Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 1.1

Journal of Dance and Somatic PracticesVolume 1 Number 1 2009

The scope of Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (JDSM)Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices is the international journal for scholars and practitioners whose research interests focus on the relationship between dance and somatic practices, and the infl uence that this body of practice exerts on the wider performing arts. The journal seeks to promote research from established scholars and practitioners, as well as to encourage those new to the fi eld.

JDSM publishes articles on a variety of themes and in varied styles. Themes might include the pedagogical philosophy of somatic practices and how this might be seen to challenge or negate dominant approaches to learning and crea-tivity; the history of somatic practices; the current application of somatic prac-tices to dance/performing arts training and education; the aesthetic implications of working with/from a somatic understanding; the ‘body’ as site of discourse in western culture, the infl uence of eastern cultures on notions of embodiment and how somatic practices challenge/collude with these ideas. The journal acts as a forum for practitioners and researchers who are exploring these and related areas.

Editorial and Advisory BoardJayne Stevens – De Montfort UniversityAmanda Williamson – University of Central LancashireSylvie Fortin – University of QuebecVincent Cacalano – Manchester Metropolitan UniversityGill Clarke – Laban/Independent DanceGary Hall – Coventry UniversityCecilia Macfarlane – Independent ArtistJoe Moran – Independent Artist

Printed and bound in Great Britainby 4edge, UK.

ISSN 1757–1871 (print)ISSN 1757–188X (Online)

Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices is published twice a year by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK. The current subscription rates are £33/$65 (personal) and £180/$290 (institutional). Prices include UK/US postage. Please add £9 if ordering within the EU and £12 elsewhere. Advertising enquiries should be addressed to: [email protected].

© 2009 Intellect Ltd. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use or the internal or personal use of specifi c clients is granted by Intellect Ltd for libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) in the UK or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service in the USA provided that the base fee is paid directly to the relevant organization.

Journal EditorSarah WhatleyCoventry UniversityPriory StreetCoventryUnited KingdomTel: +44 (0)24 76158352E-mail: [email protected]

Co-EditorsNatalie GarrettCoventry University

Kirsty AlexanderLondon Contemporary Dance School

Book Reviews EditorPolly Hudson Coventry University

Online EditorDavid Bennett Coventry University

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Notes for Contributors

Research articles for peer review should be innovative with respect to the themes that the journal is addressing and grounded in the relevant literature. Writing that combines images and illustrations is encouraged, as is refl ective writing. In addition, book reviews, interviews with practitioners and reports of conferences/symposiums will all contribute to JDSP’s mission to provide a platform for scholars, practitioners, educators and stu-dents who are involved in this body of work which has previously remained largely at the margins of scholarly debate. We wish to con-sider the impact and infl uence of the work on performance and to discuss the implications for research and teaching.

OpinionThe views expressed in the journal are those of the authors, and do not necessarily coin-cide with those of the Editor or the Editorial Advisory Board.

RefereesJDSP is a refereed journal. Referees are chosen for their expertise within the subject area. They are asked to comment on compre-hensibility, originality and scholarly worth of the article submitted.

SubmittingArticles should:• Contain original research or scholarship• Not be under consideration by any other

publication• Normally be between 4000–6000 words Non-standard submissions that might include illustrations, images, refl ection and so on can be considered and do not need to conform to the word limits for research articles. Authors are welcome to contact the Editor for further guidance if required.

Abstract and keywordsEach article should be accompanied by an abstract, which should not exceed 150 words in length. Each article should also be supplied with 4–6 keywords for searching purposes.

LanguageThe journal uses standard British English. The editor reserves the right to alter usage to this end. Foreign words and sentences inserted in the text should be italicized. Articles should be written in a clear and concise style.

Format of submitted articlesSubmissions to JDSP should be sent as an attachment to an e-mail message to the editor. The attached article should be ‘ano-nymized’. This is to maintain confi dentiality during peer review. You should delete the ‘File properties’ or ‘Summary info’ of your document (see fi le menu) that reveal your name and institution (where relevant). Be sure to add your full name and address in the e-mail message to the editor.• Font should be Times New Roman 14,

one-and-a-half-spaces and left aligned, not justifi ed.

• Margins should be 1 in/2.5 cm all round.• Pagination should be continuous with

numbers applied top right.• Images – illustrations, photographs, graphs,

and graphics – should all be entitled ‘Figure’, be numbered consecutively, and be clearly legible. The source must be indicated below each to acknowledge the holder of the copyright. If images are less than half a page in size, they may be inserted into

interview), and at the end of the ‘Works cited’ list under ‘Interviews’.

• If the informant gave an interview to someone else, which is being cited, then the author should cite the informant and the interviewer, e.g. (Bloggs, interview for Smith 1999) in the text, and reference it as: Smith, S. (1999), ‘Interview with Bloggs’, London: Dance, 5, pp. 1–10. The point is for another person to be able to fi nd the interview, so keep to the format in which the interview was printed. In this case, the interviewee’s name appears in the title of the article, showing he is not the author because the interviewer is. However, it could be the other way round.

Data required before publication of any articleArticles accepted for publication must contain– Correct Harvard system references (see

above for details)– Article title– Author name and institutional affi liation

(where relevant)– Abstract– Author biography (c. 50–100 words) in

English– Key words (4–6 words or two-word phrases

that indicate the core of what is discussed in the article)

– Author street and email addressCopyrightBefore publication, authors are requested to assign copyright to the journal, subject to retaining their right to reuse the material in other publications written or edited by themselves and due to be published at least one year after initial publication in the journal. A credit to the publisher and the original source should be cited if an article that appears in the journal is subsequently reprinted elsewhere.

PermissionsCopyright clearance should be indicated by the contributor and is always the responsibil-ity of the contributor. The source has to be indicated beneath the text. When they are on a separate sheet or fi le, indication must be given as to where they should be placed in the text. The author has responsibility to ensure that the proper permissions/model for visual image releases are obtained.

ReviewingPlease contact the Editor if you are interested in reviewing for this journal.Contributions welcomeThe Editor welcomes contributions. Any matter concerning the format andpresentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to theEditor, Sarah Whatley, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry, United KingdomTel: +44 (0)24 76158352 E-mail: [email protected] guidance on this page is by no means com-prehensive: it must be read in conjunction with Intellect’s Style Guide.This guide can be referred to by contributors to any of Intellect’s journals, and so is not suffi cient; contributors will also need to refer to the guid-ance such as this given for each specifi c journal. Intellect’s Style Guide is obtainable fromwww.intellectbooks.com/journals, or on request from the Editor of this journal. For additional guidance on submissions, reviewers guidelines or general information, please contact Sarah Whatley. Email: [email protected]

the text according to the place of insertion. If larger, they should be placed on separate pages at the end of the article. In this case, ensure that an indication has been given as to where they should be placed in the text, e.g. Insert Figure 3 here. Visuals in proposals should initially be sent as low-res JPEG fi les as an email attachment. If articles are selected for publication, contributors will be asked to provide images to the Editor with respect to Intellect’s Notes to Contributors.

• Quotations should be used sparingly and be identifi ed by ‘single’ quotation marks if they are embedded in the text. Longer quotations (i.e. longer than 45 words) should be indented on both sides, without quotes. Both should be referenced using the Harvard system (see below). The page number(s) must be included.

• Foreign words and phrases inserted in the text should be in italics.

Endnotes, references and citations• ‘Explanatory notes’ should be kept to a

minimum: they will appear in the outside left or right margins of the text. They should not contain publication details; submit all these as references. Please use the Word (or equivalent) ‘Footnote’ facility and ensure that they are submitted as endnotes, not footnotes.

• Place endnote marks outside the punctua-tion (after the comma or full stop). The note mark must be in superscripted Arabic (1, 2, 3), not Roman (i, ii, iii).

• Bibliographical references should use the ‘Harvard system/style’ (author + year: page), e.g. (Hartley 1989: 84) inserted into the text.

All references must identify an author (surname or institution name) for all documents, whether found in archives, newspapers, the Internet, etc.

• Each Harvard-style reference should be fully sourced in a list of ‘Works cited’ at the end of the text. Publications not mentioned in the text should not be included in this list, though they may be included under a separate ‘Further reading’ list.

Format for citing a bookAuthor surname, Initial (year), Title in italics, Place of publication: Publisher. e.g. Hartley, L. (1989), Wisdom of the Body Moving; an Introduction to Body-Mind Centering, Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Citing an articleAuthor surname, Initial (year), ‘Title in single quotation marks’, Name of journal in italics, volume number: issue number (and/or month or quarter), page numbers (fi rst and last of entire article). e.g. Carr, D. (1997) ‘Meaning in Dance’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 37: 4, pp. 349–366.

Citing a web publication or website itemwebsites should be referenced as publishers of material: a separate author and the title of the information/document/pdf article should be supplied. e.g. Hale, C. (2004), ‘The Science of Making Dances’ Dance Gazette, 2, pp.16–19, http://www.choreocog.net/papers.html

Citing personal communications and interviews• Personal communications are what the

informant said directly to the author, e.g.‘Bloggs thought this was a good thing (personal communication)’. This need have no citation in the references list. Equally the use of (personal communications) need not refer back to a named informant.

• A more formal research interview can be cited in the text (Bloggs, 16 March,

Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor. The guidance on this page is by no means comprehensive: it must be read in conjunction with Intellect Notes for Contributors. These notes can be referred to by contributors to any of Intellect’s journals, and so are, in turn, not suffi cient; contributors will also need to refer to the guidance such as this given for each specifi c journal. Intellect’s Notes for Contributors are obtainable from www.intellect-books.com/journals, or on request from the Editor of this journal.

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JDSP 1 (1) pp. 3–4 © Intellect Ltd 2009 3

Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices Volume 1 Number 1 © 2009 Intellect Ltd

Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.3/2

EditorialSarah Whatley with Kirsty Alexander and Natalie Garrett

As we head into uncertain times in this first decade of the new century, many of us are becoming more fascinated with those aspects that make us unique as human animals. We are witnessing a return to interest in embodied knowledge and theories about embodiment, which have been developing in the West since the early 1900s. This is now influencing thought processes and arts practices, including dance, in new ways. It is only in recent years that the significance and philosophical position of embodiment work has been recognized. And yet the pace and pressures of life provide too few opportunities to take rest, to be still and to find an ease-fulness in our relationship with our own body. We might acknowledge the body’s extraordinary capacity for experience, expression, adaptation and survival, and yet we are too often thwarted in our desire to respect the body’s authority and wisdom. Thanks to the legacy of Cartesian dualism in western thought, what we know through our sensing body is still often regarded as unreliable.

This preamble provides something of the context for this new journal. The aim of the journal is to provide space for debate around moving, think-ing and writing; and to offer a celebration of the somatic epistemology that underpins important developments in dance and movement practices that have emerged and found purchase in recent years, whilst also acknowledg-ing the challenges that this brings for all those engaged in the work.

For many of us working in the broad area of dance, whether as dance practitioners, theorists or educators (or, most often, as all three), we have witnessed a growing interest in dance as a site of investigation from those beyond the discipline. At the same time, we have also seen a shift towards a more enquiring and curious approach to dance, for those within the discipline; an approach which draws on theories and practices that constantly question traditional modes of doing, ways of seeing and experi-encing dance. These practices are characterized by a return to the self and sensorial awareness, to cultivate a new consciousness of bodily movement; hence the term ‘soma’ (of the body) and ‘somatic’ as a reference to the first-person perception, and the balance between first and third-person perspective, which underpins these experiential practices. Thus in con-necting to the self, somatic practice also seeks to cultivate awareness of the self within the world, in relationship to our environment.

The roots of these enquiries are wide ranging, as the papers in this first issue illustrate. Martha Eddy’s paper appears first, to provide a useful over-view of the historical development of somatic practices. Two leading educators in somatic practices, Amanda Williamson (UK) and Sylvie Fortin

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4 Editorial

(Canada) then offer detailed observations of their work in different settings to illuminate the profound impact this work has on learners and clients. Williamson talks of a ‘quiet political movement’ that defines Somatic Movement Education and reminds us that our body ‘is present and active in every moment of our lives. To ignore its centrality discounts our mate-riality, our engagement in a material world, our body substance – ultimately, to disregard the body negates our humanness’. This theme is powerfully explored in the reflective writing in the articles that follow, which reflects on personal experiences with movement forms or particular events, and gives voice to the artists’ own practice. The experiences of leading artists are represented through the writing of Suna Imre, in interview with Miranda Tufnell, through Helen Poynor’s reflections on the extraordinary dances of Anna Halprin, and in the poetic utterances and drawings of dance artist Cecilia Macfarlane following a period of movement research with Anna Halprin.

When I first proposed this journal to Intellect, I was confident that there was a space for a Journal that brought together this growing body of knowledge, in the hope that the writing would become more visible, thus strengthening and supporting the development of the practice, whilst drawing interest from those beyond the dance community. It is encourag-ing to know that the Journal has been welcomed by many, including those who have already submitted contributions for this first issue and for sub-sequent issues. The aim is not to be prescriptive about the range of writ-ings and certainly not to limit the writings to discussing particular dance styles, but to present the reader with a sense of a unifying curiosity and determination that underpins the practices that give rise to these writings. Each paper offers a view of a process, project or practice from writers at varying stages of their engagement with somatic work. Because some of the writing that emerges through this work is itself emergent and often written by the artist/practitioner at the time of the practice, or shortly afterwards in the form of reflective writing, the aim for the journal is to support these different forms of writing: to let the community of somatic practitioners, and those who comment on these practices, find a space for sharing and exchanging ideas and experiences.

So the title ‘dance and somatic practices’ deliberately unites two inde-pendent, yet potentially closely related, bodies of practice and theory – and it is the intersection that provides the focus for the Journal. What links all the articles is a growing attention to the body and its intelligence – and how the intelligent body can find its own voice; a voice which is a radical, but necessary, alternative to dance practices that aspire towards a virtuosic body seeking to reproduce a stylized form. Another important common thread is a deep respect for those individual artists, writers and practition-ers who have made such a significant contribution to this body of work, often through their teachings, which are acknowledged in this issue.

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Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.5/1

Keywordssomatics somatic movement bodymindSME&Tsomatic education somatic movement

therapy

1. This article draws on structured interviews, personal educational experiences, and review of literature in published and unpub-lished manuscripts, as well as Internet entries.

2. This second theme will be developed in a subsequent paper; Part 2. Part 2 questions the acknowledgement of cultural roots within the pedagogical process of somatic education and asserts that the voice of

A brief history of somatic practices and dance: historical development of the field of somatic education and its relationship to dance1

Martha Eddy Moving On Center/Center for Kinesthetic

Education, NYC

Abstract This article outlines the historical development of somatic movement practices especially as they relate to dance, dancers, and dance education organizations. It begins with historical events, cultural trends, and individual occurrences that led up to the emergence of the ‘classic’ somatic methods at the turn of the twentieth century (Alexander to Trager). It then defines ‘somatic move-ment education and therapy,’ and the growth of three generations of somatic movement programmes. Interview data reveals how a second generation included a large proportion of dancers and speaks to how the ‘bodymind thinking’ of dance professionals continues to shape the training and develop-ment of somatic education, as well as ‘dance somatics’. Finally it raises the question of the marginalizing of both dance and somatic education, and points to combining forces with their shared characteristics to alter this location in western culture. Another finding seeks to assess the potency and placement of ‘somatic dance’ in a global schema.2

PrefaceThis article is based on three methods of inquiry: lived experience in the overlapping fields of dance and somatic education since 1976; personal communiqués (live, by telecommunications, and by email) using a struc-tured interview; and supplemental literature review. Wherever possible the founder of a somatic discipline, or seminal figure in the academic pro-motion of ‘dance somatics’, was interviewed.3 I trained directly with Irmgard Bartenieff and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in the 1970s and then went on to teach in their certification faculties for ten years prior to creat-ing my own Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy Training in 1990. I continue to teach on all three faculties and have also since inter-acted with hundreds of diverse somatic experts at conferences, in classes and on organizational boards. I am appreciative of each colleague who was willing to provide an interview and/or critical review of sections of this paper. Along with the data gathered, many of the statements in this article are made through my personal phenomenological perception of stories told within the oral tradition of ‘somatics’.

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6 Martha Eddy

dance professionals, especially women, within the field completes a holistic paradigm by encour-aging emotional expression, which in some instances also elicits activism.

3. If necessary a director of a school or a close relative or colleague was sought out.

4. ‘The Self that Moves’ was the title of a college course that I took in 1974 with Bartenieff trained movement analysts Tara Stepenberg and Diana Levy. It used the tools of Laban Movement Analysis for personal inquiry.

5. Additionally, James Spira PhD worked in 1988 to bring the field together under the title of Movement Therapy and began the antecedent of the current professional association – IMTA, which became ISMETA.

IntroductionThe field of ‘somatics’ is barely a field. If necessarily seen as one, I liken it to a field of wildflowers with unique species randomly popping up across wide expanses. How did individual experiences of, and with, the living body become a field? Illnesses, physical limitations, and exposure to unfamiliar physical and/or spiritual practices through travel and transmigrations, led numerous men and women, separately but in a common period of time, to discover the potency of listening deeply to the body. Pain and new views of human behavior combined with a love of movement and curiosity about the physical body to create the independent formation of various systems of bodily inquiry in Europe, the United States and Australia. The positive out-comes of these investigations gave credence to the process of finding answers to bodily needs and communicative desires through internal bodily aware-ness. Somatic pioneers discovered that by being engaged in attentive dia-logue with one’s bodily self we, as humans, can learn newly, become pain free, move more easily, do our life work more efficiently, and perform with greater vitality and expressiveness.

The historical time period moving out of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century was ripe for a quantum change in our relationships with our bodies. There was a need to break free of Victorian strictures and also to embody the optimism the Victorian era offered. The possibil-ity of experiencing the body newly came with such diverse movements as ‘free love’ and ‘gymnastik’. Within the twentieth century, as ration-alism was influenced by existentialism and phenomenology, a gradual shift towards theoretical support for experiential learning and sensory research occurred in parts of the academic and scholarly culture. These shifts were catapulted by the theories of Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and Whitehead.

Somatic inquiry was buoyed by this growth of existentialism and phenomenology as well as through dance and expressionism. These developments were moved into diverse frontiers by the groundbreaking work of Freud, Jung and Reich in psychology, Delsartes, Laban and Dalcroze in cultural studies (art, architecture, crystallography, dance and music), Heinrich Jacoby and John Dewey in education, and Edmond Jacobson in medical research. From the unique experiences of explora-tory individuals across the globe, fresh approaches to bodily care and education emerged. However, it took the outside view of scholars, some fifty years later, to name this phenomenon as the single field of somatic education. Thomas Hanna (1985), supported by Don Hanlon Johnson (2004) and Seymour Kleinman (2004),5 saw the common features in the ‘methods’ of Gerda and FM Alexander, Feldenkrais, Gindler, Laban, Mensendieck, Middendorf, Mézières, Rolf, Todd, and Trager (and their protégés Bartenieff, Rosen, Selver, Speads, and Sweigard). Each person and their newly formed ‘discipline’ had people take time to breath, feel and ‘listen to the body,’ often by beginning with conscious relaxation on the floor or lying down on a table. From this gravity-reduced state, each person was guided to pay attention to bodily sensations emerging from within and move slowly and gently in order to gain deeper aware-ness of ‘the self that moves’.4 Students were directed to find ease, sup-port, and pleasure while moving – all the while paying attention to


7A brief history of somatic practices and dance

6. The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association reviews and approves training programmes and registers individ-uals that meet a list of professional criteria including a minimum study time of 500 hours. www.ISMETA.org

proprioceptive signals. Participants were also invited to experience increased responsiveness as they received skilled touch and/or verbal input as ‘fresh stimuli’ from a somatic educator or therapist.

The transmigration of people and ideas from the east to the western part of the globe also shaped the development of somatic practices, by fostering exposure to the philosophies and practices of mind-body practices such as the eastern martial arts and yoga. For instance, during this era Joseph Pilates developed a system of exercise (‘Contrology’) with focus on the coor-dination of breath that was derived from yoga (India), and George Gurdjieff developed movement activities for greater spiritual development grounded in Eastern philosophy (Allison 1999). Among the somatic pioneers, Ida Rolf cites yoga as an influence (Johnson 1995), Irmgard Bartenieff studied Chi Kung, and Moshe Feldenkrais was a black belt in Judo (Eddy 2002b).

In what could be attributed to Jung’s concept of the collective uncon-scious, or likened to the ‘hundredth monkey’ parable, isolated individuals and institutions in distant places independently began to recognize this work as an important and effective area of inquiry. What emerged from these profoundly creative and investigative somatic pioneers, especially as they taught their practices to psychologists (e.g. Fromm, Perls, Watts), educators (Dewey, Myers), and scholars (Fraleigh, Hanna, Johnson), became a canon inclusive of exercises, philosophies, methods, and systems of inquiry. By delving into personal bodily experiences, new meanings about being human and potentialities for health and life were codified into educational programmes in diverse parts of the world. As an exchange deepened across disciplines, somatic inquiry also found entry into some research methodologies such as: action research; ethnographic study; frequency counts in movement observation; phenomenology; pilot studies for quantitative research; and qualitative case study.

Defining the Field: Coining ‘Somatics’ and ‘Somatic Movement Education & Therapy’In the 1970s Hanna coined the term ‘somatics’ to describe and unify these processes under one rubric. Philosophers and scholars in the late twenti-eth century helped to forge the new field of Somatic Education. Mangione (1993) describes how the global communication explosion, and the cul-tural shifts of the 1970s, spurred a veritable boom in ‘somatics’. In 2004, I identified that there are three branches of the somatic world – somatic psychology, somatic bodywork, and somatic movement (Eddy 2004). I con-tend that dance professionals have especially driven the development of somatic movement and the field of Somatic Movement Education and Therapy (SME&T). SME&T involves ‘listening to the body’ and responding to these sensations by consciously altering movement habits and move-ment choices. In large part, this article addresses the development of rec-ognized training programmes in somatic movement6 and the role of a second generation of somatic pioneers, who were predominantly dancers, in this evolution.

