Talks and workshops.  

Energy is a concept that crosses from the natural world to the human body and back. The Soviet academician (but also a prince and old believer) Aleksei Ukhtomsky claimed that modern physics borrowed all its concepts from the human body and its actions: mass, force, pressure, impulse, speed… In the early twentieth century the direction of influence switched: physics and the natural sciences fed into human experience and avant-garde art. The concepts of impulse, movement and force become interiorised: feeling impulse in our body, we experience agency; sensing our own movement, we feel alive; experiencing resistance to our action, we become aware of the real world. Like energy, the concepts of impulse, movement and force travel between scientific theories and cultural beliefs. Making impulse, movement and force part of human experience, early twentieth-century culture re-appropriated physical concepts. It opened up ways to new art practices, including modern dance. Both talks will be followed by practical workshops in which we will sense our movements. The workshop is devised to suit everybody of all ages; no particular training is required. 

I. Irina Sirotkina, Mastering impulse in science and dance
Originally derived from bodily functions (heart pulse, breath), the concept of impulse entered the neurosciences and psychology. Emerging in the early twentieth century, free dance explored and embodied the concept of impulse. Before going on stage, Isadora Duncan awaited an impulse coming from the universe of music into the source of movement, which she located in the solar plexus. Her many followers in Imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union claimed that, with no impulse, movement is dead. New, free dance, transformed the everyday notion of impulse as an uncontrolled, unconscious, often asocial behaviour, into a positive and liberating force which connects the dancer’s body to the cosmos and makes energy flow between performers and the audience. In the movement workshop we will practice bodily impulse in the manner of early twentieth-century dancers. 

II. Roger Smith, Force and the ‘sixth sense’
What constitutes the proverbial ‘sixth sense’, additional to the traditional Aristotelian five senses? Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were several candidates, from sexual appetites to the ability to communicate with the dead, but more often the sense of movement and sense of force. Being alive is a continuous cycle of action (self) and resistance (world), subjectively experienced as one force versus another. It is often noted that feeling movement against resistance, we know reality, through participation in the play of forces making the world. In the womb, the foetus has its first sensations from the rhythm of the mother’s heart and breath, and from movement and its containment. The modern term for the force sense is kinaesthesia (or, in physiological terms, proprioception). In Soviet Russia, kinaesthesia was discussed, in language introduced by I. M. Sechenov (in the 1860s) as central to ‘the dark sense’, our sense of being embodied and active in material reality. The feeling for movement has a place in modern culture, in dance but also in walking and in sports like climbing. 

Irina Sirotkina is Honorary Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University and a practitioner of early modern dance as inspired by Isadora Duncan. 

Irina Sirotkina's most recent book is Dancing Freedom: Modern Dance in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (Bloomsbury 2026).

Roger Smith is Honorary Professor at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, and Reader Emeritus at Lancaster University. 

Roger Smith has published The Sense of Movement: An Intellectual History (Process Press, 2019), Kinaesthesia in the Psychology, Philosophy and Culture of Human Experience (Routledge 2023) and, most recently, Modern Soul Experience in Psychology and Philosophy (Routledge 2026).

Jointly they published The Sixth Sense of the Avant-garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomsbury 2017).