'm touching this wall and I'm feeling the temperature. I'm starting to perceive it sound or I'm perceiving it's grittiness.

There's something there that I think takes us into a question around the interdependence of bodies. How do we articulate selfhood in relation?

Was that actually a wall or was it some gritty teeth that was scraping along my forearm there or something? Factual Actual is a painting method, but it's also a performance. We used pulley systems with canvases attached to them. The dancers pull and release up and down and thudding to the ground. And these are having the audience enveloped and the performers are being dragged from underneath the canvases. The paintings are continuously shifting, but they're protagonists in the work, so they're equal to the dancers. I think there is something about softening our perceptions to start seeing other things and their equality with us, how they choreograph the body, how they affect the body. So these canvases are also choreographing us, but I'm taking that as a metaphor in a way, the white male western canon of painting.

What does it mean to be well? What does it mean to recover? Our relationship with health and recovery can be unrealistically rigid.

There's an expectation for me with lupus to have this amazing story of, "Jameisha started very sick and she didn't know what was going on with her and then got diagnosed. And then she changed her life and now she's thriving. She's still has lupus, but she's great now." I think that's what people want to see because it makes them more comfortable, when the reality is sometimes I get very, very sick, sometimes I don't. But there is this expectation that's the goal that I'm going towards. End of the day, I have lupus, it's a chronic autoimmune disease, there is no cure. So what happens when there is no cure for your illness? What does recovery mean?

What does it really mean to design with an idea of difference?

Our expectations of how things are supposed to be in terms of linearity, that's not realistic. And an illness will make you really confront that. That will make you come to the reality that things are not in a straight line.

I'm currently working on a project with the Alvar Aalto Foundation in Finland. Paimio Sanatorium was built by Aino and Alvar Aalto in the early 1930s as an instrument for healing and as an experimental way to treat tuberculosis. It looks like a spaceship in the middle of a pine forest in Finland, but I'm interested in it because it was designed around the horizontal body. So the idea that you enter a hospital, your life is in suspension for a short time and then you leave recovered, even though that was quite an idealistic version of the hospital, because many people didn't leave the hospital. And I was interested in what that represents in terms of this quite linear idea of recovery. And it throws up a question of, "Well, what if you have a different relationship to the hospital? What if your relationship to the hospital isn't linear? It's more complicated, it's more messy, and it isn't a straightforward process of recovery."

Learn to get a balance between should and want.

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One of the key proponents of a soft body as a body that is resistant was actually Mahatma Gandhi. This notion that the soft body doesn't cooperate in British Colonial regime. It doesn't allow for that instrumentalization of the body into this productive machine, which simply carries on the violence of the British Empire. There's something there within Gandhi's principles of non-cooperation, which are about stopping the machinery of colonialism. It's not about rising up and fighting back. It's actually about stopping, to be non-productive.

The politics of the soft body is that everybody can be a soft body. So firstly, coming from a racial component, softness should be applicable to all bodies. The body by nature is soft, it's very squidgy and soft. It needs to be honoured in that way.

We call it fight or flight, but actually there are other options. You don't have to fight and you don't have to leave. You can actually use the information of adrenaline to actually just settle into the body and understand that the weight of the body is a very powerful thing and becomes very difficult to move. It takes far more people, far more police to move a soft body than it does to move a hard body.

I think Soft Life, the idea that we are going to put our softness, our comfort first sometimes over what is expected of us, I think it can be a very powerful tool. But I think also we have to be careful that it doesn't get commodified.

For me, in my professional practise and my personal life, I'm interested in thinking about how do I revalue connectivity? How do I value slowness and being with others? Or maybe something that Soft Life captures also, it's not about instrumentalizing connection.

I feel that it's really political. I don't think that my work necessarily has a big P on it, but I feel the generation, how those works are generated feels hugely political, which feels a bit more hidden.

A lot of these things about softness, just on a practical level, on a personal level in my studio, they're quite boring. It's about being organised. It's about allowing time for people that's practical. It's about writing schedules. It's about remembering ahead what someone might need. Often the languages of care, softness become words that don't have a practical force within the whole institution. They just become a frame that sits within an exhibition space. And I'm interested in creating work that problematizes that actually. If we as artists find ways to actually use those systems in a different way, there's a soft resistance that happens within that.

Thanks to Florence Peak, Jameisha Prescod, Martin Hargreaves and Elona Segar. Soft Life is produced by Alana Chance and Axel Kacoutié with sound by Axel Kacoutié and additional music by Ellens Rige.