Research & Practice

The Musical Body - ongoing practice-led research

After more than two decades (2003-) of developing The Musical Body through artistic practice, facilitation, improvisation, camps, workshops and collaborative experimentation, COVID and the years following- and especially coming into 2026 as a mother of a three year old has led me to a more explicit period of practice-led research and documentation.

This involves looking both backwards and forwards: tracing the artistic, musical, somatic, developmental, communal, educational and relational lineages that have informed The Musical Body Methodology/work; returning to particular practices with greater attention; documenting scores and processes that have emerged over time; reading contemporary research alongside knowledge developed experientially through practice; and continuing to discover what The Musical Body becomes through practice with others.

I am interested in distinguishing between what I have observed repeatedly through more than twenty years of practice, what existing research and other artistic lineages already help to explain, and what remains a hypothesis or question requiring further investigation.

This research is an opportunity to return to long-held questions with greater attention - through embodied practice, reading, dialogue, documentation and experimentation - and to discover where existing knowledge supports, complicates or opens new directions within The Musical Body.

Current questions

Relationship as artistic material

What happens when attraction, resistance, imitation, distance, leadership, following, conflict, humour, vulnerability and other group phenomena are treated not merely as conditions surrounding improvisation, but as material for the improvisation itself?

Artistic fluency

What becomes possible when improvisers develop greater fluency in moving between raw, playful and experimental sound and more structured musical organisation - between breath, noise, cry and gesture, and pulse, repetition, rhythm, melody, harmony and song?

Rather than positioning freedom and structure as opposites, I am interested in our capacity to travel between them.

Art and life

Do capacities practised through improvisation - listening, initiating, following, tolerating uncertainty, making mistakes, relinquishing control, responding to difference and taking creative risks - become available in our relationships and everyday lives?

What, if anything, travels with us when the improvisation ends?

Companioning as research

What knowledge becomes possible through sustained practices of reading, sounding, moving, listening, questioning and witnessing with another person that may not emerge through solitary research or larger group laboratories?

Part of the current research is exploring this through ongoing companion practice: allowing reading, embodied exploration, artistic practice, dialogue, reflection and lived experience to inform one another.

Sometimes a text begins the research. Sometimes the body does. Sometimes an improvisation does. Sometimes the conversation itself becomes the research.

A larger question

Underneath these inquiries is a question that reaches beyond musical practice:

Can becoming more improvisationally fluent in sound also make us more improvisationally fluent as humans?

The Musical Body has always been interested in ‘the spaces between life and music’.

This period of research is an opportunity to investigate those spaces more rigorously - to ask what can be observed, documented and supported by existing knowledge; what becomes more complicated on closer examination; and what new questions emerge through sustained artistic practice.

The Musical Body is an evolving methodology and field of artistic practice developed by Charlotte Roberts since 2003. Grounded in more than two decades of facilitation, artistic practice and experimentation, it brings together a distinctive body of practices, scores, principles and ways of working across body, voice, music, improvisation and relationship.

The current research builds on this substantial history: deepening and documenting the methodology, tracing and engaging more rigorously with its lineages and research contexts, and investigating the artistic, relational and human possibilities that have emerged through the work over time.