Professional practitioners of somatic movement disciplines use a variety of skills and tools, including diverse qualities of touch, empathic verbal exchange, and both subtle and complex movement experiences. This


8 Martha Eddy

triune process helps a person discover the natural movement or flow of life activity within the body. If a student or client is uncomfortable with any of these modalities the practitioner will adjust the tools being used, as somatic work is, by definition, a creative interplay. The goal of the somatic move-ment professional is to heighten both sensory and motor awareness to facilitate a student-client’s own self-organization, self-healing, or self-knowing. Movement includes the subtler movements of the breath, the voice, the face, and the postural muscles, as well as any large movement task, event, or expression. Somatic lessons often use touch to amplify sensory experience through the skin, the body’s largest organ, and therefore more quickly awaken awareness. Touch is a primary tool, however it is only a tool and is it not always used in every somatic movement session or class.

While many of the individual somatic movement disciplines (most notably the ones that have been in existence for at least fifty years) have their own standards and scope of practice, one professional association, ‘The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association’ (ISMETA), worked to shape the commonalties of somatic movement disci-plines. They provided a definition of the type and range of work that is engaged in by a somatic movement professional, and a ‘scope of practice’ for the field of SME&T. The original scope of practice for somatic move-ment educators and therapists, as defined by the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association, stated:

The professional field of somatic movement education and therapy spans holistic education and complementary and alternative medicine. The field contains distinct disciplines each with its own educational and/or therapeu-tic emphases, principles, methods, and techniques.

Practices of somatic movement education and therapy encompass postural and movement evaluation, communication and guidance through touch and words, experiential anatomy and imagery, and the patterning of new movement choices – also referred to as movement patterning, movement re-education or movement re-patterning. These practices are applied to eve-ryday and specialized activities for persons in all stages of health and devel-opment. Continued practice of specific movements at home or work, with conscious awareness, is also often suggested.

The purpose of somatic movement education and therapy is to enhance human processes of psychophysical awareness and functioning through movement learning. Practices provide the learning conditions to:

• Focus on the body both as an objective physical process and as a subjec-tive process of lived consciousness;

• Refine perceptual, kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and interoceptive sensitivity that supports homeostasis and self regulation;

• Recognize habitual patterns of perceptual, postural and movement inter-action with one’s environment;

• Improve movement coordination that supports structural, functional and expressive integration;

• Experience an embodied sense of vitality and extended capacities for living.(ISMETA 2003)



ISMETA has also developed a more detailed ‘Operational Definition’ of movement patterning – the use of touch to enhance movement per-formance is a primary tool of somatic work. The operational definition is as follows:

A movement educator or therapist will place his/her hands on specific areas of the student’s/client’s [clothed] body in order to enhance movement per-formance. By applying focus through the hands, and combining still and moving touch, the educator/therapist defines the part/s of that area, articu-lates the connection of those parts, and guides the person’s body movement through an efficient or more expressive pathway. With hands-on movement re-patterning, the educator or therapist can:

• guide the student/client in initiating and practicing improved movement coordination;

• activate and direct the attention of the student/client throughout the entire learning process;

• identify and define the student/client’s habitual patterns of perceptual, postural and movement interaction.

This learning process helps the student/client:

• refine and focus proprioceptive and kinesthetic attention; • recognize his/her habitual patterns of perceptual, postural and movement

interaction with his/her environment; • develop improved movement coordination and perceptual movement

integration.(ISMETA 2003)

Dance educators and choreographers may have stumbled upon these types of interventions in the process of teaching movement. Martha Myers (Eddy interview 2003b) was seminal in cross-fertilizing somatics within ‘the dance world’ by sponsoring body therapy workshops at the ‘American Dance Festival’ once it was at Duke University. She also pioneered the advent of ‘the science and somatics of dance’ by inviting doctors and researchers from Duke University to join dancers in exploring movement on the floor to learn about their bodies. Her seminal work continues to fuel the liveliness of somatic education within the dance science commu-nity (e.g., at International Dance Science and Medicine Association con-ferences) as well as in the professional dance community (American Dance Festival Archives 1980–1996).

This paper focuses on the development and interplay of the ‘somatic movement movement’ with the field of dance. In her treatise on ‘Somatics,’ Mangione also sees the historical connection between the birth of modern dance and the development of somatic theories and practices.

Modern dance was a revolution in the field of dance. Beginning around the turn of the century, this new exploration of expressive and earthy dance was a response to the airy, stylized ballet that was dance at the time. Somatics and the modern dance movement are linked. Both movements were born


10 Martha Eddy

7. Movement Pattern Analysis; Movement Signature Analysis; Action Profiling; Kestenberg Movement Profile.

8. Laban had three chil-dren with Suzanne Perrotet, one of Dalcroze’s foremost teachers.

of the same time and possibly for many of the same reasons. They are both body-based forms that value the whole human being. The two fields also share some of the same personalities, pioneers of the modern dance move-ment such as those in the following listing have contributed to the field of somatics. While not all of these individuals may not strictly be considered somatics pioneers, their influence is significant.

(Mangione’s 1993: 27)

She lists: Francois Delsarte (1811–1871), Emile Jacques-Dalcroze (1865–1950), Rudolf Laban (1879–1958), Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), and Mary Wigman (1886–1973). These artists helped to set the stage for the emergence of somatic movement as a vital force in our current world. They shaped the culture in which the primary somatic pioneers were working. As dancers they were breaking rules; as people they were reintro-ducing non-Cartesian models. Add to this list the genius of Margaret H’Doubler (1889–1982), for her amalgam of open-ended dance explora-tions on the floor coupled with the study of the biological sciences, which became requisite studies within the first university dance department at the University of Wisconsin (Ross 2000, Eddy interview 2003c). And with all of this burgeoning growth I will make a case, later in this paper, for how dance and ‘somatics’ remain on the fringes of academic inquiry, per-haps precisely because they are of the body, and include elements that are ineffable.

Considered the father of European modern dance, Rudolf von Laban (1879–1954) was born in what is today Bratislava, Slovakia. He developed a system of movement exploration that epitomized freedom of expression through the human body. Even though Laban did not experience a bodily injury or physical limitation, he did feel confined by the pressures of his father to enter the military and, in his adulthood, by the constraints of working under the rules of Hitler and the exigencies of the world war. Laban spent many of his late adolescent years in Eastern Europe where he was exposed to eastern forms of movement – folk dances, military exer-cises and martial arts, as well as those that originated in Asia. Laban went on to study dance, and to create dances and schools of dance that valued personal expression. He also developed a system of movement notation called ‘LabanNotation’. Laban had been working first as the choreogra-pher and then as movement director for the Third Reich’s State Opera in Berlin before he came under house arrest for not conforming to Hitler’s mold. He defected to Paris during the International Dance Competition and lived there until he moved to England with the help of his former student, choreographer of the Green Table, Kurt Jooss. In England he established the ‘Art of Movement Center’. During World War II, he was called upon to analyze movement in industry. The components of move-ment that he defined became the basis for ‘Laban Movement Analysis’ (LMA) and numerous other forms of movement analysis.7 This LMA sys-tem has since been applied to physical education, dance education, and somatic education.

Laban was teacher to Mary Wigman as well as Kurt Jooss, and a peer of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (Bachmann 1993).8 While he lived in Paris, he was influenced by the teachings of the already deceased Delsartes



(Hodgson 2001). He was also aware of Isadora Duncan, another great founder of expressive movement and modern dance. Duncan brought her dance style from America to Europe while Martha Graham stayed strongly identified with American dance. Graham did, however, come to perform at Dartington Hall while Laban lived in England. The early 1900s was a rich time for artistic breakthroughs. The somatic pioneers spawned a different bodily endeavor applicable in many settings – pay-ing careful attention to bodily sensation. The pioneers developed the use of somatic awareness in movement work such as acting, martial arts, exercise, physical education, physiotherapy, and dance. It is this history of diversity across numerous bodily, creative and scientific professions that engenders the continuing interdisciplinary nature of somatic educa-tion. What is worthy of note is that these somatic progenitors were often artists/performers also trained as scientists. Many suffered illnesses or injuries, and others experienced the changing world of the twentieth century through travel and emigration.

Theories and Practices in Europe prior to Somatic Education The underlying theories and movement practices for numerous somatic systems originated in Germany. Elsa Gindler (1885–1961) and Heinrich Jacoby Gimmler were important movement leaders at the turn of the twen-tieth century. Gindler and her teacher, Leo Kofler who lived in the United States shared the experience of overcoming tuberculosis. Kolfler led the way by learning to heal from tuberculosis through anatomical study and physical exploration. Two German students traveled to the USA to STUDY with him and then translated his book, which continues to be published in Germany today (Johnson 1995). Gindler learned of Kofler’s success and was also able to recover from tuberculosis using Kofler’s teachings. She cultivated such an awareness of her breathing that she could actually rest her diseased lung and allow it to HEAL. This discovery led her to develop the somatic work she called Arbeit am Menschen/Work on the Whole Person. Her prior movement training was in Gymnastik (Jahn’s work), yet she addressed the physical exercises in a new way, with an emphasis on men-tal concentration while breath, relaxation and tension were explored. Historical influences of Gindler and Jacoby can be traced to other German innovators such as Bess Mensendieck, Ilse Middendorf, and Marion Rosen (Haag 2002). The somatic concept of deep internal reflection was an adaptation of Gymnastik that both Gindler (Johnson 1995: 6) and Dr. Mensendieck used.

Bess Mensendieck, M.D. (1864–1957) was influenced by a combina-tion of medicine, art, and an understanding of Gymnastik. She taught for Dalcroze and studied with Steiner. Her art form was sculpture, an art form with both tactile and visual elements. With this integration, she developed a system of over 200 exercises for executing movement (often in front of a mirror with minimal clothing) to improve habits and functioning. Her work is found in physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dance, and osteop-athy, especially in Europe (Johnson 1995).

Gindler asked students to focus, concentrate and become aware during movement regimens. She wanted them to be conscious of breathing as well. For example, Gindler states: ‘There is the difference between the


12 Martha Eddy

breathing that occurs when the lungs and vesicles are open and breath-ing … through the arbitrary inhalation of air.… If the movement occurs with open [conscious] breathing, the movement becomes alive’ (Johnson 1995: 33). Among her students were Carola Speads and Charlotte Selver, who both escaped Germany and brought her work to the United States where 24 they further developed it, each in their own way. The work of Carola Speads and her students (see Elaine Summers below) is an impor-tant resource to learn more about breath studies as is the work of Ilse Middendorf.

Ilse Middendorf’s primary teacher as a young woman was Dora Menzler, however Middendorf was a student of Gindler’s. Middendorf became a teacher of the ‘Mastanang Method’ and was mentored by Cornelius Veening, who was connected to Heier and thereby to Jung. The methods of Kallmayer and Mensendieck were circulating in Germany at the time so she was aware of their practices. She developed work with natural breath ‘The Experience of Breath,’ to make room for the essence of a person to unfold and develop.

Life Stories of the Somatic Pioneers: A brief history Based on common lore, oral tradition, and written treatises such as those edited by Don Hanlon Johnson (1995), I have identified F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Mabel Todd, Irmgard Bartenieff, Charlotte Selver, Milton Trager, Gerda Alexander, and Ida Rolf as ‘the somatic pioneers’. Please see the schematic on page 24 depicting each of them in bold letters. It also attempts to give you information about who they were influenced by and who they have influenced to create somatic movement trainings including the ‘second generation’. These somatic dance professionals who founded training programs are also highlighted in bold: Anna Halprin, Nancy Topf, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Sondra Fraleigh, Emilie Conrad, Joan Skinner, Elaine Summers, and Judith Aston.

The First GenerationFrederick Matthias Alexander (1869–1955) was an actor with laryngitis who began to question deeply the cause of his vocal problems and won-dered if they might have something to do with how he was using his vocal apparatus and his body (Alexander 1932). Through intensive periods of personal exploration he found a method for ‘changing and controlling reaction’, which he then taught in Melbourne and in Sydney. He also returned to performing and teaching in Australia and New Zealand. Next he moved to London, and finally to the United States. While not much is written about how F. M. Alexander may have been influenced by his child-hood in Tasmania, or his experiences in New Zealand, these were influ-ences replete with exposure to non-western values and concepts. Learning through global travel or study was notable amongst other somatic move-ment leaders as well. As with Laban, one can speculate that being an out-sider in a new place might intensify one’s powers of observation and self-reflection.

Moshe Feldenkrais, Ph.D. (1904–1984) also traveled through and lived in different countries and continents, studied in France, and was pushed to new levels of awareness during World War II. He was born in



Russia and emigrated to Palestine at the age of thirteen, traveling by cara-van with his family. Feldenkrais studied engineering and earned his doc-torate in physics at the Sorbonne. It was in Paris that he excelled in the martial art of jujitsu. He became one of the first westerners to earn a black belt in Judo (1936), and subsequently taught, following the footsteps of his teacher Professor Kano, the originator of Judo.

Feldenkrais first injured his knee playing soccer, and again while work-ing with anti-submarine research in England during the war. His knee could not be healed, even with the help of surgery. Feldenkrais was motivated to explore his own body to find out what caused his inability to walk. This inward road of exploring the body grew, in part, out of his interest in auto-suggestion, self-imagery and the workings of the unconscious mind. During the process of self-exploration, he incorporated principles from physics, Judo and human development in his two strands – ‘Awareness through Movement’ and ‘Functional Integration’. He developed his methods by working with all kinds of people with a wide range of learning needs, from infants with Cerebral Palsy to leading theatrical and musical performers.

Like Alexander and Feldenkrais, Mabel Todd, author of The Thinking Body (1937) and The Hidden You (1953), was also interested in improving her health since she had to contend with bodily limitations. She had a para-lyzing accident and was told she would not walk again. Unwilling to give up, Todd used thinking processes to heal herself, including how to return to walking, by developing imagery about the anatomically balanced use of the body. She speculated that vocal problems were often due to bad posture and that a psycho-physical or psycho-physiological approach might be of help. With this hypothesis, Todd began to study the mechanics of the skeletal structure, and she applied her discoveries in her studios of ‘Natural Posture’ in New York and Boston. Personally, her imagery resulted in a walk that was an improvement over her pre-accident gait; professionally she created a system that became central to many movement educators. She joined the faculty of the Department of Physical Education at Teachers College, Columbia University where she taught anatomy, posture, and neuromuscu-lar awareness to physical education and dance professionals. At Teachers College, her work was further developed by her protégé, Lulu Sweigard (1974), author of Human Movement Potential.

Born in Germany, in the same year as Feldenkrais, Gerda Alexander (1904–1994) also founded a somatic discipline – ‘Eutony’ (Eutonie), now referred to as Gerda Alexander Eutony (GAE). In GAE, students are invited to sense their muscles, skin, or bones – literally any part of the body and to connect it to their feelings. On a physical level, GAE strives to bring balance to the muscular tone of the body. She taught that tonus changes occur not only with different kinds of effort, but with emotional shifts whether they be deep depression with a low tonus or happiness with a high tonus. This function is referred to as psycho-tonus. “Flexibility in tonus change is also the basis for all artistic creation and experience….What you do not experi-ence in your whole body will remain merely intellectual information with-out life or spiritual reality”. (Bersin in Johnson 1995: 260)

Unlike the other somatic educators cited above, G. Alexander’s protégés take a Eurocentric stance, and they make the following explicit statement about her work and its influences: ‘The method developed completely from


14 Martha Eddy

10. It is interesting to note that GAE was the first somatic dis-cipline to be accepted by the World Health Organization (in 1987) as a type of alternative health care (now referred to as Complementary and Alternative Medicine – CAM). (Chrisman, 1).

the western culture area.’ Alexander’s work reveals a strong European lin-eage (ASEGA 2003). She was a dance and gymnastic teacher who studied and worked with Jacques Dalcroze; she then integrated her interest in the creative self-discovery of each person’s body-mind tonus into a holistic approach used in diverse educational settings. Eutony teaches deep inter-nal awareness that also helps one sense the outer environment fully.10

Charlotte Selver helped shape the work of her ‘gymnastik’ teacher, Elsa Gindler. Charlotte Selver, (1901–2003) was the person, together with her husband Charles Brooks, who gave the work an English name, focusing it more on sensation and consciousness: ‘Sensory Awareness’. Selver cites Gindler as her primary teacher, yet she also refers to the importance of learning from other scholars. She had the opportunity to learn in person from various great thinkers from east and west, Suzuki Roshi (Zen mas-ter), Suzuki Daishetz (scholar), Korzybski (General Semantics) and Ram Dass (yogi) (Laeng-Gilliatt n.d.). She explored in depth the realms of con-sciousness, as well as awareness while moving, and taught these processes until she died at the age of 102.

Ida Rolf (1896–1979) was born in New York City. The inspiration for her work springs from exposure to eastern practices, and to great thinkers (Pierre Bernard, Fritz Perls, Sam Fulkerson and Korzybski), as well as the serendipity of being able to work as a woman at Rockefeller Institute. She also had the intent to heal not just the symptoms but also the causes; she saw causes as multiple and related to ‘the circular process that do not act in the body but are the body’ (Johnson 1995: 174). Her work grew out of the sciences and alternative approaches to healing. She obtained her Ph.D. in biological chemistry. During World War II, she was hired to work at Rockefeller Institute, beginning in the department of chemotherapy. As a scientist investigating the body and health, she was exposed to osteopa-thy and homeopathy, and she developed an interest in yoga. From yoga she understood that one could work with the body to improve all aspects of the human being, and, for the most part, this was done through length-ening the body to create more space in the joints (Feitis in Johnson 1995: 157). She learned from the Hindu philosophy that ‘when morals are built from the body’s behavior you get a moral structure and behavior which respect the rights and privileges of other individuals. (Rolf in Johnson 1995: 174)’ She wrote Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structures in 1977. Dr. Rolf continued to study movement throughout her life including yoga and taking classes in the Alexander Technique; she learned from osteo-paths and about homeopathy, and always related the physical body to the energy fields around us, most especially the gravitational pull.

Milton Trager, MD (1909–1997) also lived in the United States and was the founder of Psychophysical Integration. Like F. M. Alexander, he had to deal with physical weakness and illness at the outset of his life. He was born with a congenital spinal deformity. Through steadfast physical application he became an athlete and a dancer. He made his first somatic discoveries at the age of eighteen when he traded roles with his athletic trainer one day and touched him powerfully. The trainer took immediate notice and remarked on the effectiveness of Trager’s touch in alleviating his physical discomfort. This was the beginning of the somatic research that led Trager to the development of the Trager Approach to Psychophysical



11. Agnes de Mille would later make a point of stating that Graham was not influenced by Laban in her explorations into self-expression through new approaches to dance (Graham Co Programme notes 1998).

Integration. When he was in his mid-forties he chose to go to medical school to become a doctor. He continued to give daily sessions in his unique somatic discipline in addition to maintaining a regular medical practice. As part of his approach, Trager developed a bodywork system as well a system of movement education called Mentastics. Trager’s work emphasizes moving “lighter, freer.” After 50 years of developing his work, in the mid-1970s, he was invited to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. His work was received with excitement and spread rapidly, he was know to have a “gift as a healer”. He insisted that he was not a healer and that anyone could learn these skills. (Trager Organization n.d.: 1)

Following in the footsteps of her teacher, Rudolf Laban, Irmgard Bartenieff (1900–1981) was a dancer who helped to pioneer several new fields – dance therapy, dance anthropology, Laban Movement Analysis, and her own somatic system called ‘Bartenieff Fundamentals of Movement’. She was born in Berlin, studied dance and movement analysis with Laban, and performed dance with her husband, Igor Bartenieff. While in Germany, Bartenieff stud-ied ‘Bindewebegung Massage’, known in the United States as ‘Connective Tissue Therapy.’ Bartenieff experienced an abrupt dislocation from her home in 1936 when, because her husband Igor was Jewish, she and her husband caught one of the last boats out of Nazi Germany. Upon arrival in the United States, they did not feel welcome in the dance community, which was then dominated by Martha Graham.11 This lack of work in dance opened another door, and both Igor and Irmgard Bartenieff studied to become physical thera-pists. In time Irmgard found her way back into the world of dance in New York by teaching dancers, as well as other professionals, the ‘Effort/Shape’ concepts of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) at the Dance Notation Bureau. She also taught classes in ‘correctives’ that evolved into the Bartenieff Fundamentals of Movement. Although the term ‘corrective’ reflected her intent to find correct posture and movement efficiency, Irmgard always taught through improvisational exploration and somatic inquiry, emphasiz-ing attention to breath and developmental processes.

These pioneering individuals, born near the turn of the 20th century, lived through much adversity and historical change. They discovered ways to cope with diverse stressors by being present and active in their unified body-mind experience. They also used systematic reflection and organiza-tional skills to create tools to share with others, as well as methods by which to teach them, and in this way are still helping new generations to cope with the 21st century.

And there are other somatic movement practitioners, including those who developed their own somatic movement systems, many of whom are students of the progenitors. Indeed there are over 37 different somatic movement certification programmes today. Francoise Mezieres and Marion Rosen are two other important early pioneers. Each of these women were students of the human body and were motivated to explore how to work with touch and movement to heal. Rosen developed a movement system referred to as ‘Rosen Movement’ (Knaster 1996). Mezieres’ work was taught in universities and also influenced her student, Therese Betherat to develop “The Anti-exercise Method”. While some dancers have trained to do Mezieres, Trager and Rosen’s work, they have yet to have a strong impact in dance curricula. More of their stories will be told in the future no


16 Martha Eddy

doubt, in large part because of protégés such as Therese Bertherat, Martha Partridge, and Linda Chrisman.

New Generations of Somatic Leaders: Dancers motivated by dance, global exchange and their studentsDance excites people to explore movement expression, deepen creative skills, and investigate the body kinesthetically. More than a dozen more somatic disciplines were born from the exploration of dance and somatic education; numerous somatic founders began their professional lives as dancers. Discovery through internalized and conscious exploration of a physical or emotional challenge, supported at times by exposure to cul-tures or thinking that values ‘diving inward,’ is a theme that repeats itself through the generations.

