Move like a practising bubble

TL;DR: Movement is fundamental to animation pedagogy, but it also carries risks and precarity. The image of the soap bubble is used to reflect on the precarious nature of creative practice.

Abstract: Animation pedagogy often focuses on preparing students for work in the creative industries. As such, story and character development are emphasized over other possibilities of animation practice. However, I argue that movement – as a somatic practice – is fundamental to the task of teaching and learning animation. What better material to work with than the moving body with which we have all been practising since infancy? Yet movement is itself prone to fetishized imagery of hard-bodied frenetic motion that endangers its own body/bodies and habitats. This article explores the image of the soap bubble for thinking about the precarity of creative practice. To imagine the soap bubble as a practitioner of somaticity is to take on an ethics of the moving body that recognizes the precarity with which all bodies move while holding their form. I employ the inherent tensile ‘stretchiness’ of language to imagine what it would be to ‘move like a practising bubble’.