Embodied Polyaesthetics

The term Embodied Polyaesthetics contains concepts for educational or therapeutic framed experiential arts activities grounded in perception, aesthetic feeling and aesthetic empathy, leading to expressive arts performance from the body sense

What is Polyaesthetics?

Polyaesthetics is the culture of perception. Perceiving an object (the world) is a multi-sensory act with all of the senses being involved. Multi-sensorial awareness leads to in-depth-perception ("Mehrsinnen Gewahrsein" or "Mehrwahrnehmung") and has direct influence on the quality of moulding, shaping and performing 

The Polyaesthetic theory and method was developed by Prof. Wolfgang Roscher (1927-2002), a German  educator, musician and theatre director. Roscher was fascinated by the concept of the Bauhaus School and the holistic view of the Bauhaus teachers crossing arts and craft

Expressive Arts Focusing - © Bree Anne /Unsplash - Embodied Polyaesthetics

Roscher's work (theory, practice and philosophy of polyasesthetics) is the foundation for an interdisciplinary training model being taught in various European schools, colleges and conservatories, mainly in Austria, Switzerland and Germany

Roscher found out that all art disciplines engage with all the sensory and communicative modalites to some extent. This is to be found both in art perception (receptive arts engagement) and in producing art (active art engagement)

Polyaesthetics go along with experiential receptive-active arts engagement (the doing of taking the Fine Arts into low-skilled-high-sensitivity arts activities from the body sense)

What are Experiential Arts Activities?

How Prof. Eugene Gendlin would have said it ...

Words are social forms. Arts are social forms. Arts themselves are not moving forward alike words are not moving forward when you use words or arts only. So taking arts only is not moving forward and interpretating arts only is not moving forward unless you approach the arts experiential

This means to ask if there is a step coming when you are refering to your art. What I mean here is a step opening up to something. Even when you interprete a piece of art in best ways, the whole stays within a certain social form and social forms do not change. What changes the form and brings a shift, this little step of forwarding, is to pause and wait for art not to come by intention or creative skills or through improvisation. What comes as art comes through the body, and what comes through the body is social or cultural and with a More of that is not part of the social and the cultural. This kind of art has forwarding life energy in it. This kind of art is what I call Experiential Art

How Eugene Gendlin would have said it are words coming from an inner voice speaking Gendlinish (Gendlin-like), they are no original words of Eugene Gendlin

Perceiving, experiencing and expressing aesthetically from the body sense makes space for more than all the senses to perform

Doing Polyasthetic activities experientially (from felt experiencing) the quality of polyaesthetics is expanding (concerning quality of sensory perception, quality of artistic outcome and quality of in-depth-meaning to be found)

This kind of expansion is happening at the edge of bodily knowing. Processing at the edge of sensual awareness is bringing the More of (Eugene Gendlin) to the arts, opening up to the Experiential Third

The Experiential Third is a space offering unpredictable shifts in body, arts and meaning (with all arts activities in arts experiencing and arts expressing being covered). Those shifts are actualized through the interaction of situation, aesthetics and the living body

Step into a user-friendly practice of Embodied Polyaesthetics

developed from Museum based Art Therapy

Learn about Creative Compassion

© Houcine Ncib / Unsplash | Expressive Arts Focusing - Embodied Polyaesthetics

Make space for artlife. Develop more than all of your senses