Bartenieff’s story demonstrates how experience as a dancer can support somatic investigation and become instantly applicable in dance classes. Like her somatic peers, Bartenieff remained inquisitive throughout her life and continued to study diverse movement forms. She discovered a Chi Kung teacher while in her seventies, and found in this Chinese discipline a key to her own graceful aging; Chi Kung aligned with her Laban-based philosophy of integrating the functional and the expressive in movement, and her principle of finding gradated rotation in movement (Bartenieff 1980: 19). Bartenieff’s innovations were embraced within her programme training ‘Certified Movement Analysts’ replete with dance professionals. It was her students within the CMA programme that encouraged her to name her own work Bartenieff Fundamentals and to create ‘Bartenieff Instructor Training.’ The work of Elaine Summers (a student of Selver and Speads), Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Emilie Conrad, Sondra Fraleigh, Anna Halprin, Joan Skinner, and the late Nancy Topf all derived in part from their experiences as dancers and was immediately applicable to the dance community. These women have all played pivotal roles as leaders, and bridged the fields of somatic education and dance. On their own and with their students, each has taken bodily inquiry to new levels of human potential – as expressive physical performers and as fully engaged human beings.

Elaine Summers developed ‘Kinetic Awareness’ when osteoarthritis began to limit her dancing. She sought the help of Charlotte Selver and Carola Speads, who taught her a somatic approach through deep aware-ness to sensation. Prompted by her great drive, and by a dancer’s natural inclination to creatively explore motion, she delved into kinesthetic and kinetic investigation. Through movement and different positions in space, she discovered principles and techniques that helped her continue to dance. She developed techniques and “tests” often using small balls (3–8cm in diameter) as stimuli for movement. Her cues invite slowing down comfortably on the floor with the balls as mobile cushion. The goal is to release each part of the body into gravity more fully, and most impor-tantly, respond to the balls mobility with movement responses. Her instructions highlight that this self-initiated breath and movement activates the nervous system, the blood and the lymph.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, occupational therapist, Certified Laban Movement Analyst and dancer, founded the system of ‘Body-Mind Centering®, (BMC®), in part to be able to understand and explain what it is



she did intuitively with her occupational therapy patients (Eddy 2002b). She felt that she understood the mental-emotional aspect of her holistic work, but at the same time she wanted to give voice to the particular way in which she touched clients (Eddy interview 2001). Like other somatic leaders, she has spent a good deal of her professional life exploring how best to transfer this knowledge to her students. While her training in Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) helps to organize and to confirm some of her discoveries, Bainbridge Cohen cites over forty people in the ‘Lineage of BMC – Homage to my teachers’ – an appendix in her book Sensing Feeling and Action (1993: 158). This lineage includes professionals from the United States, Asia and Europe. Bainbridge Cohen studied yoga in New York, and practiced Aikido and Katsengen-Undo in the USA and in Japan. She also studied with and taught for Erick Hawkins, trained with the Ohio State University dance department while studying occupational therapy, and has collaborated over the years with key players in the ‘Contact Improvisation’ community (Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith). Indeed as editors of Contact Quarterly, Nelson and Stark Smith were first to publish descriptions of Cohen’s work (republished with Bainbridge Cohen as author). Cohen’s early somatic training began with Barbara Clark, protégé of Todd’s and was later deepened with Bartenieff.

Sondra Horton Fraleigh was born in Utah into a Mormon culture, always dancing. As an adult she infused her dance exploration and theories with Zen Buddhism, Butoh, and the work of Feldenkrais. A renowned scholar and author in the field of phenomenology, especially as experienced through dance, she developed ‘Shin Somatics’ as part of her ‘EastWest Somatics’. She cites tutelage under Mary Wigman, Rosen’s use of breath to access emotions, Ann Rodiger’s Alexander lessons, and Maxine Sheets as strong influences. She is a proponent of effective communication, integrative bodywork and meditation as part of her somatic process (Eddy interview 2003a).

While many somatic leaders were influenced by Asian practices, Emile Conrad, founder of Continuum, was exposed to new paths of expression through her Afro-Caribbean dance experiences. Conrad’s travels to the Caribbean (Eddy 2002b) were a primary source in the development of the work. As a dancer studying with Katherine Dunham, then through living in Haiti, she (like Cohen), experienced and developed inroads to cellular awareness through movement. Her own experience of oppression within her family fueled her motivation to ‘break free’ by means of dance and movement (Eddy interview 2002).

Anna Halprin, choreographer, performer, healer, and affirmer of other people’s self-healing potential, not only used somatic focus as the basis of her art-making but, together with her daughter Daria Halprin, developed a model of health-supporting exploration that places the Halprin work in the domain of somatic movement education and ther-apy. Their work is also part of the field called ‘Expressive Arts Therapy’ or ‘Creative Arts Therapy’. Halprin chose to work with emotional expres-sion because of her work with Fritz Perls. However, it was her dance training with Margaret D’Houbler, whom Halprin likes to call ‘the mother of somatics’, that first supported Halprin’s philosophy of holism. D’Houbler asked her always to look for the meaning and expression of movement (Eddy, 2003c). Influenced by the Halprin model, several other


18 Martha Eddy

somatic movement programmes choose to integrate expressive arts ther-apy processes into their training programmes such as those of Daniel Levin, Alice Rudkowski, and Kay Miller.

Joan Skinner founded ‘Skinner Releasing Technique’ while serving as Chair of the Dance Department at the University of Washington. Her work with imagination and visualization builds on elements of Mabel Todd’s work, which she was exposed to through her first dance teacher during childhood. As a Graham and Cunningham trained dancer, she was com-pelled to work on her own to find an antidote to ‘pulling up,’ ‘holding on’, and ‘gripping’. She also had an injury in 1954 that instigated an even deeper self-investigation and led her to study the Alexander Technique and apply her experience to ballet barre. As she went on to teach her dis-coveries, she would use imagery, and the images became so powerful an agent for change that she developed them to the point that they became a signature of her method.

Nancy Topf (1942–1998) also trained with Joan Skinner, along with Marsha Paludan as Joan’s assistant, and Mary Fulkerson, Pamela Matt, and John Rolland as classmates. When Skinner left the University of Illinois, Urbana to go to The University of Washington in Seattle, Topf (and most of her colleagues) went on to study with Barbara Clark, who was schooled in the work of Mabel Todd and who came to live in Urbana. While Todd’s approach was deeply founded in anatomical imagery, Topf became known for honing in on the importance of the center of the body and the work of the psoas in efficient human expression. Since Topf’s untimely death in a Swiss Air flight in 1998, graduates of her programme have joined forces to continue, formalize, and promote the ‘Topf Technique’. It became an official member of ISMETA in 1995. This information was gathered through personal communications with her sister, dance educa-tor, Peggy Schwartz (Eddy 2003e).

Others can be included in this roster of somatic leaders with a history in dance. Judith Aston (Pare 2001; 2002) reaches out primarily to the health and fitness community, but she too began dancing as a child, and continued to study dance into her college years. At UCLA, Aston studied with Rudolf Laban’s daughter, Juana De Laban, and with Valerie Hunt, both schooled in Laban Movement Analysis. She also worked with dance therapist Mary Stack Whitehouse. Each of these mentors encouraged her to find her own answers rather than studying their systems. After incur-ring spinal injuries after two car accidents in 1966 and 1967, she studied with Ida Rolf. Aston helped expand upon the Mensendieck-based move-ment programme that Dr. Rolf was offering. Aston’s work, together with some contributions from Dorothy Nolte, helped to shape what is now called ‘Rolf Movement’ but began as ‘Movement Analysis.’ Judith Aston said:

Many people took the Movement Analysis course: Bob Prichard, Don Hanlon Johnson, Mark Reese, Tom Myers … in fact everyone who trained from 1971 to 1977 was required to take that course. Bill Williams, Roger Pierce, Joseph Heller, Annie McCombs Duggan, Heather Wing, Louis Schultz, and many others took my Movement Certification training and in fact took classes for years. I think we were called ‘the dancers.’ I was



offended then – now I realize my highest goal is to continue dancing through this life and beyond.

(Pare 2001: 7–8)

Since that time (1977), Aston has integrated her love of dance, fitness and somatic awareness into her own work called ‘Aston Patterning.’ Similarly Dorothy Nolte, Ph.D. has gone on to develop ‘Structural Awareness: Nolte System of Movement Education.’ Rolf Movement also continues to grow and be used by diverse dance professionals.

Movement practices designed by Mensendieck, shared by Rolf, and then transformed by Aston and Nolte, illustrate how somatic movement systems have evolved over the generations. The work of Feldenkrais is reframed by the teaching of dancer Anat Banuel. Ilana Rubenfeld com-bined Alexander, Feldenkrais and Gestalt principles to devise ‘Rubenfeld Synergy’. Key ideas are reshaped and added to new ones. The end of the twentieth century saw the burgeoning of dozens of new somatic move-ment systems. Just from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen alone, six new systems in four different countries have been born – my own ‘Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy Training’ (1990), Jacques van Eijden’s ‘Somatic Coaching’ (circa 1996), Suzanne Rivers’ ‘Global Somatics’ (circa 1999), Linda Hartley’s ‘Institute of Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy’ (1995), Horst Viral’s ‘Somatic Movement-Art Training’ (2007), and Mark Taylor and Katy Dymoke’s ‘BodyMind Movement Certification programmes’ (2008). So, each programme blends influences from other studies and experiences in the founders’ lives. Dynamic Embodiment uses BMC and LMA/BF as key tools. Jacques van Eijden, formerly on the faculty in the dance department of the Amsterdam Theatre school, teaches princi-ples that can be used across disciplines. Linda Hartley has forged a path that includes deep understanding of psychotherapy, while Suzanne Rivers brings her own Native American and intuitive knowledge into her train-ing process. Eric Franklin (a teacher of Ideokinesis) and Susan Klein cite BodyMind Centering as among their influences: both studied Bartenieff Fundamentals as well. Indeed, one of Franklin’s books uses a primary Bartenieff concept – Dynamic Alignment – as its title; Franklin’s pro-gramme is not a full ‘Somatic Movement Therapy’ or Education certifica-tion but rather combines diverse somatic activities with Ideokinesis and dance science to strengthen the dance experience. BodyMind Dancing©, a dance form using principles of Dynamic Embodiment, is another case in point; this training method uses dance to teach somatic concepts that can be used during daily life, while of course training dancers to be more somatically aware while dancing.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the historical emergence of each of these somatic movement disciplines is that they defined, and now share, a theme that there are many possibilities, no one truth, and always the option to make choices if one chooses to take responsibility for one’s body and living process. Whether this discovery came primarily from the major historical shifts apparent during this time period, or in response to injuries or illnesses that the medical profession had no answer for, or from having been educated to accept a non-Cartesian point of view, or cross-fertilization of Eastern and Western philosophies, or a combination of these factors, all these progenitors spent long periods, mostly alone, engaged in somatic


20 Martha Eddy

research. These journeys of somatic exploration may not in an of them-selves be unique but these leaders went on to articulate their processes and often worked with their students to codify a method, or a series of movement explorations, if not a full philosophy of how to be in the world with the physical body.

Many other dancers, and some notable dance somatic scholars, have contributed to the development of somatics as well. They are often con-temporary dance professionals rather than founders of training programs. Sylvie Fortin has studied, researched and taught dance somatics in Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. Her dissertation research was a cross-case analysis of the modern dance teaching of somatic move-ment educators Glenna Batson, Martha Eddy, and Mary Willaford (Fortin and Siedentop 1995).

Dance programmes and somatic psychology degrees have spawned the growth of masters theses and doctoral dissertations on somatic movement topics. A sampling of these programmes include: dance science (University of Oregon; University of Maryland), dance/choreography (State University of New York-Brockport, The Ohio State University), dance education (Temple University, University of Central Lancashire, University of North Carolina-Greensboro), somatic psychology (Naropa, California Institute of Integral Studies, and Santa Barbara Graduate Institute), interdisciplinary and liberal studies (International University of Professional Studies, SUNY-Empire State College).

Dance settings have been especially potent for the teaching of ‘somat-ics’ inclusive of somatic research methods. These classrooms value experi-ential learning – learning by doing, being of the body. Since the advent of modern dance, there is a precedent to spend time on the floor, to release and relax with the support of the ground and to build upward from there. Somatic education has been equally potent for dance by helping perform-ers to heal from injuries and enhancing performance. The exchange between somatic education and dance education is particularly important. Within the Limon company, Ann Vachon (Ideokinesis) and Jennifer Scanlon (Alexander Technique) both integrated somatic studies into their teaching. When she was a member of the Trisha Brown company, Eva Karzcag was another seminal teacher of choreography and dance using Alexander principles. Trisha Brown credits long-term study of Alexander Technique and Kinetic Awareness, with Elaine Summers, for alternatives to how to hone her body for dancing (Griffin 2001: 30). For periods, Trisha Brown’s company members studied the ‘Klein Technique’, a dance method that was devised in large part from interaction with Collette Barry, long-term patient of Irmgard Bartenieff’s and from Klein’s direct Laban/Bartenieff studies. Contemporary dance is marked by Bartenieff’s ‘Big X floor work’ even though many teachers are unaware of its beginnings (Bartenieff 1980: 256). Students of Irmgard Bartenieff such as Susan Klein who ran a dance studio in New York City together with Bartenieff’s physi-cal therapy patient Colette Barry (and then later with Barbara Mahler) extended the Bartenieff work to the dance community. Laura Glenn and JoAnna Mendl Shaw continue to do so at Julliard. Janet Kaylo’ arrival at the Laban Centre brought Bartenieff’s work to the dance community in England. Glenna Batson (1990), Irene Dowd (1981) and Pamela Matt



(1993) are dance scholars who have taught the Ideokinesis work exten-sively within the context of dance. Jill Green (2002; 2007) and Ellen Saltonstall (1988) have been major proponents of ‘Kinetic Awareness’. Feldenkrais has influenced dance pedagogy around the world. Nancy Galeota-Wozny has integrated both Feldenkrais principles and somatic scholarship into dance (Galeota-Wozny 2006) and also has written about Barbara Forbes (former ballet mistress at the Joffrey and faculty at Sarah Lawrence) and Catherine Paine’s exploration of Feldenkrais principles with dance (Galeota-Wozny, 2002). Anat Banuel is a dancer and Feldenkrais protégé who has developed her own training programmes. This is just a small sampling of the intersections between dance perform-ers and teachers and somatic practices. Dancers use somatic education to strengthen technical capacity, expand expressiveness, and reduce inci-dents of injury, as well as for self-development (Eddy 2002a; Eddy 2006).

It is no wonder that dance departments have become academic homes for somatic work. Somatic psychology departments have also been important, but dance programmes are much stronger advocates for using bodily kinesthetic learning processes in the classroom: providing courses that allow enough time for somatic exploration and proper envi-ronments for somatic learning (Eddy 2000a). Both types of departments provide classes, and also support publishing, journals themes, and con-ferences. Key conferences and journals that cross-fertilize dance and somatic education have been sponsored by the Congress on Research in Dance, National Dance Association in the United States, CENIDI DANZA, the National Center for Fine Arts (INBA) and the National School of Dance in Mexico City, Palatine Higher Education Academy, Taipei National University of the Arts, the University of Quebec/Montreal, and Victoria University of Technology in Melbourne, among others. The international visibility of the work is further witnessed through pro-grammes at the University of Haifa, the Paris Conservatory, the Laban Centre, The TheatreSchool in Amsterdam, Western Front in Vancouver, TanzFabrik in Berlin, Moving Arts in Koln, and Universidad Javeriana and Academia Superior de Artes de Bogota, Colombia. The State University of New York has been pivotal in providing academic support for dancers who also want to gain somatic certification while studying at university level. The Laban/Bartenieff training, East/West Somatics, Somatic Dance and Well-being, and Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy Training training programmes have links to gradu-ate level degrees. These have traditionally linked to dance degrees. The DE-SMTT is now linked to a cross-disciplinary degree and to doctoral studies as well.

What remains disturbing to me is how marginalized both somatic edu-cation and dance continue to be despite our growing understanding of the influence of the mind on the body, and the body on the mind. Does an affiliation with dance strengthen the position of somatic education? And likewise does the growth of “somatics” help strengthen the position of dance in the academy at all? Certainly dance’s position is growing stronger through its visibility on the front page of art sections of daily and weekly papers; instead of the existence of doctoral programmes in dance; the pres-ence of dance scholars in interdisciplinary plenary; and the role of dance


22 Martha Eddy

research in diverse conferences. Books such as The Body Has a Mind of Its Own (Blakeslee & Blakeslee, 2009) that show how movement and aware-ness heighten the neural “maps” for body schema, sensory and motor activity, movement planning, and physical anomalies may help to sharpen interest in somatic education. Neuro-science is helping to describe what occurs during somatic processes. However, even while neuroscience is becoming the rage, getting up (or lying down) to learn through movement is still a rare educational experience. Perhaps the growth of scholarship in somatic education, neuroscience, and creativity (as in dance) will boost the investigation of each discipline and their interaction.

Oddly though, the growing body of research on creativity does not ade-quately address dance. There is a meagerness of kinesthetic experience in education across disciplines, including those subjects that focus on human expression or movement studies – from kinesiology to cultural studies, to physical and occupational therapy, to psychology. Most of these disciplines remain unaware of somatic education as a resource. On the other hand the dance community has heavily cited the work of Howard Gardner for studying the genius of Martha Graham and bringing awareness to ‘kines-thetic intelligence’ (Gardner 1993). However, Csikszentmihalyi’s research has not included studies of dancers for their creativity as much as for the ability to enter into ‘the flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1992). The “Creativity” research that Csikszentmihalyi gives a capital “C” to includes interviews with musicians and visual artists along with scientists, writers, and inven-tors (Csikszentmihalyi 1996). Two statements in his early treatises may point to why. He strongly contrasts creativity with ‘sex, sports, music and religious ecstasy,’ pointing out that they are similar in that both give us the feeling of living life to its fullest, even providing us at times with a uni-versal connection, but different because the latter physical experiences are only fleeting (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996:2), in that they don’t leave a lasting product for future generations. Perhaps related to this, he does share his awareness that creativity research has had little to say about the more difficult aspects of human experience.

So we are in the paradoxical situation that novelty is more obvious in domains that are often relatively trivial but easy to measure; whereas in domains that are more essential novelty is very difficult to determine. There can be agreement on whether a new computer game, rock song, or eco-nomic formula is actually novel, and therefore creative, [it’s] less easy to agree on the novelty of an act of compassion or of an insight into human nature.

(Csikszentmihalyi 1996: 29)

Given that somatic education is perhaps even more elusive than dance, it is no wonder that it too has not had a great deal of research attention.

However, there is a developing rigor in the disciplines of dance and somatic education. Judith Lynne Hanna (2008) makes an exhaustive case for the role of dance in education based on research and practice. The tau-tology that the discipline of dance strengthens the body and soul is an informal acknowledgement of the capacity of dance to train rigorously, developing one’s ability to do more. Most dancers have carried two jobs,



two educational majors, two simultaneous projects, and/or two roles within their organization (performer and fundraiser). Biographies provide accounts of dance increasing discipline, as well as health and vitality (Nagrin 1988). The somatic paradigm supports a hypothesis that awaken-ing the body expands the mind and beckons somatic dance professionals to become strong both of body and mind. Within the contexts of the acad-emy, more somatic research can be shaped with this fortitude.

Both the movement practice itself and marginalization within society has taught the dancer to work hard, to survive. Dance as a profession can be debilitating. If dance is experienced through classes or performances in an authoritarian and demeaning manner, it can be not only physically injurious but diminishing of the soul. Since the 1970s more and more dance professionals are discovering the usefulness of somatic education in softening these deleterious challenges.

The marriage of dance education and somatic education has seen numerous benefits – tips for longevity and the honing of our living instru-ment, inroads to creative process (Calamoneri and Eddy 2006, Fraleigh 2003; Shapiro 1998), empowerment through self-authority (Green 2007), and increasing communication (Eddy 2000b and 2004; Eddy 2003a; Eddy 2003c; Eddy 2003d). The world of somatic education has secrets to living life more fully – keys to finding and knowing when we are ‘in the flow.’ Somatic awareness could be used for a step-by-step manual to docu-ment that entry into ‘the flow’. Indeed choreography, and its documenta-tion, allows for long-lasting expressions of essential insights into human nature. When influenced by somatic inquiry, choreography and dance should well become of increasing interest to academic inquiry, especially as its impact on modern culture becomes more known.

Hopefully these stories about the men and women of the world of somatic movement education and therapy, who have broadened our view of health to include bridges between the medical and the intuitive – the scientific and body wisdom – will invigorate those of you on this quest. It is of interest to me how unique each of them was or is, and that the twentieth was ripe for so many individuals to immerse themselves, independently, in such similar pursuits. This to me is creativity in action. The dawning of the field of somatic education seems to fit well within the parameters of being ‘creative’: the burgeoning of a novel idea or phenomenon by a person (or persons), in interaction with a culture that also has a field of experts that recognizes, challenges and promotes it (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). That field of experts in both somatic education and in dance may only now be stand-ing fully present. We now have a world culture that ripened within the past 100 years with creative individuals drawn to somatic awareness con-tinuing to be born. The dancer of the twenty-first century is well poised to be creative, deeply conscious, supportive of a creative and aware culture, and contribute generously to somatic scholarship.

Since somatic inquiry and dance share ineffable qualities, our chal-lenge is to add to the canon of research methods and published works that can speak to these more elusive domains. How brilliant and prescient Feldenkrais was when he titled his last book, The Elusive Obvious (1989). Human nature, the body, the sensation of living, are so obvious and yet perceived as elusive. Dance and Somatic Education share the gauntlet:


24 Martha Eddy

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how to study, awaken, and even canonize the ‘elusive obvious,’ and bring forth the depth of knowledge that emerges from each field, separately and together, out of the ranks of ‘fleeting moments’ and into the ranks of Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Creative,’ with a capital ‘C.’ Journals that print somatic movement research and discourse, such as these, will play a critical role.

Works cited Alexander, F. M. (1932), The Use of the Self, London: Orion Books.

