Le corps organisé, entre contrôle et débordement : Le cas des professions intellectuelles

As only very few studies have investigated how intellectual (and hence mainly digital) work affects our embodiment, my case, a dance intervention in a bank involving employees, was a good way to study bodies in action. During their work with the artist, employees were standing on the boundary between work and leisure, hesitating between professional and personal embodiment. Observations, interviews and an analysis of their gestures relying on various visual data give a complete description of their embodiment process in this specific moment. On the one hand, bodies remain very constrained, distant and closed, but on the other hand, some employees open up to play, displaying rare and sometimes risky gestures. My findings suggest that the body’s boundaries are much more unstable than we think and that artistic experimentation is one way to understand what a body can do at work. Embodied play is not only an individual experience; it also has the potential to criticize dominating bodily norms existing in an organisation. Alternative embodiments thus propose a way out of organisation.