Allison, N. (ed.) (1999), Illustrated Encyclopedia of Body-Mind Disciplines, New York, NY: The Rosen Publishing Group.

American Dance Festival Archives (1980–96), ‘Body Therapy Course Offerings’, American Dance Festival Catalogue Listings.

ASEGA (Association Suisse d’Eutonie Gerda Alexander®)(2003), Biography of Gerda Alexander, 1–4, http://www/eutonie.ch/

Bachmann, M., Stewart, R., Partlett, D. and Dobbs, J. (1993), Dalcroze Today: An Education through and into Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bainbridge Cohen, B. (1993), Sensing Feeling and Action, Northampton, MA: Contact Editions.

Bartenieff, I. (1980), Body movement: Coping with the environment, Philadelphia, PA: Gordon and Breach.

Batson, G. (1990), ‘Dancing fully, safely, and expressively – the role of the body therapies in dance training’, Journal of Physical Education Recreation and Dance, 1, pp. 28–31.

Blakeslee, S. and Blakeslee, M. (2008), The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. NY: Random House.

Calamoneri, T. and Eddy, M. (2006), ‘Combing the Pathways of Dance and the Body’, Dance Chronicle, 29:2.

Chrisman, L. and Frey, R. (n.d.), ‘Movement Therapy’, Gale Group: Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine, http://www.healthline.com/galecontent/movement-therapy, pp. 1–5.

Csikszentmihalyi, I. (1992), Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Czikszentmihalyi, M. (1996), Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, NY: HarperCollins.

Dowd, I. (1981), Taking Root To Fly, NY: Irene Dowd.

Eddy, M. (2000a), ‘Access to Somatic Theories and Applications: Socio-Political Concerns’, Proceeding of the International Joint Conference: Dancing in the Millennium.

Eddy, M. (2000b), ‘Movement Activities for Conflict Resolution’, The Fourth R, Washington DC: CREnet, 92, pp. 13–16.

Eddy, M. (2002a), ‘Dance and somatic inquiry in studios and community dance programs’, Journal of Dance Education, 2, pp. 119–127.

Eddy, M. (2002b), ‘Somatic practices and dance: Global influences’, Dance Research Journal, Congress on Research in Dance, 34, pp. 46–62.

Eddy, M. (2003), ‘One view of the somatic elephant’, Dynamic Embodiment SMTT Curricular Papers, New York, NY: Moving On Center SMTT at CKE.

Eddy, M. (2004), ‘Body Cues in Violence Prevention’, Movement News, New York: Laban Institute of Movement Studies.

Eddy, M. (2006), ‘The Practical Application of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) in Dance Pedagogy’, Journal of Dance Education, 6:3, pp. 86–91.


26 Martha Eddy

Feldenkrais, M. (1989), The Elusive Obvious, Capitola, CA: Meta Publications.

Fortin, S. and Siedentop, D. (1995), ‘The Interplay of Knowledge and Practice in Dance Teaching: What We Can Learn From a Non-Traditional Dance Teacher’, Dance Research Journal, 27:2.

Fraleigh, S. H. (1993), ‘Good intentions and dancing moments: Agency, freedom and self-knowledge in dance’ in U. Neisser (ed.) The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self Knowledge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Gardner, H. (1993), Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, NY: Basic Books/Perseus Book Group.

Galeota-Wozny, N. (2002), Ouch: Dancers find a path out of pain with the Feldenkrais Method®. Dance Magazine. (November 2, 2002).

Galeota-Wozny, N. (2006), ‘Somatics 101’, Dance Magazine, July.

Green, J. (2007), ‘Student Bodies: Dance Pedagogy and the Soma,’ in L. Bresler, International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, 1119–1132, Netherlands: Springer International.

Green, J. (2002), ‘Somatics: a growing and changing field’, Journal of Dance Education, 2:4, p. 113.

Griffin, T. (2001), ‘Trisha Brown’, Dance and Art in Dialogue 1961–2001, Andover, MA: Phillips Academy, Addison Gallery of American Art: 30.

Guild, Rolf (nd), ‘History of Ida P Rolf’, Ph.D.: 19 May 1896–19 March 1979,’ www.rolfguild.org/idarolf.html

Haag, M. (2002), ‘Elsa Gindler,’ 1–4, www.JacobyGindler.ch/gindler.html

Hanna, J. (2008), ‘A Nonverbal Language for Imagining and Learning: Dance Education in K-12 Curriculum’, Educational Researcher, 37:8, pp. 491–506.

Hanna, T. (1985), Bodies in Revolt: A Primer in Somatic Thinking, Novato, C: Freeperson Press.

Hodgson, J. (2001), Mastering Movement: The Life and Work of Rudolf Laban, NY: Routledge.

ISMETA (2003), ‘Scope of Practice’, www.ISMETA.org

Johnson, D. H. (1995), Bone Breath and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, Berkeley CA: No Atlantic books.

Knaster, M. (1996), Discovering the Body’s Wisdom, New York: Bantam Books.

Laeng-Gilliatt (n.d.), ‘A conversation with Charlotte Selver’, Living Responsively, pp. 1–3, http://www.livingresponsively.com/Articles/A_Conversation_with_Charlotte_/body_a_conversation_with_charlotte_.html

Mangione, M. (1993), ‘The origins and evolution of somatics: interviews with five significant contributors to the field’, Doctoral Dissertation, Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University.

Matt, P. (1993), A Kinesthetic Legacy: The Life and Works of Barbara Clark, Tempe A: CMT Press.

Nagrin, D. (1988), How to Dance Forever: Surviving Against the Odds, NY: Harper Collins.

Pare, S. (2001), ‘Interview with Judith Aston’, Structural Integration, Summer: 5–8, Boulder, CO: Rolf Institute.

Pare, S. (2002), ‘Interview with Judith Aston Part II’, Structural Integration, Winter: 8–11, Boulder, CO: Rolf Institute.

Rolf, I. (1977), Rolfing: The Integration of Human Structures, NY: Harper and Row Publishers.



Ross, J. (2007), Anna Halprin Experience as Dance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Saltonstall, E. (1988), Kinetic Awareness, NY: Kinetic Awareness Center.

Shapiro, S. (1998), Dance, Power and Difference: Critical and Feminist Perspectives on Dance Education, Urbana, IL: Human Kinetics Publisher.

Sweigard, L. (1974), Human Movement Potential: Its Ideokinetic Facilitation, New York: Dodd-Mead.

Todd, M. (1937), The Thinking Body, NY: Dance Horizons.

Todd, M. (1953), The Hidden You, NY: Dance Horizons.

Trager Organization (n.d.) http://www.trager-us.org/milton_trager.html

InterviewsEddy, M. (2001), ‘Interview with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Len Cohen’,

Amherst, Ma., 22 October.

Eddy, M. (2002), ‘Interview with Emilie Conrad’, New York, NY: 25 October.

Eddy, M. (2003a), ‘Interview with Sondra Horton Fraleigh’, from Brockport, NY by Telecommunication, 3 July.

Eddy, M. (2003b), ‘Interview with Martha Myers’, New London CT, 30 July.

Eddy, M. (2003c), ‘Interview with Anna Halprin’, Kentfield, CA, 3 November.

Eddy, M. (2003d), ‘Interview with Elaine Summers’, New York, NY, 8 November.

Eddy, M. (2003e), ‘Interview about Nancy Topf with Peggy Schwartz’, email cor-respondence: January–December.

Eddy, M. (2004a), ‘Interview with Don Hanlon Johnson’, from Mill Valley, CA: by telecommunication, 26 April.

Eddy, M. (2004b), ‘Interview with Seymour Kleinman.’ Columbus, Oh: 4 February.

Suggested citationEddy, M. (2009), ‘A brief history of somatic practices and dance historical develop-

ment of the field of somatic education and its relationship to dance’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1, pp. 5–27, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.5/1

Contributor detailsMartha Eddy, CMA, RSMT, Ed.D. is Director of the Dynamic Embodiment Somatic Movement Therapy Training (DE-SMTT) affiliated with Moving On Center (www.MovingOnCenter.org) and in partnership with the State University of New York – Empire State College (www.ESC.edu/MALS), housed at the Center for Kinesthetic Education (www.WellnessCKE.net) in New York City. CKE provides somatic move-ment sessions to individuals of ALL ages and professional consulting to schools, hospitals, and community centers in the use of movement and kinesthetic aware-ness in education, health, and creative endeavors.

Contact: CKE: 49 West 27th Street #MezzB NY NY 10001, USA.Tel: 1-212-414-2921E-mail: [email protected]

<mailto:[email protected]>www.WellnessCKE.net <http://www.wellnesscke.net/>


Choreographic PracticesISSN 2040-5669 (1 issue | Volume 1, 2010)

Aims and Scope

Call for Papers

Editors





1. The first ISMETA Masters Degree train-ing professionals to work in the field of community and client practices developed in the UK in 2007 at The University of Central Lancashire. ‘MA Dance & Somatic Well-being: Connections to the Living Body’ is approved by ‘The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association’ (ISMETA). This pro-gramme of study was founded by Amanda Williamson and developed through research in New England over a period of three years. The curriculum was designed through a thematic literature

Keywords connectionsupport heart relaxation community companionship self-realisation

Formative support and connection: somatic movement dance education in community and client practiceAmanda Williamson University of Central Lancashire

AbstractThis article articulates some of the key features and philosophical standpoints currently employed by Somatic Movement Dance Educators in community and client-based practice. Community and client practice is a newly formed profes-sion in the UK. This article explains some of the defining features of commu-nity practice, particularly ‘formative processes of connective support’ – such as: biologic movement, relaxation support, heart-felt connections, inter-connective support and open-ended models of self-discovery. In doing so, the article also addresses many unspoken elements of international practice – namely the cul-tivation of human qualities such as companionship, gentleness, heart, vitality, pleasure, empathy and compassion. Further to this, there is a discussion of key skills required to work within contemporary practice and generic international concerns pertaining to the field at large.

As we mature, and our organism continues adapting to the physical require-ments of the stimuli in our gravitational world, we also adapt to the affective-emotional and habitual requirements of our social world. This adaptation takes place initially in our family[,] and later as we move further out into our culture. We currently find ourselves adapted to the demands of a hi-tech, mechanistic society, unconsciously – often ritualistically – repeating the same movements, both neuro-muscularly and feelingly day after day.

(Abrams 2009: 2–3)

This article articulates some of the key features and philosophical stand-points currently employed by Somatic Movement Dance Educators in com-munity and client-based practices. Community and client practices are a newly formed profession in the UK. In 2007, the University of Central Lancashire developed the first vocational Masters Degree in ‘Somatic Movement Dance Education: Community and Client Practices’. The MA is approved and academically supported through registry by ‘The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association’ (ISMETA).1 This highly innovative international development gives academic visibility to a largely under-acknowledged strand of practice within mainstream univer-sity curricula, and supports practitioners world-wide by raising the status of Somatic Movement Dance Education (within community and client con-texts) to the level of viable academic study and professional practice. This

JDSP_1.1_03_art_Williamson.indd 29JDSP_1.1_03_art_Williamson.indd 29 6/8/09 10:21:14 AM6/8/09 10:21:14 AM

30 Amanda Williamson

review and practice-as-research, with leading figures, such as Daniel Leven and Mary Abrams, supporting radical innovation in the field: this initiative was supported by Professor Sarah Whatley from Coventry University. Across the USA, there are a number of highly successful ISMETA-approved training programmes in community and client-based practices. See for example: Daniel Leven, Martha Eddy, Anna Halprin, and Emilie Conrad – all of these programmes foreground the impor-tance of bringing somatic awareness to the general public and community. For further details of com-munity programmes and organizations approved by ISMETA, see http://www.ismeta.org/. The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association promotes a high standard of professionalism in the field of somatic movement education and therapy through advocacy and main-taining a registry of professional practi-tioners.

2. This strand is a model of dialogical companionship: by this, I mean dance is used as a process to reflect and enhance life within a commu-nity context through non-invasive meth-ods of listening and creativity.

3. To gain an early Euro-American view of the roots and devel-opment of embodied and somatic practices,

new strand of practice is distinctly marked by high degrees of socio-political reflection, non-violent communication, non-hierarchical reflective frame-works, biologic temporality, and restful resonance. In essence, it could be referred to as a model of ‘Dance and Human Companionship’.2

Somatic Movement Dance Education in community and client contexts has been shaped through different strands of practice and a far wider para-digmatic movement advocating depth-connection and connectivity.3 When we talk of Somatic Movement Dance Education, we are not dealing with one specific practice or a singular praxis. On the one hand, we are making reference to a paradigm (a vast body of international knowledge) that shares an ethos and (gentle) socio-political remit – for example, the inter-national community shares generic concerns, and central principles inform training across continents.4 On the other hand, we are referencing a world-wide body of individual practitioners (real people) who tend to develop unique praxis arrived at through extremely high levels of creative synthe-sis, as well as spiritual, emotional, aesthetic, and political individuality.5 The field shares an international language developed through much trans-global exchange. In reality, however, international practice can be mark-edly different in aesthetic form and pedagogical intent from one continent to the next.6 In this article, I am specifically referring to a unique genre of community practice developing in the UK – the influential roots of this strand can be largely traced to the USA and attributed to the radical groundbreaking work of Anna Halprin, Daniel Leven, Emilie Conrad, and Mary Abrams.7 Many of the principles located within this strand are educa-tional principles formed through ISMETA’s life-affirming scope of practice.8

Historically and philosophically, community practice shares common ground with the integration of applied somatic movement education within university dance curricula.9 Both strands are deeply influenced by ‘ecosomatic perspectives’ and actively shaped through a pedagogical con-cern for the ‘decentralization of decision-making’ and ‘a shift from outside authority to self-responsibility’ (Enghauser 2007; Eddy 2002b: 47). Both are distinctly marked by the concept of perceptual autonomy developed through an easeful and deeply-sensed relationship with body-self; educators work to cultivate a sense of self which can potentially escape or transcend objectification, albeit within dominant cultural values which place impor-tance on external perceptions of the body (Green 1999).10 Key philosophi-cal standpoints, such as the internalization of authority, self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-education, inform training and aesthetics, as well as community and client practices. Both strands are part of a quiet politi-cal movement based on the belief that we have the capacity and personal agency to direct and/or redirect our lives through gentle self-reflexive processes; becoming active agents in our experience, sensually alive, and co-actively engaged with our world. This is a defining feature of Somatic Movement Education generally.11

Community and client-based practices differ because they are not con-cerned with the advancement of performance, or how applied somatic education supports technical training, or how it shapes aesthetics. Community educators are primarily concerned with helping people move into life again after a period of stress, fatigue, world-weariness, and disil-lusionment. The body, already layered with meaning, weighed heavy with


31Formative support and connection

please see Don Hanlon Johnson (1995). For further discussions on how the field developed, see Johnson (1997), and for an even wider look at the paradigm in a con-temporary context, see Ian Macnaughton (2004). The following are just a few of the professional categories which form part of a far wider paradigm advocating depth-connection and connectivity: Somatic Integration Techniques, Somatic Movement Structural Integration Techniques, Somatic Movement Education, Somatic Movement Therapy, Applied Somatic Movement Education to Dance/Performance Studies, and Applied

socio-cultural value judgements, burdened and pressured, requires a dif-ferent type of socio-communal space – a space of reorientation developed through organismic rest, ease, and communal connection. Somatic educa-tors are all too aware of the impact cultural values, societal structures, and familial/ancestral lineage can have on the body.12 Given this, educa-tors go for simplicity and do not impose pre-existing theory upon a client or community. Body classifications, typologies, and overarching grand theories of analysis and interaction are rarely used, if at all.13 Educators consciously choose to work in a manner which does not impose knowl-edge or hold a fixed truth about the body or health. Practices of heart-felt companionship, experiential anatomy, spacious presence, biologic tempo-rarily, simplicity, minimalism, and non-analytical frameworks define much community work. Offering simplicity to the complexity of lived expe-rience is a key skill required to work within the profession.

Community and client practices are part of a wider supportive and connective paradigm, a body of knowledge advocating the healthy benefits of connection and support. This body of knowledge straddles both per-formance and community work. Finding support in the moving body is a basic premise and discerning feature of Somatic Movement Dance Education, and there is a growing body of international knowledge explor-ing the positive effects of connection and bodily support.14 Connection to the body, support within the body, and supportive communications between bodies are definable aspects shaping the field.

Figure 1: Brigitte Carr Visioning the body Photo: AnneMarie Nissen.



Somatic Movement Education to Dance in Community and Client Practices. Please visit ISMETA to observe the clear distinctions between various schools of practice and to view the orientation of a far wider body of knowledge in con-temporary contexts. Visit approved train-ing programmes to observe generic and shared discourse, whilst noting differ-ence and variety in approach.

4. Educators working within this paradigm share a similar con-cern about the status of the material body and the way in which dominant culture neglects the body as a source of positive knowledge and a site of active change. Anna Halprin (2000) and Daria Halprin (2003) are perhaps the most radical and politically active writers in relation to the cultural neglect of the body and the body within healthy community – both write on how we can activity shape our relationship to the world through fostering depth-connection. Please see Tom Myers (1998) for an excellent exploration of socio-political concerns and an overview of the neglect of the body within mainstream educational systems. See Sandra Fraleigh (1987) for an in-depth exploration of re-embodiment addressed through existential phenome-nology. Key principles which orientate the field internationally include: raising the

In relation to the above, this article will articulate some of the defining features of community practice, and particularly what I term ‘formative proc-esses of connective support’– these are: biologic movement as support, relax-ational support, heart-felt connections and inter-connective support, and open-ended models of self-discovery. In doing so, I will address some of the unspoken elements of practice – namely the cultivation of human qualities of companionship, gentleness, heart, vitality, pleasure, empathy, and compas-sion. These subtle but essential qualities are embedded within somatic move-ment exercises and reflective dialogical processes.15 As such, these qualities are key skills required to work within contemporary practice and play an integral part in the training of community practitioners. Qualities such as gentleness and companionship are cultivated in order to explore the health benefits of embodied personal and transpersonal experiential support.

Models of connectivity and support

Our general everyday life is often formed through habitual movement pat-terns which greatly ‘diminish our essential ability to adapt and to be crea-tive’, and this results ‘in a trapped condition known as over-stabilization’. We experience over-stabilization physically by feeling sluggish, dense, and lacking in resiliency, by breathing rigidly and shallowly, and by losing our capacity to recognize and value subtle sensations and movements.

(Abrams 2009: 2–3)

Somatic Movement Dance Educators are trained in models of connectivity and support. Often clients come to sessions because they feel alone, fatigued, isolated, and alienated – usually people feel something is missing in their lives – a sense of joy or vitality has disappeared from their lived experience, and there is a need to be met and heard without judgement. Clients often articulate an uncomfortable feeling of ‘estrangement’, sens-ing their body needs some attention and care. Miranda Tufnell notes,

[d]espite a culture in many ways obsessed with the body, its fitness, appearance[,] etc., we are curiously estranged from the feeling world of our bodies – from the constellations of sensation, memory, intuition, emotion, instinct[,] and dream that our bodies generate to keep us in touch with ourselves and the world.

(Tufnell 2000: 10–11)16

Even when surrounded by family and friends, clients often articulate a feel-ing of ‘aloneness in the world’, expressing feelings of bodily dissipation, exhaustion and perceptual experiences of disintegration. Much international practice addresses the paradox that we are alone yet deeply connected. As such, practices are shaped by models of self-support (how we support our aloneness, finding enough support within our own body) and depth-connec-tion with others (how we stay present, spacious, curious, bright and alive; fostering positive connections). Initially, connectivity is fostered through experiential processes which contact a deeper sense of vitality, usually located within the body’s moving physiology.17 Connecting to the innate and myste-rious intelligence of body helps people to feel part of creation again: connec-tion and exploration of mystery is a definable aspect of practice.



status of the body as a site of knowledge and a site of positive change, becoming a co-active agent in the world, and consciously making decisions based on the acquisition of knowl-edge felt through the body.

5. High levels of indi-vidual expressive sensibility and socio-political reflection define individual praxis, contributing to the development and uniqueness of the field across continents. Please see ISMETA to view the individual-ity of programme directors, their political and spiritual standpoints, and the uniqueness of their programmes. ISMETA acknowledges the cross-pollination of practice – the organization supports unique development through cross-polli-nation and personal creativity, while advo-cating the importance of referencing lineage.

6. A good example of difference in aesthetic form and pedagogical intent can be seen, for example, in work of Daniel Leven and Emilie Conrad. Both ISMETA direc-tors have developed unique somatic processes which are vastly different in aesthetic form, but at root share the same concern for the body, care of body and care for the communal body. For further details, see: http://www.ismeta.org/leven.html and http://www.ismeta.org/continuum.html

7. Anna Halprin, founder of the ‘Halprin Process’, is

In addition, educators address alienation from the sensate through radi-cal models of kinaesthetic education. For example, traditional education teaches people to know the world through the exteroceptive system, prima-rily the visual and auditory. As Tom Myers notes, we learn about our world and what is ‘going on at some distance from our bodies’, and the kinaesthetic sense (what we feel in and through our body) is undervalued (Myers 1998: 102).18 Within community work, we strive to cultivate an intimate relation-ship to our body through investigating kinaesthesia and to explore how our perceptual knowledge of the world is greatly enriched through fostering a sensitive and conscious engagement with proprioception and interoception.19

Most contemporary practice is formulated through the concept of a communal ‘holding environment’ where the body is nurtured through models of self-reflexivity, non-judgment, and open-ended processes of self-discovery.20 The holding environment works to eliminate habitual pat-terns of judgment, competition, and humiliation, as well as interactive communications based on attack and defence, all of which are viewed as antithetical to health and well-being.21 It is a philosophical framework of bodily support, self-education, and positive growth. Educators work through practicing curiosity, which explores care for the body, care for life, and care for another. In relation to the above, community practice is by nature compassionate, life-affirming, and self-reflexive – a kind-hearted presence and considered appreciation for the body marks the discipline. Many of these human qualities and socially reflective aspects of praxis remain undefined or peripheral to our understanding of the field.

Formative support

We are sensate beings in a sensate world, constantly in sensate relationship with the people and the environment surrounding us. It is through our bod-ies that we make and break contact with our sensate world. In the womb as the body grows and develops[,] we perceive everything around us through our bodies. Our bodies are ourselves in this world; they are the source of our knowledge about ourselves and the world.

(Hayes 2007: 2)

The beauty of somatic work is in its simplicity. Initially, formative support is fostered through simple, yet powerful, sensory-perceptual processes. The sen-sate precedes perception and interpretation; it is valued as a site of change and deep release from fixed perceptual and interpretive patterns (McHose and Frank 2006: 1).22 Encouraging people to move within the sensate invites the possibility of change, and this is an important process which supports and connects people to wider aspects of life. Many clients attend sessions because they feel stuck. Moving in the sensate allows people to journey into the pre-reflective, and it is here they can dream ‘the new’ or find positive sense-streams of experiential support. Educators invite clients to explore the sensory realm in order to widen perception, re-pattern perception, and/or gain more autonomy over perception (Tufnell and Crickmay 2004, McHose and Frank 2006). Attention to breathing, sensing, grounding, and connec-tivity are also considered vital experiential processes – such processes help us



the forerunner of this particular strand of community practice. Her groundbreaking work uses dance as a healing art and compassionate, inte-grative tool within community, and has shaped the field internationally. Daniel Leven, founder of ‘Shake Your Soul®’ and ‘The Art and Soul of Healing through Movement’, is another radical, innovative practitioner cur-rently developing praxis in relation to community, heart, positive interaction, and healing. Emilie Conrad, founder of ‘Continuum’, has been instrumental in developing movement focusing on fluid and depth-connection with self and earth. Mary Abrams, Director of Movingbodyresources

to connect to the external environment and with the internal body (Brodie and Lobel 2004).23 Focusing on the breath, blood, and heart are other key experiential processes offered as formative support and used to cultivate con-nective presence (Hayes 2007: 8). Further to this, support is explored via invitations to experience a more conscious relationship to gravity, weight, mass, space, and flow (McHose and Frank 2006: 9–13). Educators encour-age an experience of anatomy and moving physiology as the ground of being, our formative life support.24 Developing a felt relationship to body through interoceptive kinaesthesia (sensory-perceptual awareness of the internal body) is used to form the basis of ‘self support’ – an experience of support encountered and sustained from within body-self. Giving the sensory life of the body attention, through gentle, slow interoceptive process, is central to finding support.

Biologic movement as support

Our bodies, as our lives, are shaped by movement – from the changing pulse of our hearts, tides of our breath, to the movement of thoughts, feelings, sensations, dreams. In each moment of life[,] we are touched[,] moved by a myriad of impulses and stimuli, which the body registers and responds to, whether we notice it or not…. Movement informs us to how and where we are; without the sensation and stimulus of movement[,] we lose a sense of what is going on within us.

(Tufnell 2000: 9, 11)

Figure 2: Rebecca Weber Reflective Drawing after Moving Photo: AnneMarie Nissen.



and president of ISMETA, is a key figure, playing a central role in the development of somatic work within community and client-based work.

8. Educationally and philosophically, ISMETA programmes are informed by the following ‘scope of practice’: The purpose of somatic movement educa-tion and therapy is to enhance human processes of psycho-physical awareness and functioning through movement learning. Practices provide the learning conditions to: focus on the body, both as an objective physical process and as a sub-jective process of lived consciousness; refine perceptual, kinaes-thetic, proprioceptive, and interoceptive sensitivity that sup-ports homeostasis and self-regulation; recognize habitual patterns of perceptual, postural, and move-ment interaction with one’s environment; improve movement coordination that supports structural, functional, and expressive integra-tion; and experience an embodied sense of vitality and extended capacities for living. See http://www.ismeta.org/about.html#scope

9. The application of somatic movement systems to Dance Studies explores how applied experiential knowledge enhances performance, tech-nical training, and teaching methodolo-gies. Applied somatic movement education within the dominant

Even more formative is finding support within movement itself. As Emilie Conrad points out, ‘movement is what we are, not something we do’ (Gintis 2007: 16; original emphasis). Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are movement even at the most microscopic level of being, and an essen-tial feature of what it means to be human is movement. However, Emilie’s statement often eludes our general cultural awareness and certainly escapes our daily lived experience. There is a call by writers such as Bonnie Gintis to rediscover the instinct to engage with the ‘movement that is at the core of our biologic identity’, allowing ‘the motion that is already present to be augmented’ (Gintis 2007: 16). Across the field, support is explored through attentive movement explorations which contact the micro-movement present within fluid systems (see Conrad 2007, Bainbridge 1993, Hartley 1995). ‘We can find endless amounts of support through the moving body’, particularly when we are invited to move in response to ‘the motion that is already present’ within us (Abrams inter-view 2008, Gintis 2007: 16). Proposing that we can find support through movement, and within the rhythms of fluid, can be life changing when the idea becomes experientially felt. Coupled with greater degrees of kinaesthetic awareness (the ability to feel ‘you’ moving through space and know where ‘you’ are), produces an integrated experience where the outer body is moved by its own internal fluid flow – this is referred to as cultivat-ing depth-support-in-movement.

Movement invites change

When made conscious, and when entered into as mindful expression, move-ment becomes a vehicle for insight and change. As creative and mindful movers, we are able to explore whatever rises to the surface, experimenting, opening up, and investigating ourselves in new ways.

(Halprin 2003: 18)

‘As we mature, and our organism continues adapting to the physical requirements of the stimuli in our gravitational world, we also adapt to the affective-emotional and habitual requirements of our social world’ (Abrams 2009: 2). Because movement is constantly evolving, never-ending, altering, shifting, and unfolding, it is an exceptional site of change – a site where new perceptions are formed, re-formed, and/or altered. Infinite possibilities are called into play where newly experienced movement articulation creates insight, widens our perceptions and invites change. Educators help people to ‘unlock the shapes everyday life has enforced upon them’ (Tufnell practice observation January 2009). Praxis, which offers the possibility of perceptual epiphany illu-minating how body-self orientates in the world, is a central feature within community practice. Open-ended processes of self-discovery are taught through somatic movement improvisations which help clients learn new patterns and perceive new sensations – ‘[i]n improvisation, we can try things out, make discoveries, take risks, do it again’, and ‘[f]eelings and experiences are transformed through this dynamic use of creativity’ (Halprin 2003: 19).



paradigm of Western Theatre Art Dance explores how somatic education supports performance, shapes aesthetics, and contributes to positive life-affirming teaching methods. See key theorists, such as Batson and Schwartz (2007a, 2007b), Brodie and Lobel (2004, 2006), Ahearn (2006), and Eddy (2006). See, for example, Coventry University, De Montfort University, and John Moores University for excel-lent examples of the integration of somat-ics into university dance curricula. Please see Martha Eddy (2006, 2002), Jill Green (1999), and Sylvie Fontin (1995), who are key authors in the application of somat-

Relaxational support Support is fostered through relaxation and particularly through exercises which contact the parasympathetic nervous system.25 Practice designed around relaxation, focusing on parasympathetic processes, is a strong feature of community work and contemporary practice. Somatic educators use parasympathetic processes to support ‘self-reflective, digestive, recep-tive, and process-orientated’ experience (Hartley 1995: 253). As Julie Brodie and Elin Lobel (2004: 80) note, ‘[s]hifting the focus from product (skill acquisition) to process (what is actually happening in the body)’ is a funda-mental principle in dance pedagogy which utilizes somatic awareness. Rather than achieving anything, somatic work may simply focus on para-sympathetic processes, such as attention to the felt and lived experience of breathing. A gentle reanimation into felt-life through the ‘silent sensing of breath’ is often central in community practice (Hayes 2007: 8). Attention to the parasympathetic using meditative processes creates a spatiality of presence, an embodied experience of spaciousness, and a spatiality of being. In part, educators encourage a release into what I term our biological or phys-iological temporality, meaning that feeling and experience is deeply felt within the rhythms of the body rather than through the abstraction and pressure of clock-time. In relation to this, the discipline forms and contrib-utes to what Tom Myers has termed the bodywork relaxational paradigm (1998: 111).26 ‘Somatic methods rely largely on augmented sensory proc-esses (in stillness [and] movement). In other words, more time is spent attending to slow, gentle, quiet movement or body scanning at rest’ (Batson

Figure 3: Susanna Recchia Finding Ground Photo: AnneMarie Nissen.



ics to Dance Studies and Education.

10. For further discus-sion, please see Jill Green (1999), who is a key theorist writing about dominant cul-tural values, agency, and autonomy. Her work is groundbreak-ing in relation to understanding dance and discourses of power.

11. See Daria Halprin (2003) and Anna Haplrin (2000) for writing on the possi-bility of social change through community praxis developed through somatic awareness.

12. Within ISMETA and across the wider contextual paradigm, Daria Halprin (2003) is one of the most vocal writers about how the body is impacted by cultural values.

13. Educators are aware of post-Jungian psychology, mod-els of Dance and Depth Psychology, Psychoanalysis in movement, and Somatic Psychology analytical models. Educators consciously choose to work in a manner which doesn’t impose knowl-edge or hold a fixed truth about the body or health. See Pallero (2003) and Hayes (2007) for Dance Movement Therapy and Transpersonal practices which use theoretical frameworks.

14. This paradigm is best viewed through The International Somatic Movement Therapy and Education Association (ISMETA). Many of the key figures in the field,

and Schwartz 2007b: 71). Slowing down is a key aspect of support, and the concepts of self-care and self-nurturing are important aspects in this work – slowing down, resting, and relaxing are essential elements of practice.27

The development of somatic movement processes which orientate the body towards deep rest and anatomical ease is of increasing importance among the international community. Kinaesthetic awareness is often fostered in order to locate what I term sense-streams of experiential support, which in turn maximizes pleasure and alleviates stress within the organ-ism. A central therapeutic aspect of this work is an experience of inner sup-port felt through the pleasure of discerning what feels good, restful, and/or invigorating through movement. For example, listening to how ‘the organ-ism seeks to maximise its experience of vitality in any given moment’ through sense streams which provide information about what is not feeling very well and shifting the body ‘toward affective pleasure and ease’ (Abrams interview 2008). Support is realized through an affective experience of pleasure and sensory comfort, which in turn creates an immediate sense of well-being and joyful, attentive connection with body-self.

Heart-felt connections and inter-connective support

The heart is a powerful muscle that pumps life-sustaining blood throughout the whole body. It is the central organ of the circulatory system. A special artery, the ‘coronary’ artery, the vessels of which literally ‘crown’ the top of the heart, carries freshly oxygenated blood first to the heart itself. The heart first nourishes itself so that it may nourish the rest of the body. By nature[,] we must too nourish and nurture ourselves first in order to sustain the resources with which we can nurture others.

(Hartley 1995: 203)

Developing an easeful relationship with body-self, using somatic processes based on experiencing the kinetic and material presence of the heart, is a strong feature and growing area of experimentation, both nationally and internationally.28 Cultivating a resonant and lived connection to the heart is encouraged in dyadic process in order to counter experiences of feeling alone, disconnected and alienated. Interoceptive awareness of heart sup-ports a self-directed reorientation towards life with passion and greater degrees of well-being, both personally and socially. A heartfelt connection to others is fostered through talking and moving while staying in resonant connection with the heart. As Linda Hartley notes, ‘The heart expresses both our human sensibility and our potential for wholeness. It concerns sharing in a deep sense, the giving of and receiving into ourselves’ (Hartley 1995: 203). Within this work, connection to the heart is nurtured in order to explore a quality of humanness and companionship with heartfelt pres-ence. Heartfelt connections are developed through experiencing heart-in-self and self-as-heart, extending and connecting to another while maintaining a sense of one’s own vitality, ground, and felt substance. Connection to the heart is encouraged through interoceptive listening, and in particular, through locating physiological support in the breath, blood, and heart – the ‘silent sensing of breath and blood’ (Hayes 2007: 8).



Figure 4: Francis Angol Talking Heart Photo: AnneMarie Nissen.



such as Anna Halprin, Emilie Conrad, Daniel Leven, and Sondra Fraleigh run training programmes through ISMETA. Connection and support under-pins the ethos and curricular design of many of these train-ing programmes. For good examples of training programmes exploring depth-connection with body and community, see Daniel Leven’s ‘Leven Trainings in Movement Therapy’, Anna Halprin’s ‘Tamapla Institute’, and Amanda Williamson’s cur-ricular design of the Masters pro-gramme ‘Dance & Somatic Well-being: Connections to the Living Body’.

15. In good practice, somatic movement exercises should always be accom-panied by reflective dialogical processes – these are processes where clients talk about their moving experience with a companion. Within the field, we work to balance the verbal with the non-verbal and the pre-reflective with the reflective.

16. Miranda Tufnell is a key practitioner working in the UK within the context of client and community practice. She is one of the seminal authors and practitioners contributing to the connective paradigm in community and client practices, exploring how health is improved when we feel connected and supported.

17. Experiential practice which contacts our moving physiology was initially

Big heart: strong legs‘If you’re gonna have a big heart, you’d better grow strong legs’ (Abrams practice observation 2008). Legs carry our hearts through the world, and heart likes to grow roots, e.g., to know its ground and its resonant belonging to earth (fluid, spirit, breath). However, the heart also carries the legs through the world. The heart, if deeply sensed, can orientate the entire body: the heart knows where it wants to go, and listening to the kinetic presence of heart re-orientates the body-in-world. Feeling dissonance, brokenness, and absence of heart is common in human experience, but feeling the kinetic presence of heart through a deeply sensed and dialectal relationship with the reality of its organismic functioning can alter and reshape life with heart. Conscious awareness of the heart, positioned deeply within the core of body, moving life-blood throughout and to the peripheral body, harmonizes dissonance through internal connectivity and awareness of life-sustaining energy. Consciousness of core/distal interconnectivity, through a felt experience of the oxygenation of blood, supports moments of homeostasis. The heart has a function, and it is to move towards and into life with greater degrees of courage and clarity. Giving people the permission to focus on their heart is perhaps one of the most pro-ductive and life-affirming offerings in this work. Languaging the heart through poetic and mytho-poetic reflections, via an awareness and lived relation to the existential reality of heart, is an emerging theme across continents.

Models of self-discovery and the imagination

We contemplate sensate experience and we meditate upon, empathise with, and imagine sensate experience. Our impressions of life are received through the channels of the senses, and memory and the imagination seem to be able to re-conjure and enhance sensual and emotional experience.

(Hayes 2007: 10)

The field is based on the belief that we have the capacity and personal agency to direct and/or redirect our lives through gentle self-reflexive proc-esses; these processes help us to actively participate in the world, discover more about ourselves, and make change if called to do so. Self-reflexive models are somatic processes that do not use any analytical or advisory framework, but rather encourage subjective reflection with the support of a heart-full companion. In doing so, they aim to gently support people through self-realization. Models of self-reflexivity are best understood as open-ended processes of self-discovery, where people are given the time and space to subjectively experience their body moving and then reflect on their moving experience, usually with a companion. The way we move reflects our feel-ing-state and such processes offer an excavation of feeling-state which is often habitual – these processes offer support at the level of locating habit and instigating change. Often, processes shift from deep body listening into pre-reflective moving time (moving in the sensate prior to reflection or inter-pretation). This is followed by a reflective period of drawing and/or writing, culminating in talking and dialogical companionship. People are encour-aged to gently explore the possibility of change through attending to them-selves within and through their own lived sensory experience.



developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (1993) and Emilie Conrad (2007). Cohen is one of the founding figures of Somatic Movement Education and created movement explora-tions contacting the following fluid sys-tems: arterial/venous; synovial; cellular; inter-cellular; lymph; and cerebrospinal. Conrad developed a system based on the fluid intelligence of the body, and fluid resonance with earth/universe – a deeply connective practice based on fluidity. She developed the term ‘Oceanic Ancestry’ to refer to the idea that we have developed from a single-celled organism into a multi-cellular fluid organism (2000).

18. Please see Tom Myers’ groundbreaking article, ‘Kinesthetic Dystonia’ (1998).

19. Proprioceptors are generally understood as internal receptors sensed in the skin, joints, muscles, and tendons enabling us to know where we are in space and the position of the body in space. Interoception enables us to feel the internal and innate functioning and life of the body, such as sense-streams from internal organs and internal systems of support.

20. Self-reflexive models are somatic processes which do not use any analytical or advisory framework, but rather encourage subjective reflection with the support of a heart-full companion. Educators choose their language carefully, noticing

The experience of awareness: embodied imagination provides clarity by revealing the myths we live by. It lets soul speak through metaphor and so reconnects us with our inner life. It is in moments of symbolic authenticity that soul is stirring. This brings strength and direction.

(Hayes 2007: 14–15)

Across the field, the imagination is viewed as an extension and expression of sensate experience. The imagination is dependant upon the body and sourced through sense perception – we sense, we perceive, we imagine. It is utilized as a primary and very real support. It is not viewed as irrational, but rather as an integral tool in developing self-awareness and a major initiator of change. Given this, the imagination is an incredible source with which to language and express our most fundamental level of existence, the sensate. Within sensory imaginal models, the sensate is explored through moving, drawing, and writing, and is given visibility through met-aphorical, symbolic, and sometimes mytho-poetic reflections. Some theo-rists refer to this as ‘embodied imagination’, and it is used to support people in finding ‘strength and direction’ (Hayes 2007: 14–15). Internationally within community work, the use of metaphor and symbol is used to lan-guage the body beyond the anatomical and functional, facilitated widely so people gain a deeper understanding of how their movement reflects wider aspects of life.29 As Daria Halprin points out, ‘movement as metaphor imparts a knowledge of the body and gives us the tools we need to see all the ways in which movement reflects who we are’ (2003: 20). In order to develop movement articulations, deepen sense-streams, and articulate depth of feeling, shape-shifting within symbolic and metaphorical move-ment processes is an essential ingredient of community work.

Connectivity: an international concern

[T]he experience of connection: through breathing and sensitive contact with the bodies of others and with earth[,] it is possible to relinquish our fearful investment in separateness to connect deeply with other people and with nature. This connection brings nourishment; it lightens heart.

(Hayes 2007: 15)

Our body is present and active in every moment of our lives. To ignore its centrality discounts our materiality, our engagement in a material world, our body substance – ultimately, to disregard the body negates our human-ness. Re-inhabiting and reconnecting to the body is a central feature of community practice; in essence, practices of connectivity orientate the field internationally. Words such as ‘interconnection’, ‘connectivity’, ‘matrix’, and ‘reconnection’ contribute to a shared discourse, which seeks to support and offer alternatives to feelings of disconnection and alienation.30 Advancing the health benefits of depth-connection to body through a felt dia-logue with the blood, breath, heart, fluids, bone, and tissue are important processes that deepen connection with body and materiality. Furthermore, perceptual feelings of disembodiment and fragmentation are often remedied through practice which explores the integration of body with community,



how language shapes the quality of peo-ple’s experiences. Language is used to support reflection and actively shapes open frameworks and mod-els of self-discovery. For example, words such as ‘invite’, ‘encourage’, ‘offer’, and ‘explore’ are not too directional or invasive. ‘Language styles profoundly affect our picture of the world’ – within community work, we explore how a gentle, non-invasive use of language invites and supports change (McHose and Frank 2006: 2). Exploring and investigating the language we use in sessions is another key skill and essential pedagogical precept.

21. Daniel Leven (2009) is a key theorist in

earth, and/or the inter-dependence of life.31 Experiential processes which offer a deeper understanding of evolutionary bio-morphic development, acknowledging the lived intelligence of body and its profound relationship to earth, also shape the field.32 Awareness of biological intelligence devel-oped through a felt relationship to our deeply material earth-body-substance invokes a greater sense of ‘belonging’ – belonging to earth, being-of-earth, crafted and shaped by the stuff of the earth. There are many vocal writers and practitioners working with these concepts. Influential practitioners, such as Anna Halprin (2000), Daria Haplrin (2003), Miranda Tufnell (2000), Tufnell and Crickmay (2004), and Daniel Leven (2009), are shap-ing models of connectivity. There is a call for a heartfelt, blood-full recon-nection to body and community. Anna Halprin writes extensively on the ‘personal and cultural abandonment’ of the body and how this has created personal and communal alienation (Halprin 2000: 21). This estrangement creates what educators may refer to as alienation from the sensate, leading to perceptual experiences of bodily fragmentation and disintegration.

Academic discernment: practices of active participation in the worldThe concept of ‘active participation’, rather than passive structured learn-ing, sets Somatic Movement Dance Education apart from movement prac-tices which appear somatic to the general public, such as yoga, but in fact are radically different.33 It is worth mentioning here also that Somatic Movement Dance Education is not a body-beautiful or quick-hit, feel-good

Figure 5: Rebecca Weber Reflecting and Drawing Photo: AnneMarie Nissen.



this area – his work addresses habitual patterns of judg-ment, competition, and humiliation, and raises consciousness about interactive communications based on attack and defence. An essential ingredient which creates such an environment is attention to the para-sympathetic nervous system; educators tend to focus on somatic movement meditative processes which stimulate deep rest, addressing pat-terns of flight and fright in order to balance the nervous system. Some of the ingredients of the holding environment are non-judgemental witnessing, heart presence, release and rest, and being rather than excessively doing.

22. McHose and Frank (2006) are key theorists writing in the area of sensory-perception and interpretation.

23. Please see Brodie and Lobel (2004) for a very clear explana-tion of some of the most important practices fostering connectivity interna-tionally.

24. Emilie Conrad (2007) is perhaps the most vocal writer about how our fluid physi-ology is intrinsic to our health and how fluidity supports life.

25. For an explanation of the nervous system in relation to somatic movement work, see Linda Hartley (1995: 250 – 266). Attention to the para-sympathetic increases ‘the blood supply to and activity of the

health modality. In contrast, this discipline seeks to develop a dialectally lived relationship to the existential mystery and vitality of life energy acquiescing within body. Depth-connection to mystery shifts our cultur-ally constructed perceptions of external beauty to a far deeper and more mysterious ontological enquiry. Structured movement systems that reor-ganize the body via an exterior person or impose a set of prescribed exer-cises through spiritual classification, or body typology, are vastly different in pedagogical intent and philosophical standpoint to what I refer to as pure and deep ‘somatics’. Through experiential anatomical improvisa-tions, deep somatics allows people to journey into the sensate, the pre-reflective, and sometimes into pre-cultural realms – certainly we see moments of movement which are often beyond cultural recognition, where the intention is to move within the fluid nature of physiology and primordial aspects of biology (non-stylized, improvisational biomorphic journeys).34 Re-visioning life through the courage to let go of prefixed and culturally recognizable movement invites the possibility for new meaning and radically unique perceptions of moving body to occur. Active participa-tion in positive meaning-making processes, and the possibility of making new meaning through deep somatics, defines contemporary practice. Structures imposed upon the body from rarefied sources are definably different from the intricacies and subtleties pertaining to the discipline at large. Academic dis-cernment tends to find clear expression and delineation between the noun ‘somatics’ and the adjective ‘somatic’– the former guiding, shaping, and demarcating the philosophical standpoints inherent within the field.35 The use of the noun ‘somatics’ specifically refers to ‘the field which studies the soma: namely, the body as perceived from within by first-person perception’ (Hannah, as cited in Johnson 1997: 9–10). It is from this standpoint that we contemporarily find very radical departures from pre-fixed meaning-making structures and rarefied movement systems. Furthermore, Thomas Hannah’s definition of the noun, by logical deduction, points to the possibility of active participation fostering self-education, i.e., how valuing the uniqueness of subjective experience sourced through ‘experiential learning’ and ‘experien-tial sensitivity’ supports agency, new perceptions, and conscious decision making in the world (Hannah 1970, Bauer 1999, Eddy 1992).

Accumulating positive experience: practices of clarity and re-visioning Educators work with the concept of connection using processes which sup-port active participation in one’s own health, such as attentive listening and moment-by-moment depth-connection to body-self. Using spacious practices of positive accumulation, which re-pattern the body using biologic temporality, is a key pedagogical method – accruing enough restful, con-nected experiences within the body gently over time, in order to balance experiential discomfort, dissonance, dis-ease, and aloneness. Practices and dialogical processes which orientate the body towards passion, clarity, vision, freedom, and intuitive knowing, as well as love and joy, are inherent within praxis. Re-orientation into life through positive experience is encour-aged through learning to rest, yield, and acquiesce within the rhythms of the body, and aloneness is addressed through the accumulation of attention to subtle, moment-by-moment inter-connections, within and between



digestive organs’: it slows ‘down the heart beat and rate of res-piration, decreasing muscular readiness for action, lowering the alertness of the externally-directed senses, and decreasing activity at the body periphery’ (Hartley 1995: 251). In com-munity work, the parasympathetic nervous system is val-ued because it helps people to slow down and experience a dif-ferent temporality.

26. Tom Meyers (1998) notes that bodywork and movement approaches can be divided into three ‘paradigms’, or three educational ‘pat-terns of premise and intent’, and offers the following cat-egories to help us to discern the field: relaxational, reme-dial, and integrative. Somatic Movement Dance Education is both relaxational and integrative. It is not directly reme-dial – it does not seek to cure people or resolve a specific anatomical problem, but rather supports people in creative spaces of well-being where disparate and fragmented body experience can be reorganised, re-integrated and given expressive form. For further information, see Daria Halprin (2003). Please see Hanna, Lynne (2006), for a wider context in relation to dance, relaxation and stress.

27. For an excellent article on slowing down and the balance between rest and activity, see Batson,

bodies. Sense perception has a positive trajectory – i.e., bodies like to feel good. Moving within biologic temporality, gently listening, and attentively sensing re-orientates the body towards a quality of restful vitality and the potential for moments of sensory homeostasis. In community work, the ‘whole’ self is called into play where differing aspects and expressions of body-self are given voice and visibility, however it is particularly the inte-gration of the deeply-sensed imaginal into mundane aspects of life which cli-ents enjoy and value. The work helps people to language sense-perception, making visible and giving creative voice to the deepest aspects of ourselves; this, in turn, orientates body-self in the world with greater degrees of ease-ful autonomy and a restful sense of connected belonging, clarity, vision, ingenuity, and imagination.

Works citedAbrams, M. (2009), Health and Continuum Movement, New York: Moving Body

Resources.

Ahearn, E. (2006), ‘The Pilates Method and Ballet Technique: Applications in the Dance Studio’, Journal of Dance Education, 6:3, pp. 92–99.

Bainbridge Cohen, B. (1993), Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering, USA: Contact Editions.

Bartal, L. and Ne’eman, N. (1993), The Metaphoric Body: Guide to Expressive Therapy through Images and Archetypes, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Batson, G. and Schwartz, R. (2007a), ‘Revisiting the Value of Somatic Education in Dance Training Through an Inquiry into Practice Schedules’, Journal of Dance Education, 7:2, pp. 47–55.

Batson, G. and Schwartz, R. (2007b), ‘Revisiting Overuse Injuries in Dance in View of Motor Learning and Somatic Models of Distributed Practice’, Journal of Dance Medicine & Science, 11:3, pp. 70–75.

Bauer, S. (1999), ‘Somatic Movement Education: A Body-Mind Approach to Movement Education for Adolescents Part 1’, Journal of Somatics, 15(2), pp. 38–43.

Brodie, J. and Lobel, E. (2004), ‘Integrating Fundamental Principles Underlying Somatic Practices into Dance Technique Class’, Journal of Dance Education, 4:3, pp. 80–87.

Brodie, J. and Lobel, E. (2006), ‘Somatics in Dance – Dance in Somatics’, Journal of Dance Education, 6:3, pp. 69–71.

Chodorow, J. (1999), Dance Therapy & Depth Psychology: The Moving Imagination, London: Routledge.

Conrad, E. (2007), Life on Land: The Storey of Continuum, California: North Atlantic Books.

Conrad, E. (2009), ‘The International Somatic Movement and Education Therapy Association, http://www.ismeta.org/continuum.html. Accessed January 9th 2009.

Eddy, M. (1992), ‘An Overview of the Science and Somatics of Dance’, Kinesiology and Medicine for Dance, 14:1, pp. 20–28.

Eddy, M. (2002a), ‘Dance and Somatic Inquiry in Studios and Community Dance Programs’, Journal of Dance Education, 2:4, pp. 119–127.

Eddy, M. (2002b), ‘Somatic Practices and Dance: Global Influences’, Dance Research Journal, 34:2, pp. 46–62.



Eddy, M. (2006), ‘The Practical Application of Body-Mind Centering in Dance Pedagogy’, Journal of Dance Education, 6:3, pp. 86–91.

Enghauser, R. (2007), ‘The Quest for an Ecosomatic Approach to Dance Pedagogy’, Journal of Dance Education, 7:3, pp. 80–90.

Fortin, S. (1995), ‘Towards a New Generation: Somatic Dance Education in Academia’, IMPULSE. The International Journal for Dance Science, Medicine, and Education, 3, pp. 253–262.

Fraleigh, S. (1987), Dance and the Lived Body; A Descriptive Aesthetics, Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press.

Gintis, B. (2007), Engaging the Movement of Life: Exploring Health and Embodiment Through Osteopathy and Continuum, California: North Atlantic Books.

Green, J. (1999), ‘Somatic Authority and the Myth of the Ideal Body in Dance Education’, Dance Research Journal, 31:2, pp. 80–100.

Halprin, A. (2000), Dance as a Healing Art: Returning to Health with Movement and Imagery, USA: LifeRhythm Energy Field.

Halprin, D. (2003), The Expressive Body in Life, Art and Therapy: Working with Movement, Meaning and Metaphor, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Hanna, L. (2006), Dancing For Health: Conquering and Preventing Stress, USA: ALTAMira.

Hannah, T. (1970), Bodies in Revolt: A Primer in Somatic Thinking, USA: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Hartley, L. (1995), Wisdom of the Body Moving: An Introduction to Body-Mind Centering, California: North Atlantic Books.

Hartley, L. (2004), Somatic Psychology: Body Mind and Meaning, London: Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Hayes, J. (2007), Performing Your Dreams, UK: Archive Publishing.

ISMETA (2009), The International Somatic Movement and Education Therapy Association, http://www.ismeta.org/. Accessed: January 9th 2009.

Johnson, D. (1995), Bone, Breath, & Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, California: North Atlantic Books.

Johnson, D. (1997), Groundworks: Narratives of Embodiment, California: North Atlantic Books.

Leven, D. (2009), ‘The International Somatic Movement and Education Therapy Association’, http://www.ismeta.org/leven.html. Accessed: January 9th 2009

Macnaughton, I. (2004), Body, Breath, & Consciousness: A Somatics Anthology, California: North Atlantic Books.

McHose, C. and Frank, K. (2006), How Life Moves: Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness, California: North Atlantic Books.

Myers, T. (1998), ‘Kinesthetic Dystonia: What Bodywork Can Offer a New Physical Education, Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 2:2, pp. 101–114.

Olsen, A. (2002), Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide, USA: Middlebury College Press.

Pallero, P. (ed.) (1999), Authentic Movement: Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan Chodorow, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Pallero, P. (ed.) (2007), Authentic Movement: Moving the Body, Moving the Self, Being Moved: A Collection of Essays, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Roth, G. (1999), Sweat your Prayers: Movement as Spiritual Practice, Gill & Macmillan.

G. and Schwartz, R. (2007a).

28. Daniel Leven’s ‘Movement Therapy’ programme in the USA is a ground-breaking training, focusing partly on heart-centred education and the re-formation of communities with heart (2009). Other practitioners, such as Miranda Tufnell, have developed metaphori-cal and experiential praxis around heart. In terms of ‘Body-Mind Centering’ and ‘Somatic Psychology’, Linda Hartley (1995, 2004), presents some of the most lucid writ-ing on the heart and the way in which we metaphorically articulate the heart. See Jill Hayes’ (2007) work for a beautiful exploration of somat-ics and transpersonal movement modalities, exploring connection through empathy and compassion.

29. Please see Daria Halprin (2003) and Anna Halprin (2000), as well as Bartal and Ne’eman (1993) for leading examples on movement and metaphor.

30. Anna Halprin (2000) and Daria Halprin (2003) are the most vocal writers and practitioners in terms of developing dance as tool for commu-nal healing through models of connectiv-ity. Both writers and practitioners are also central theorists in the development of earth connection and interconnection to earth through ritual and nature. In the UK, Miranda Tufnell (2000; Tufnell and Crickmay 2004) and



Tufnell, M. and Crickmay, C. (2004), A Widening Field: Journeys into the Body and the Imagination, UK: Dance Books.

Tufnell, M. (2000), ‘Beneath Our Words’ in P. Greenland (ed.), What Dancers Do that Other Health Workers Don’t…, Leeds: JABADO.

InterviewsAbrams, M. (2008), interview, 14 November.

Abrams, M. (2008), practice observation in teaching practice with MA students, UCLan, 16 November.

Tufnell, M. (2009), practice observation in teaching practice with MA students, UCLan, 31 January.

Research Assistance: Rebecca Webber

Suggested citationWilliamson, A. (2009), ‘Formative support and connection: somatic movement dance

education in community and client practice’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1, pp. 29–45, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.29/1

Contributor detailsAmanda Williamson is the course leader and founder of MA Dance & Somatic Wellbeing: Connections to the Living Body (UK). She is currently developing the Masters programme in NY (Manhattan) at MovingBodyResources with Mary Abrams (President of ISMETA). Her research is in New England – she is currently writing on the integration of the sensory imaginal in somatic movement modalities and re-visioning processes of social and personal change.

Contact: University of Central Lancashire, School of Creative & Performing Arts, Preston PRI 2HE UK.Tel: 01772 201201 ext 5943E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

33. Please see Susan Bauer (1999) and Martha Eddy (1992) for good examples of how active participation is central within Somatic Movement Dance Education. Please see Batson and Schwartz (2007a) and Myers (1998) for detailed explanations of external author-ity and the imposition of structured systems in relation to the development of Somatic Movement Dance Education and Kinaesthetic Education.

34. Developed by Conrad (2007), the term ‘primordial anatomy’ refers to the idea that we have developed from a single-celled organism, bathed by a saltwater environment, into a multi-cellular organism containing both saltwater and fresh water; i.e. we have a bio-morphic anatomy, which contains bio-information from all developmental stages, and as such, we are deeply and inextricably linked to all creation, creatures, and the universe. This theory creates a sense of being connected and interconnected to creation, and this is one of the underlying premises of somatic education, when understood through a ‘heart-centred’, ‘earth-centred’ paradigm.

35. For a good and further explanation of the etymology, history, and distinctions between somatic and somatics, see Johnson, D. (1997).

Jill Hayes (2007) are key practition-ers and theorists foregrounding con-nectivity. Please also see Gabrielle Roth (1999), another key activist in this area, who is work-ing within a cognate strand of dance and community practice.

31. Please see Anna Halprin (2000), Daria Halprin (2003), Andrea Olsen (2002), and Bartel and Ne’eman (1993) for excellent literally examples of praxis exploring the inter-connection between earth and body within this wider paradigm.

32. The study of bio-morphic evolutionary interconnectivity through cellular and fluid resonance is best seen in the work of Emilie Conrad (2007). ‘Continuum’ has a contextual framework grounded in the notion that we are bio-morphic beings – this tends to means we include and retain the cellular and skeletal-muscle memory of all life forms within our body. This is termed ‘species inclusion’ and refers to the way any creature’s evo-lutionary biological heritage encompasses that of all living creatures, past and present (Conrad 2007: 3).






Keywordshealth Foucault Feldenkrais Methodaction-research

The experience of discourses in dance and somaticsSylvie Fortin Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

Adriane Vieira Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil

Martyne Tremblay Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

AbstractAn action research consisting of somatic education classes within a bachelor pro-gram in dance has showed how dancers negotiate the dominant dance discourse and the marginal discourse of somatic education in relation to the complexities of body and health issues. More specifically, the students appreciated the approach of the Feldenkrais Method that favoured a pedagogy compatible with health concerns and with Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self.

Introduction

I will remember this action-research because it was an opportunity for me to question myself about my dance practice in day to day life and its effect on my health and wellbeing. It raised many questions and also allowed me to stand up and make clear choices. I realize again that I resist change or what is new when the results are not immediate. My vision of the body has changed. I have been able to take a personal position, but I’ve also had the opportunity to better understand and to perceive the milieu in which I am entering.

(Claudine)

These words express one student’s reaction at the end of an action-research with a group of pre-professional contemporary dancers.1 The action-research was initiated because our previous studies revealed the extent to which the pursuit of an ideal body, and the pressure of infallible performance, can pro-voke great challenges for undergraduate dance students in terms of their health management. Though many authors have shown that the body is constructed by means of different dance practices, few have attempted to understand how dancers negotiate these practices in relation to the com-plexities of body and health issues. The action-research took place within a bachelor program in dance and consisted of somatic education classes in which we included discussions about the results of empirical studies on dancers’ health. As such we hoped to offer a platform to challenge students since we believe that dance students are active participants in the

1. This study has been partially published in French by Fortin, Vieira, A. and Tremblay, M (2008).

JDSP_1.1_04_art_Fortin.indd 47JDSP_1.1_04_art_Fortin.indd 47 6/8/09 10:22:24 AM6/8/09 10:22:24 AM

48 Sylvie Fortin, Adriane Vieira and Martyne Tremblay

2. We hesitated between using the word ‘body’ or ‘soma’. The later refers to the body from a first person perception and encompasses the various aspect of our living experience (physically, psycho-logically, socially, intellectually, spiritu-ally, etc.). Although it better reflects our positioning, we hesi-tatingly decided to keep the former word of body to maintain consistency; it would have been clumsy and confusing to continually swap the word body in the con-text of the dominant dance discourse, with the word soma in the context of the somatic discourse. Experience is produced in lan-guages and it is not an easy task to step away from a binary view of the human experience. Elsewhere I have exposed my attempts to overcome this binary view in the context of integrating somatic education within dance technique classes (Fortin, S., Long, W. and Lord, M., 2002).

construction of their body, provided they have access to different discourses and the various possibilities that these can offer.2

According to Foucault (1963), discourses are systems of thoughts com-posed of ideas, attitudes, beliefs, courses of action and practices that enable, just as they constrain, what can be said or done at particular times and places. Discourses construct current truths and what power relations they carry with them. For example, we can distinguish both a dominant dis-course and a marginal somatic discourse in dance training. Each discourse proposes different perceptions of the body and training modalities. In gen-eral, the dominant discourse of dance values an ideal body where aesthetic criteria of beauty, slimness, virtuosity, devotion and asceticism prevail. On the other hand, the somatic discourse promotes body awareness to allow individuals to make choices for their own well-being, thus counteracting the fantasy of an ideal body, which is so often removed from the concrete-ness of the lived body. However, these different and sometimes opposing discourses may be confusing in the student’s experience. In order to under-stand this in more depth, in the first part of the article we will briefly exam-ine Foucault’s idea of discourse, this will help to understand, in the second part, why some elements of the discourses are used and others rejected.

Foucault’s notion of technologies of domination and technologies of the selfIn his first works, Foucault has demonstrated how institutions can discipline individuals into docile bodies, through surveillance and auto-surveillance. He developed the concept of technologies of domination, which refer to modes of knowledge production and organization that determine the con-duct of the individuals and limit their choices in such a way as to foster activity and productivity towards a continually increasing profitability. In such situations, power relations are rather immovable, spaces of freedom are constrained and an objectification of the subject predominates. At the end of his life, Foucault recognized that he had insisted too much on the technology of domination and power, and he became interested in how individuals act upon themselves.

In his last writings, he developed the concept of technologies of the self by which individuals constitute themselves and recognize themselves as subject. The technologies of the self, made up of attitudes and bodily practices,

permit individuals to effect, by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.

(Foucault, 1988: 18)

These operations that individuals may draw upon in their self-construc-tion make a greater state of autonomy possible, enabling them to resist domination. However, self-construction does not happen in a vacuum – unfettered by context and the constraints of the surrounding discourses. Technologies of domination and technologies of the self are always interrelated, and contribute to our constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of ourselves in the world.


49The experience of discourses in dance and somatics

Dominant discourse in traditional western theatrical dance Dance authors have explored the applications of Michel Foucault’s ideas. Although, dance practices can differ drastically in their underpinning assumptions about the body and may emphasize different processes of objectification or subjectification, dance is usually a site where the sub-ject has been traditionally objectified and health issues dismissed in favour of the aesthetics of the art form. According to Huesca (2005), classical ballet, as a historically institutionalized practice, offers many examples of technologies of domination, whereas contemporary dance allows dancers more possibilities for creative construction of the self. Dance ethnograph-ers have challenged this point of view, showing that even in contempor-ary dance, there prevails a view of the body as being alienated from the self, something to be subdued and managed. For example, Long (2002) has examined the power/achievement aspect of dance teaching and learning in contemporary dance classes. Green (2001) has addressed how dance practices impose an ideal body image on women’s bodies through unattainable aesthetic. Fortin and Girard (2005) have described the experience of professional contemporary dancers applying a somatic prac-tice to their dancing. While describing aspects of the dance culture, these authors have shown that choreographers, teachers as well as dancers, are seeking distance from the dominant vision of the body as object. They are looking for approaches where the subjective sensorial experience can be used to reduce the emphasis on the external form of dancing bodies, which so often have a negative impact on dancers’ bodies. As such, som-atic education practices can participate fully, where dance students’ health and well-being are concerned, in encouraging an empowering practice for the dancer.

Somatic education as a technology of the self From diverse origins outside the field of dance, a variety of somatic education practices have made their way into the dance milieu. Guimond contends that somatic education proposes ‘a new relationship to oneself and to others: sensing one’s actions, knowing one’s feelings, no longer considering oneself as an object, but as a creator of one’s own life’ (1999: 6). For Feldenkrais (1972) human movement is the founda-tion of the thoughts, emotions and sensations of a person; therefore, it offers the best means for concrete changes in life. According to Moshe Feldenkrais, individuals cannot experience freedom and be fully crea-tive unless they are able to recognize their perceptual habits and act upon them.

For Johnson (1983), somatic practices should not be looked at solely through an individualistic lens, outside of the discourses surrounding the individual, since there is always a reciprocal play between the micro and macro. To him, a mind-body split in society resulted in a sensory disconnection affecting all aspects of our life. The dominant values of our culture’ he writes, ‘insinuate their ways into our muscu-lar responses, shaping our perceptions of the world. Altering the mor-bid dynamics of our culture requires us to loosen their hold on our flesh’ (Johnson 1983:14). In retrieving the capacity to feel and observe what was escaping their critical consciousness, individuals can allow



themselves to resist technologies of domination. This idea is also found in Shusterman: ‘If it is true that oppressive relations of power impose a weighty identity encoded in our very own body, then these relations of oppression can be put into question by marginal somatic practices’ (1992: 68).

That does not mean that somatic practices, considered as technolo-gies of the self, are not unproblematic, since all body practices can be potentially emancipatory or oppressive (Markula 2004). What somatic practices offer is an alternative ‘game of truth’ to that which is pre-dominantly validated. Games of truth are linked to accepted consensus about what is sound knowledge and the accompanying hegemonic pro-cedures that legitimate power relations. Foucault (1988) contends that games of truth are unavoidable, but he emphasizes that the practice of the self allows us ‘to play these games of power with as little domination as possible’ (1988: 40). In talking about pedagogical institutions, he states that;

I see nothing wrong in the practice of a person who, knowing more than other in a specific game of truth, tells those others what to do, teaches them, and transmits knowledge and technique to them. The problem in such practices where power – which is not bad in itself – must inevita-bly come into play is knowing how to avoid the kind of domination effects where a kid is subjected to the arbitrary and unnecessary authority of a teacher, or a student put under the thumb of a professor who abuses his authority. I believe that this problem must be framed in terms of practices of the self and freedom.

(Foucault 1988: 40)

Somatic education as technologies of the self in dance In the recent International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, Green (2007) presents a review of somatic dance research. From it, we can see that some researchers have chosen to address how dance is taught somat-ically while others have chosen to study somatics as an adjunct to dance training. What these different uses of somatics have in common is a recog-nition of the value of somatic practices to a dancer’s training; these prac-tices can refine bodily perceptions, which can contribute to improvement of technique, aid the development of expressive capacities and prevention of injuries. The subtext is that somatic education can defy the dominant discourse in dance, a discourse which promotes an ideal body, supposes an attitude of docility, maintains a normalisation of pain and endorses the external authority of the professor/choreographer as the primary holder of power and knowledge. In contrast, the somatic education discourse sup-ports the development of an internal authority which refers to the capac-ity to make decisions based on sensory discriminations that accentuate the singularity of one’s body.3 Looking inward can help dancers to con-struct self-knowledge and create more satisfying states of health and well-being. In this way, somatic education can be conceived of as a technology of the self that counteracts the dominant discourse and supports a trans-formation of the power relations in dance.

3. Authors such as Green (2001) and Long (2002) seem to use the terms ‘inter-nal authority’ and ‘somatic authority’ interchangeably.



However, over the years of our career as teachers of somatic educa-tion, we have been confronted with the phenomenon that some students, despite living out their internal authority and experiencing the benefits of somatic education, reintegrate the dominant discourse relatively quickly after the end of the structured somatic classes. They return to their ‘old habits’ of aligning themselves with the hegemonic norms of the dominant discourse, where fatigue, pain and injury are accepted silently on a daily basis. This shows how strong the dominant discourse is. Fortunately, Markula (2004) allows us to better address this phenom-enon. She explains that new bodily experiences are necessary but insuf-ficient in the development of practices that constitute a technology of the self able to resist the technologies of domination. For the technologies of the self to be liberating, she asserts that the person must do three things: (1) foster a self open to change and constant re-creation, (2) increase critical awareness of the dominant discourse, and (3) develop an ethical care of the self that translates to ethical care of others.

Thus, it became essential that our action-research address these issues, since we wanted to find out how the action-research would encourage (or not) a subjectification process that allows one to be less vulnerable to the effects of the dominant discourse.4 By adding discussions based on dance research to the somatic classes, we hoped the students would increase their critical thinking and connect self-care issues to a larger perspective of the dance world.

MethodologyFor ten weeks, the action-research took place as part of a bi-weekly com-pulsory course in somatic education for the second year students of the B.A. program in dance at the University of Quebec (UQAM) in Montreal, Canada. The study was a ‘professor’s action-research’ since it was initia-ted by the three authors and not by the students (Gomez, Flores and Jiménez 1996). Taggart (1998) claims that reflective pedagogical appro-aches, that focus on individual emancipation, integrate well into the objec-tives of an action-research. For Lather (1991), the objective of raising awareness can defy the dominant discourse by opening up the space for recognizing other discourses.

Of the bi-weekly somatic classes, one class was devoted to theoretical discussion while the other class was focused on the practice of somatic education. The participants in this action-research were twenty-four French speaking students, of which twenty-two were women and two were men, with an average age of twenty-two years. They had a wide range of dance experience in terms of years (from two to fifteen years), as well as in terms of dance styles (ballet, contemporary, social dancing, hip hop) but for many of these students, coming to university coincided with their first introduction to somatic education. In conforming to the ethical code of UQAM for research with human beings, we handed out individual consent forms to each of the participants.5

As Table 1 indicates, the weekly theoretical classes, of one hour and forty minutes, encompassed the following: exchange of ideas about dance research results; discussions on ideal bodies; sharing of individual stories; and participation in drawing-up an institutional guide to injury management.

4. Other research-ers have focussed on subjectification processes through dif-ferent body awareness practices, notably in the martial arts (Boudreau Folman and Konzak, 1992), in postural education (Vieira, 2004) and in physical conditioning (Markula 2004).

5. We express our heartfelt thanks to the twenty-four students who participated in the study. The reflec-tions of eighteen of them appear in this article. With the exception of two indi-viduals identified by a pseudonym, they are identified by their first names because they asked for it. Where some participants shared a same first name, the first letters of their family name were used to distin-guish them.



The weekly practical classes, also of one hour and forty minutes, took the form of ‘Feldenkrais Method Awareness Through Movement’ lessons (ATM), inspired by the original writings of Moshe Feldenkrais and his close collabor-ators. The Feldenkrais Method is an educational system centered on move-ment, aiming to expand and refine the use of self through awareness. In some countries, the Feldenkrais Method is included under the umbrella term

Table 1: Theoretical sessions and practical Feldenkrais lessons.

Theoretical sessions Practical Feldenkrais lessons

1.1 Welcome 1.2 Body type assessment

2.1 Constructions of health among pre-professional dancers (Fortin, Cyr and Tremblay 2005)

2.2 Pressure through the foot and how it relates to the knees and the pelvis(Alon 1996)

3.1 Harmonious and obses-sive passions(Rip, Fortin and Vallerand 2006)

3.2 Movements of the pelvis (Feldenkrais 1972)

4.1 Professional dancers’ construction of health(Fortin, Trudelle and Rail 2008)

4.2 Breathing process(Feldenkrais 1972)

5.1 Ideal body(Vieira 2004)

5.2 Use of the arms in turning(Shafarman 1997)

6.1 Sharing written weekly reports

6.2 Crawling(Wildman 2000)

7.1 Choreographer-dancer relational dynamics during the creative process(Newell and Fortin 2008)

7.2 Eye movement and how it con-tributes to rotation(Feldenkrais 1972)

8.1 Class cancelled 8.2 Standing on hands and feet(Joly 1980)

9.1 Institutional guidelines for injury manage-ment(Girard and Fortin 2006)

9.2 Twist(Feldenkrais 1972)

10.1 Discussion about the ATM and IF

10.2 Changing body tone with rolls(Alon 1996)



‘alternative and complementary medicines’. However, the members of the Association Feldenkrais Québec (AFQ) do not regard it as a therapeutic intervention because they are not working from the medical model.6 Maintaining that there is no separation between mind and body, they are teaching students how to move better and how to improve their overall well-being.

In the group classes, the teacher of the Feldenkrais Method (who is the main author of this article) verbally directed students through movement sequences and various foci of attention to enable discovery of new choices. In addition to the group classes, each student also bene-fited from two individual lessons given by certified Feldenkrais practi-tioners. In the individual lessons, called ‘Functional Integration’ (IF), the practitioners use their hands to guide the movement of the student with the aim of learning how to eliminate excess effort and move more easily.

The Feldenkrais Method of somatic education was chosen for many reasons. Firstly, the authors have a solid experience in this method. Secondly, there is literature supporting the method’s contributions in dealing with health and dance issues.7 Finally, the method has been examined from a post-structuralist point of view and it has been sug-gested that it contributes to a process of subjectification (Wright 2000).

Data collected from the students included five elements: (1) individ-ual written descriptions of their own ‘body history’, (2) a weekly report of their experiences related to body and health issues, synthesized at the half-way point and at the end the action-research, (3) weekly answers to an open question relating to the theme of the ATM lesson, (4) transcriptions of group discussions in the theoretical classes, and (5) the researchers’ notes of each class based on video or audio record-ing.8 The data was analysed according to an adaptation of grounded theory (Paillé 1996). The entire corpus of data was analyzed induc-tively by multiple readings and discussions between the researchers in order to allow categories to emerge out of the data, rather than having them imposed prior to data collection and analysis. Trustworthiness of the results is linked to triangulation of the multiple sources of data and to the debriefing of the researchers on a weekly basis. The results are presented in two sections; first, the student’s appraisal of the action-research process, and second, the students’ ways of negotiating the dominant discourse in dance and the marginal discourse of somatic education.

Appraisal of the action-research process The practical Feldenkrais lessonsAt the beginning of the action-research, in the Feldenkrais lessons, some students experienced moments of discomfort and pain which slowly progressed into moments of discovery, comfort, and feelings of connected-ness. Here is Caroline Ca’ experience:

At the beginning, I was exhausting myself by putting so much effort into it […] Through time and everything we were discussing in class, I started

6. Association Feldenkrais Québec : http://www.feldenk-raisqc.info/

7. For a compilation of Feldenkrais research: http://www.psych.utah.edu/feldenkrais/research.php

8. Most of the corpus of data was part of the students’ assess-ments since the action-research took place in the context of a mandatory uni-versity course. Well aware that there was no perfect solution to the constraints of conducting an action-research in an academic setting, and in order to lessen the possible conflicts arising out of using the students’ work for both the action-re-search and the course assessment, we dis-cussed the situation with the students, who decided that the grades would be based on a formative assessment includ-ing self-assessments throughout the fifteen weeks of the semester.



to listen to myself more and I learned to take breaks and to take the time I needed so that I could benefit. I think you have to persevere.

As researchers, we interpreted students’ signs of agitation and discom-fort as an attempt to find their habitual physical references. This ten-dency lessened and, later we observed more calm, a greater acceptance of new sensations, and a growing capacity to pay attention to oneself. It is important to note that the pedagogical strategies of the somatic educa-tion are mostly opposed to those traditionally found in a dance class (Fortin 1995; Fortin, Long, and Lord (2002). For Claudine, the Feldenkrais Method offers a welcome counterpoint to usual teaching practices: ‘Feldenkrais sometimes contradicts the teaching that we get in other classes, but I find that therein lies its strength’. In many somatic approaches, no demonstration on the teacher’s part, slow rhythm and reducing effort in the execution of movements are indeed considered teaching priorities in order for the students to develop the ability to dis-criminate between physical sensations. This unusual approach awak-ened reactions such as this one of Caroline Ch’s:

I dance now with more respect for my body. In Feldenkrais, the goal is explo-ration and not performance. By applying these principles elsewhere, I realize how my stress is reduced, and how I approach events with more calm. I per-ceive them less dramatically.

The theoretical classesFor many students, the theoretical sessions were destabilizing moments as Lea expressed:

The discussions were very satisfying and useful to my personal understand-ing. All the subjects raised led us to reflect and question our beliefs in very important ways. (In dance) taboo subjects are avoided and we try not to worry about them, even though they’re still very present. Sometimes I didn’t want to go to class on Tuesdays out of fear that I would leave too shaken up by all sorts of self-questioning […] The discussions always brought me back to an awareness of the dance milieu in which I grew up and I questioned myself on my future path as well as on my past process.

This kind of comment reveals ambivalence between, on the one hand, the desire to become aware of current situations in the dance milieu and, on the other hand, the discomfort that this causes. As Geraldine wrote, even when the theory classes raised known issues, the students appreciated the oppor-tunity to position themselves:

When I am in this class, the subjects raised are never new to me. Nonetheless, what I draw from them always is. To listen to others express themselves on these topics that touch me helps me crystallize my opinions. Often this period helps to clarify my thoughts by giving them weight or instead completely bringing them into question. It is up to me to make the effort to sort through the information and to hold onto what really speaks to me.



The theoretical sessions offered the opportunity to ‘break the silence’ as noticed by Emilie P., a student who already had completed a BA in theatre:

I am sure that my reflection would have been totally different if dance had been the first medium I had come in contact with. It is surprising to see all the sacrifices that a dancer makes without ever complaining. The law of silence, this is what we call it in the milieu […] I was half-surprised when I heard that some women in third year were asked to lose weight to par-ticipate in a student show. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had been asked this. I’m sure that I would have asked (the choreographer) if he thought he was God, to ask me something like that. The quest for the perfect body with dancers is so deeply anchored that it becomes almost abstract for them that a person with a non-perfect body could be proud of it or at least could be accepting of it. Here’s an anecdote to illustrate what I’m saying: last year, a teacher thought that I didn’t dance with my torso because I didn’t accept my weight. It didn’t matter how much I told her that I didn’t have a complex about my weight, there was nothing to change her mind.

Before turning to the next section, it is interesting to note that many stu-dents, as Caroline D., mentioned the consistency between the theoretical sessions and the Feldenkrais lessons:

These two ways of learning come to one and the same thing: becoming aware. I really appreciated this whole philosophy (of Feldenkrais). I under-stood that there are many different paths to reach one goal. The choices that we make should empower us, not only physically. One should never neglect one’s own power and freedom.

Students ways of negotiating different discoursesTowards the status quoOur analysis of the data highlighted three main nonexclusive tenden-cies, each of equal importance. We spontaneously called them: (1) towards the status-quo, (2) between the status-quo and change, and (3) towards change.

Tracing back the process of each student, we estimated that at the begin-ning of the study about two thirds of the students were geared toward the first category, which is aligned with the dominant dance discourse. In their first talks and writings, we noticed that much importance was given to the teachers’ and choreographers’ authority and the right way to achieve an ideal body was valued without much regard for the consequences.

As mentioned before, for certain students the theory sessions presented ‘no great revelation’, for others, it ‘spoiled their little girl’s dream’. Our analysis revealed that the upheaval caused by the theoretical sessions was most frequent in this group. Here are Marie-Pière’s words:

Sometimes I would leave the class completely depressed. I am very sensitive to those realities that I don’t want to face because I’d rather continue to think that everything is going to be great for me.



The students of this first group were indeed the most disturbed by the theoretical session that consisted in presenting the results of a study addressing the relationships between passion and injury in dance stu-dents (Rip, Fortin and Vallerand 2006). They identified themselves spon-taneously with the obsessive passion rather than the harmonious passion. The students mentioned the ‘harshness’ and the ‘perfectionism’ that they impose on themselves. Many underlined that the high require-ments of the BA program ‘forced’ them towards an obsessive-type pas-sion. Because they saw no alternative, students in this group stayed somewhat passive when facing situations that they found deplorable. This is consistent with technologies of domination that, more often than not, reproduce the status quo. At the end of this theory session, Marie-Pière wrote in her weekly report:

I have so little time for myself I am exhausted and depressed. I have no time to spend with my family and my boyfriend […] But there’s nothing I can do! I have to go to school and work. And later, if I work for a choreographer and I have rehearsals every day, it’s going to be the same thing. I won’t be ask-ing him for fewer rehearsals unless I’m injured or really sick.

In this group, pain and fatigue were often perceived as signs of hard work and serious commitment. The students usually didn’t see that these feel-ings may indicate overwork predisposing them to injury, although Audrée shows a transformation in her way of thinking:

I realized that my injury was there before my feeling sick on Thursday. I thought back to Friday’s class in which I had noticed a pain in my left shoulder and I realize now that I should have taken more time to lis-ten to this pain. Now, I’m on forced-leave. This injury makes me realize that I have to develop more awareness of my body to prevent this kind of injury.

Interestingly, the students in this group committed themselves fully to the Feldenkrais lessons. For the most part, they used the proprioceptive explor-ations from the ATM lessons to solve physical problems they had at the time of the action-research. However, they didn’t use the opportunity given to them to question larger bodily issues. Patricia’s words about som-atic practice offer a good illustration of this tendency:

It’s about living with discomfort and determining techniques that are favo-rable to lessening this situation […] What’s important is to find one’s own solutions. You’ve got to understand that pain and discomfort are part of this profession. Might as well tame them!

Between status-quo and changeA second group emerged from the analysis of the data. Unlike the students in the first group, they benefited more from the theory sessions than from the practical Feldenkrais classes. Their writings contained many indications of a sustained interest in the theoretical sessions as opportunities to



formulate opinions. Pascal’s comments during a group discussion offer an excellent example:

I am surprised that some still view the body of a contemporary dancer in the same way as that of a ballet dancer. They’ve got to injure themselves, they’ve got to be skinny, they’ve got to be perfect, with no tattoos. I went into contemporary dance because I thought this mentality was over. When I found it’s still here, I just about climbed the walls. Does this mean that people like me and Emilie have no place here (because we don’t have the stereotypical body)?

Many students grumbled about the ideal body in the dance world. They believed that it was possible to change the way one constructs an ideal body, whereas in the first group students held the opinion that it was unfeasible. For many dancers in this second group, the ‘ideal body myth’ is unattainable and the way dance is taught has to be questioned as well. As the weeks went by, students in this group enlarged their criticism of the dominant discourse. The writings of Emilie P. demonstrate this dimension:

The choreographers will try to impose their ideal body type on all the dancers […] who try and risk everything for the creative process and the choreographer. It becomes a vicious circle. The dancers want to live their passion, so they push their bodies until it’s perfect enough to be hired in the professional milieu. Often, during the creative process, it’s not enough; so the dancers will go even further. They won’t complain out of fear that the choreographer might dislike them and then not rehire them. The cho-reographers therefore feel fine in asking for more because they don’t meet any resistance from the dancers. The dancers end up not listening to their own sensations anymore.

While this group was called ‘between status-quo and change’, the desire for change was traceable more on a theoretical level than on a practical one. The students did not act in a concrete way when facing situations they deemed problematic. We noticed many ‘I must’ statements compared to ‘I do’ statements. In the next quote, Luc questions the external criteria of the ideal dancing body. He revealed a desire to invest himself in proprio-ceptive explorations, which would guide him towards what we could qualify as a ‘better feeling’ rather than a ‘better looking’. However, his desire remained at an intentional level.

I must change my behaviour. I want to change my habit of doing things right, just for the form (the shape). I am enormously influenced by our soci-ety that values performance. I see my obsession of wanting to be perfect as an obstacle since I’m criticizing the movement instead of feeling it.

Eveline’s comments, about the appearance of the ideal dancer’s body, also help us understand this idea:

In Feldenkrais’ book, Awareness through movement, there are certain exercises that work with an arching of the lower back and a release of the abdominal



muscles […] This intention goes so completely against what we learn that I would find it difficult to do it in front of my peers. To give myself the right to have a soft and round belly would change my perception of myself and even change the perception that others have of me. We are so conditioned to pull in one’s stomach that we notice big bellies right away. As a dance student, I’m so used to being surrounded by pretty straight and thin bodies, my vision becomes skewed when I get into the metro at night and face the reality.

We can see in Eveline’s comment a capacity to think critically about body image even though she feels uncomfortable about changing her behaviour. If she would give herself the right to do otherwise, she would experience the discourse of somatic education. By seeing the ‘games of truth’ at play in the dance studio but not opposing them, the students in this group are positioning themselves in an in-between space with regard to Foucault’s technologies of domination and technologies of the self.

Towards changeA last group brings together students whose comments express a certain resistance to the dominant dance discourse. These students manifested a facility in making links between their bodily experiences and their under-standing of the dance milieu. As expressed by Emilie S.:

I became aware that my past training did not really take into account the internal sensations of the body. I really appreciate the fact that I have become more critical in the face of pain. I realize that I have to change those pre-conceptions that I have about the dancer’s body. I believe that many dancers themselves still have preconceptions about their own bodies. This is why I am so grateful for the conversations that allow me to put things into question and become more critical. Of course, dance is steeped in a world of sacrifices but I think that changes begin inside our own internal worlds. I love the idea of developing an ‘internal authority’ that dictates the path to follow.

Students of this group talked about changes they made when facing situa-tions they identified as problematic. Virginie, for example, talked of her decision to consult an osteopath:

I realize to what extent I neglect myself. Throughout the class, I couldn’t stop telling myself that I should pay more attention to my repetitive injuries. The procrastination of my visits to the osteopath is often due to my financial situation. But immediately after this class, I jumped on the phone to make an appointment without delay. Better late than never […] The Feldenkrais class develops my thinking and brings me closer to a mentality that resem-bles me.

It is important to underline that it was with these students that we noticed the weakest affiliations to the dominant dance discourse at the beginning of the action-research. Some were already engaged in a critical thinking



and have had experiences in somatic education. This was the case for Marie-Josée who wrote:

I feel divided. I can understand and accept the choreographer’s authority but the way in which he directs me is very important; I am not an object. I love to participate in the creative process but I find it interesting to learn someone else’s movement. I feel that the choreographer is neither above nor below the dancer. For example, there is a choreographer who asks us for a lot of time outside of class, but I accept because I find the time for it and I love his material and I see it as part of my personal evolution.

Marie-Josée is referring to a guest-choreographer invited to give a fifteen-week class culminating in the performance of an original piece. An anec-dote recounted by Marie-Josée deserves to be mentioned because it illustrates the negotiation at work between marginal and dominant dis-courses. A third of the way through the action-research, the choreogra-pher asked the female students to lose weight, something which Marie-Josée found inappropriate (even though later the choreographer explained that what he was really after was more commitment from the students and not weight loss). This same choreographer asked the stu-dents to rehearse during periods that are usually free such as lunch hours and weekends. Seeing this request as excessive, the students presented a united front by drawing-up a schedule together of extra rehearsal time that they could all manage. To do so, they took into account their differ-ent family situations and the loss of income they would suffer from being less available for their weekend jobs. Marie-Josée said that she felt divided between a reaction of resistance to his demands and one of acceptance because ‘this choreographic project also allows me to access something unique in my interpretation’. This anecdote illustrates that students may cooperate, at least in part, with situations of domination, because the advantages are greater than the sacrifices they would experience. Engaged in a reflective thinking process, Marie-Josée contextualizes the choreogra-pher’s demands:

He’s afraid that the piece won’t be any good. He’s scared that we don’t have enough time. His reputation in Montreal is not my problem. But we’re working together on this and I will do what I can to make the piece good […] This has clarified what I want to do in life. I want to dance but that’s not all I want. I don’t think I have the strength. I would like to do some projects with young cho-reographers, do some dance-theatre, have kids, do massage therapy, travel.

In her two-sided position in the face of the choreographer’s excessive demands, Marie-Josée shows clear-sightedness with regard to the ‘games of truth’ of the dominant discourse. Despite institutional constraints, she was able to make choices inspired by an ethic of care for herself and the other dancers. During our discussions, some students, like Marie-Josée, mentioned that body and health management is a creative challenge. If health is defined in relation to what a group accepts as normal, it can just as easily be redefined. Dancers can envisage the possibility of instituting new norms rather than perpetuating those already in existence.



Discussion and conclusionThe three emerging categories – towards the status quo, between the sta-tus quo and change, and toward change – echo Foucault’s positions relative to the dominant discourse – appropriation, accommodation and resistance – in an astonishing manner that we had not anticipated. According to Foucault, power can only be wielded on free subjects and insofar as they are free, they may:

identify with the dominant discourse and internalise it • adapt to it without accepting it • thwart it •

The students that make up the first group had appropriated the dominant discourse in dance, which they considered inescapable and even essential in building a dance career. Therefore, these students believed they had to know how to play by the rules of the game. As such, their bodily experi-ences in the somatic classes did not serve the purpose of improving well-being but were subverted and used to work towards what was important to them: pushing the limits of their performance. While this approach can bring great fulfillment, it can also bring pain and injury since, for the majority of the students, the ideal dancing body is next to impossible to attain. What they learned from the marginal discourse of somatic educa-tion was used to lessen the negative health impacts of the dominant dance discourse. In other words, somatic education was used to recuperate or repair one’s tired or damaged body in pursuing the quest for perfection. In summing up, the participants in the ‘towards the status quo’ group did not show a subjectification process, since what was learned from the somatic education classes served the dominant discourse.

The students in the second group adopted a position of accommoda-tion towards the dominant discourse. On the one hand, they manifested critical thinking in how they verbalized their reticence about certain aspects of the dominant discourse; on the other hand, they did not seem to physically experience the changes that they professed verbally. One must develop critical thinking in the face of the dominant discourse but, as Markula (2004) suggests, in order to develop a practice of the self which constitutes a technology of the self and a practice of freedom, one must also consciously build the alternative discourse by making concrete chan-ges to the way one uses oneself physically. This was a step that had not been taken by the students of this group by the time we ended our action-research. In this group, the process of subjectification appeared as a ‘brico-lage’ borrowing from both the dominant and marginal discourses. Sensations, ways of being and doing, were integrated into their daily activ-ities, insofar as they were compatible with elements of the different dis-courses to which these individuals adhered to.

It is therefore with the students who manifested both critical thinking in the face of the dominant discourse and a capacity to make connections with their bodily experiences that we observed the fullest subjectification processes. The experience of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education allowed these students to develop an internal authority which made them less vulnerable to the health impacts of the dominant dance discourse.



They made choices based on their intimate experiences, respecting the limits of their own bodies. For the students in this group, the normality of pain or certain pedagogical practices was no longer so blindly tolerated or, if so, it was only under certain conditions and for a limited period of time. When a proprioceptive awareness is coupled with reflective thought, the threats to the body that were once deemed acceptable in the life of a dan-cer now become unacceptable.

For all the students, this action-research provided an opportunity to cast doubt on the ‘games of truth’ of the technologies of domination. The students of the first group were, for the most part, less inclined to question the dominant dance discourse but when given the opportunity to discuss its various issues, they found it to be a viable exercise. In the dance training milieu, there is a certain amount of consenting to training or choreographic demands that are sometimes violent, and physically or psychologically abusive. Power, as explains Foucault, is not the result of the imposition of external constraints on the person but is rather an internalization of norms and productive goals by the person. Of course, dancers cannot abandon all disciplinary practices throughout their training and career, but they can critically think about the benefit or cost of participating in different body practices that inevitably have consequences on their health.

On the whole, this action-research offered the possibility of investigat-ing how the dominant dance discourse, and the marginal one of somatic education, participate in students’ reappraisal of the body, art and health. In the course of their previous training, some students had registered cer-tain ‘truths’ from which they did not stray if they were to succeed in attaining the physical perfection that they so desired. The action-research questioned the rules of the game by presenting the dancers with a peda-gogical approach compatible with health concerns.

Somatic approaches represent a definitive development for contempo-rary dance but they should also be contextualized and looked at critically, since we cannot look at somatic approaches outside the historical and artistic discourses from which they are practiced. Dancers construct them-selves and are constructed in many ways by various, and sometimes com-peting, discourses, which operate at any given time, each of them with different games of truth. While recognizing the possibility for satisfaction resulting from the different ways of practicing dance, our focus through-out this action-research was on a broad notion of health, one that con-nects with Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self. In a short period of time, the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education, tied to a reflective thinking process about health issues in dance, has confirmed its potential as a technology of the self. What will be the long term effects of the action-research on the students’ negotiations of dominant and marginal dis-courses in dance is unknown.

Through this action-research we invited the students to engage them-selves in different ways of knowing. While we do not support a position that theoretical and practical knowledge necessarily leads to changes, we would argue that knowledge is a prerequisite. For change, dancers need to raise their consciousness about the dominant discourse and how it con-structs dancing bodies. Unless the dominant discourse in dance changes, or marginal discourses are given a more prominent place, changes in



dancers’ health and well-being will remain limited. While this action-research was realized in a contemporary dance training institution using the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education, we believe that other somatic approaches, particularly those that support a pedagogy valuing sensorial experience and a critical approach, could also be successfully applied to other dance forms for the benefit of students who consciously learn to negotiate between different discourses.

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Fortin, S., Cyr, C. and Tremblay, M. (2005), ‘The act of listening to the art of giving voice: Creative alternative practices in writing about health in dance’, Dance Research Journal, 37:2, pp. 11–24.

Fortin, S., Trudelle, S. and Rail, G. (2008),’Incorporation paradoxale des normes esthétiques et de santé chez les danseurs contemporains’, in S. Fortin (ed.), Danse et santé: Du corps intime au corps social, Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec. pp. 9–41.

Fortin, S., Vieira, A. and Tremblay, M. (2008), ‘Expériences corporelles des discours de la danse et de l’éducation somatique’ in S. Fortin (ed.), Danse et santé: Du corps intime au corps social, Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec. pp. 115–136.

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Green, J. (2007), ‘Student Bodies: Dance Pedagogy and the Soma’, in L. Bresler (ed.), International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, Netherlands, Springer, (pp. 1119–1132),

Guimond, O. (1999), ‘L’éducation somatique: un changement de paradigme’, Sans préjudice … pour la santé des femmes, Réseau québécois d’action pour la santé des femmes, 18, pp. 5–6.



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Suggested citationFortin, S., Vieira, A. and Tremblay, M. (2009), ‘The experience of discourses in dance

and somatics’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1, pp. 47–64, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.47/1

Contributor detailsSylvie Fortin, Ph.D., is associate professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, and director of the graduate programs in dance and somatic education. She is well known as a somatic practitioner and prolific author of body-related issues in the arts. Sylvie is currently involved in a series of funded research projects focusing on the constructions of health. She is part of CINBIOSE (Centre for the Study of Biological Interactions on Human Health) and ‘Invisible That Hurts’, two interdisciplinary research groups that favour an interdisciplinary and feminist approach.



Adriane Vieira, Ph.D. in Human movement science is full professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and is invited teacher at Universidade do Vale dos Sinos. She works in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Adriane is physiotherapist and known as an expert in back school and somatic education. She is part of the Riograndense society of psychosomatics medicine. She is member of the research group Body posture and movement quality at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul.

Martyne Tremblay is a Ph.D. student in Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. For her doctoral thesis, she is studying the health represen-tations and corporeal habitus of university students in contemporary dance. She completed her Masters in dance at the same university, investigating the link between dance and spirituality as lived by contemporary dancers. Martyne is part of the research group on the constructions of health directed by Sylvie Fortin.

Contact: Département de danse, Université du Québec à Montréal, C.P. 8888, succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal (Québec) CANADA, H3C 3P8.Tel: (514) 987-3000, poste 3499Fax: (514) 987-4797E-mail: [email protected]





Keywordsperformance as

researchpractice-led researchchoreography extended voice

documentation artist writing

Enskinning between extended voice and movement: somatics, touch, contact and the cameraYvon Bonenfant University of Winchester

AbstractThis article has two parts: a prelude, or prosaic introduction to its artistic research content, and the body of the work, which explores through metaphor, rhythmic wordplay, description, and still image, the making of the 2008 music-video-dance experiment Intimacies. The article uses an adapted performance-writing style to explore the results of a somatic process that yoked together interests in touch, membrane and emotion, with a studio process exploring the notion of intimacy, intensity, contact and the skin. Intended as an immersive experience in the subjec-tive memory of a creative process, it celebrates encounter.

Prelude The writing that follows this prelude is an auto-poetic account of a crea-tive research process. This process in question is the making of the video-dance piece Intimacies (2008).

The piece Intimacies has now been workshopped and developed into two distinct forms. Indeed, one might say that I could begin use the title Intimacies to refer to a developing working methodology rather than to a specific artistic product. A scholarly-reflective artistic account of the mak-ing of the first version of the piece (in 2006) was published in Studies in Theatre and Performance in January 2008 (Bonenfant 2008a), and focused on how one might ‘de-discipline’ the body to create a certain kind of live-art derived, musi-dance performance. Moving between a poetic and a more traditional academic voice, the article documents the process and product of voice-movement collaboration among two extended vocalists and two dancers. The article contextualizes the work through explaining that I use what I call a kind of emotional somatics – somatic work derived from certain aspects of a body psychotherapy technique I am trained in1 – to source material for performance in the studio. The project threw up many challenges and questions. Primary among them was how one might bring the intimate and personal experience of the performers to audiences in other ways than the live, theatrical setting permitted. These other ways might allow spectators to access an enhanced and intense vocal experi-ence, as well as bring audiences a heightened visual experience of the inti-mate encounters between performers and the intimate detail of their bodies. I have attempted to explore some of this line of inquiry through this second project, the Intimacies (2008) video-dance experiment.

1. See Bonenfant (2006) for an explanation of the intersection between body psychotherapy and stage practice from my perspective. More information is also provided later in this prelude.

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66 Yvon Bonenfant

2. Many readers of this journal will be famil-iar with Reich’s work, which was developed out of psychoanalysis but which went in radical directions later in Reich’s life. Reich is a much-contested figure. For more infor-mation on Reich see one of his most fun-damental publications Character Analysis, and Bonenfant (2006) and (2008a) for references to more writing about Reich’s life and work.

3. In saying this, I have summarized two entire fields of operation and phi-losophy in Boyesen’s body psychotherapy technique. The first is her theory of tissue armouring, whereby membranes either stiffen and become impermeable to fluid transfer and create tissue tendon, or are too permeable and create hypotonic tissue (see Boyesen 1985: 46–57, 83–88). The second is her interest in the link between extremely light touch and the discharge of ‘stress energy’ in the smooth musculature sur-rounding the intestine (Boyesen 1985: 64–75).

4. I have found that the most accurate and complete descrip-tions of biodynamic massage practice, its choreographies and its uses are described largely in literature in French, as Boyesen was notorious for not wanting to write things down, and many of the people that did so were second generation Boyesen therapists. See the following chapters in particular:

Making a choice to refer to a specific set of somatic practices as ‘emo-tional’ somatics might seem controversial. In a thought-discipline that seeks to study the body through body-mind interaction, or to view the human organism from a perspective that truly includes both the physical, organic body and the constellation of processes of self-awareness we might call the ‘mind’, attending to the emotional qualities of corporeality and mind-body integration might seem a given. However, there is a body of somatic knowl-edge and practice that particularly emphasises the emotional qualities of somatic awareness and mind-body interaction, and that is concerned with these qualities in such a way that all of the other corporeal properties are worked with through an emotionally tinted lens. This work straddles the worlds of traditional psychotherapeutic discourse and practice, particularly as derived from humanistic and modified Freudian and Jungian models (depending on the discipline in question), and mind-body awareness. This might include techniques such as: Core Energetics; Bioenergetic Analysis; Radix Body Re-education; and Medical Orgonomy (and many other off-shoots, developments and refinements). These are practices largely derived, in various ways, from the work of Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957),2 the founder of western, psychoanalytically-derived body psychotherapy.

My own training is in the field of Biodynamic Psychology, founded by Gerda Boyesen (1922–2005). This second-generation, neo-Reichian body psychotherapy discipline has a number of particularities. What is relevant to the idea of a somatic process of enskinning within Boyesen’s work is her interest in the function and experience of membrane in mind-body systems. Boyesen was interested in membranes (from cell walls right through to epithelial tissues) as containers of both literal (interstitial, lymphatic, blood) and emotional fluid, and as the space of exchange among cells and tissues (on an intra-corporeal level) and organisms (on an inter-corporeal level).3 Between bodies, this, of course suggests a strong emphasis on the skin, skin being our outermost membrane and the primary (and primor-dial) place of sensual exchange and contact with other living, breathing human bodies.

Body psychotherapy often uses various touch-inclusive techniques or physical interventions to intervene with breathing and consciousness in order to stimulate certain kinds of emotional ‘flow’. These might include palpations, massage, and contact that stimulates or supports various kinds of movement (and are generally used carefully and judiciously). Perhaps because the interest in membrane is so central to the Boyesen approach, the Boyesen-derived work has developed a highly refined series of touch interventions that work with light touch on the outermost levels of skin, rather than necessarily intervening with deeper tissues. Very light, yet carefully constructed, choreographed and structured touch experiences are designed and used in therapy sessions under specific circumstances.4 Without going into clinical detail, it is important to understand that these choreographies of touch, these deceivingly superficial touch interventions play a central role in biodynamic theory and practice. The experience of receiving this work as well as of practicing it forms the existential basis upon which the Intimacies experiments were developed, but are particu-larly emphasized in this second attempt to engage with the emerging Intimacies methodology.


67Enskinning between extended voice and movement

Besson (1992) and Vaudaine (1992). Interesting case stud-ies can also be found in Nunnelly (2000a and 2000b).

Aesthetically speaking, the primary personal expression of my somatic knowledge and practice is in the realm of holistic, embodied voice. This underpins the Intimacies work, since the Intimacies experiments look beyond the voice to other forms of corporeal interaction. As an extended vocalist, with bel canto training but who has also self-developed particular approaches to expanded vocal vocabulary, I come to the world of choreo-graphic facilitation from a very particular perspective. Extending my own preoccupation with skin and membrane – a preoccupation cultivated by my training in body psychotherapy – into the aesthetic realm, I work with what I might call the haptic voice, the voice that touches (for further infor-mation see Bonenfant 2008b). A voice that touches implies some sort of conscious relationship with membranes – with the soft skin tissue of the eardrum and with skin and other surfaces. Vocal touch is a kind of social touch: it reaches, extends, radiates toward the outside world and outside bodies. I re-emphasize that this voice is intended to be more than an abstract language: it is meant to engage concretely with the notion of touch. But it is unlike skin-to-skin touch. Its sound waves distribute out-ward in a radiant fashion, can include many, and thus can become social.

This radiant quality of the social voice makes me interested in the possibility of a radiant physical, touching gesture and thus gesture that might also be perceived to touch even when manual touch is not liter-ally occurring. I working from a trans-disciplinary perspective, rather than interdisciplinary, for as Celine Roux (2007: 178) points out, the word trans-disciplinarity implies that we move beyond distinct medias and disciplines to embrace art that moves beyond the notion of discipli-nary frontier. I am interested in how dancers might sing through ges-ture, and how the notion of singing from and to skin might become a notion of movement from and to skin. Perhaps this is partly because my own radiant, sung practice feels so danced: creating the kind of sound work I do necessitates a very developed relationship with kinaesthetic awareness and with the gestural qualities of vocal sound. And most recently, the central felt, somatic concept I have used as a starting point to generate this haptic gesture is through techniques that focus on the development of holistic inhabitation of that massive, important, incredi-ble organ we all depend on: the skin.

Making this version of Intimacies involved undertaking studio processes that were highly collaborative; I was facilitator and performer, there were three other participant-performers, and there was a videographer who was present for all portions of the process and acted as both a witnessing eye and a tactile, aesthetic, touching eye-skin. This meant that the project involved facilitating a relationship between performers and videographer that allowed all to engage with that mysterious process we call improvising. This improvisation was, of course, not totally free: it was in response to stimuli. It is constrained by our technical capacities, the languages we allow our organisms to ‘speak’, and the languages we have been taught. We can, however, all engage with processes that extend these languages, and this is precisely what the performers attempted. They were chosen for their interest in, and ability to, respond idiosyncratically to corporeal stim-uli, and for their professed interest in felt relationship. We therefore allowed


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spontaneous material to emerge from exercises with contact: eye (or reti-nal skin) contact; contact between skins of hands, of feet and of mem-branes, using touch qualities derived from Boyesen’s work and other exercises of my own. These qualities needed, of course, to be filtered through, digested by, incorporated into and interpreted through the organ-isms of the performing and video-capturing ensemble.

The place of the videographer in this process is intriguing, and she occupied many different roles: witness; sometimes participant; outside, objectifying eye; an eye attempting to render this process a subject, attempting to move beyond the distant observation of the lens to capture, in visuality, something of the essence of the exchanges taking place between performers’ skins. The challenge was to allow this to create a means of viewership that the theatrical audience spectatorship role could not: to focus on proximity and detail in ways a viewer would not other-wise access. This is why the stills you will see in this article tend toward large images of detailed texture and body parts, rather than to the capture of fast, acrobatic, ‘danced’ gesture. The material emerging from the bodies was personal; we were touching each other and creating intimate fleshly dialogues, and the videography meant to document some of these moments. The images became a form of memory. Similarly, the final soundtrack – for the product of Intimacies was in fact an extended voice dance video – emerged from a score derived from processes of remember-ing (indeed, perhaps re-enskinning) the lived, studio experience. The final artistic product was made from remembered sound, remembered bodies, and re-enskinned lived moments; these were scores and notes rendered into a multi-tracked extended voice piece. The visual edit was created after the sound recording, an editing process that dialogues with my own mem-ory, and with the poetry of the re-enskinned, sung moment.

How can we make this process relevant to you? The reader of this jour-nal may already have developed or participated in the ways mind-body techniques can facilitate the emergence of alternative kinds of vocabularies for dancers, yet it is unlikely many have done so focusing so particularly on this sung, enskinned, en-membraned perspective. Artistic research is the sharing of interiorities: I contend that the challenge of bringing readers into a process that is both familiar to them and yet unfamiliar can be fruitfully addressed through immersing the reader in an informed poetic engagement with process, with an intense subjectivity, and with documented moments of re-enskinning. I therefore choose a style of writing that shifts between dif-ferent poetic registers, attempting to bring the reader into a process using metaphor, description, musical wordplay, and poetic suggestion, and to ‘narrate’ stages in the making process that were somehow meaningful to me as an immersed creative practitioner. The writing that follows is there-fore a form of performance writing, but from what I would call a ‘somatic’ and sung perspective; in a sense, it tries to create the written word from the remembered sung impulse. It does not communicate the result of the proc-ess to you, but rather attempts to communicate metaphorically about the experienced content. This creates stories of attachment, for bringing the skin into this process, consciously using the membrane, created a love-like joy in my own organism. I experienced this as artistic director of the project and celebrate its emergence in this writing.



This writing attempts to immerse you, to document a togetherness, to explore somatic knowledges’ emergence in a creative context, to posit states of experience and render some salient elements of them into another form.

SECTION 1: DISCOVERY

1. IntentionTo make a piece from vivid encounter. To make a piece from the most essential encounter. To make a piece from skin. To make a piece with skin. To make a piece of skin be a piece. To make a video of skin. To make skin skin again in the eyes. To try to make eyes feel skin. And ears, enskinning, singing the edges, singing the breathwork, singing the surface.

To make a piece from encounter: the home of encounter is membrane cell walls exchanging oxygen air water (perhaps laughter) membrane, the home membrane skin brushes rubs caresses exchanges cornea; eye skin transparent rays flowing through eardrum; small warm nest of tambou-rine sensing tiny air particle zinging

In the night the soft membranes sparking in the dry airagainst the warm breeze of duvet twistrushing with divine notions of contactI want to feel you

In the day to day light of cold studiosand the grind of a slog against a body-hating worldwhere to find moments to touch. Not just touch

To touch a skin and feel it. To touch a skin and be enough there to be there. To touch a skin and risk it. To touch a skin and marvel. Fronds of ocean coral waving. To touch a skin and marvel at coral. Coloured coral dancing up from a soft ocean floor, waving but to touch, to touch, rougher than torn sponge. To touch a skin and feel it. To touch torn sponge, to hold. To hold you. To hold me.

To make a piece from encounter and wishing. To make a piece from encounter from lonely. To make a piece with hearts at the where. To make a piece from the shy whole self. To make a piece from a skin-scented body. To make a piece entirely alone. To make a piece with strong heart marks imprinted. To make a piece like a cast iron grill. To make a piece with a cast iron centre. To make a piece with a centre of bone.

And outward from the bone spirals certain flesh and now the slowly, invisiblyshredding surface, cells dropping into dust, nerves extending their tiny tentacles into the night airit isn’t all silk and only silk. The skin calls me forward

After a night in the wondering alley. After a night with a dog wearing pearls. After a night with a lonely poinsettia. After a night with a withering


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grin. After a night with cold blade by the bedside. After a night of unwa-vering fear. After a night of abandoned hard treasures. After a night of just waiting for you. After a night of the worst kind of metal. After a night of distance and maim. After a night of masked dreams in the mildew. After a night of steep wandering lust.

There you are again, skin. An invitation. For if we want encounter, ifwe want to remember each other, we must actually be in the surface. We must remember from the delicate surface, the tough surface, the marked surface, the static surface, the breathing surface, the wantingsurface, the needing surface, the largest surface. The skin of theearth itself: crust floating on magma. The skin of the human mind and soul: the fine spun silk, the breathing balloon, the tattooed memory, fading ever and slowly, the last gaspthe last wrinkled place we might feel the others there

Figure 1: Still from Intimacies (2008), videography: Ludivine Allegue, choreographic direction: Yvon Bonenfant, performer: Robin Dingemans. Copyright Yvon Bonenfant and Ludivine Allegue.



when the rest has gone, the sounds, the lightin the last moment perhaps it is only that brain we feelthe skin brain

celebrating this, encounter,

2. Look We stood and met. Eyes. First thing was just to look, to look into each oth-ers’ eyes. The look of seeing, of waiting, of witness. This first skin, the cornea will we let them in and through.

I remember Charlotte Bronte, always describing the eyes as giving off light rather than taking it in … Mr Rochester’s ‘ray’ dropping on her shoul-der … she could touch eye rays they were like lasers emitting emitting.

And so. Rays, reaching forward, to simply look, standing. To start to make a world where we see. In this studio, we look into the eyes and then breathe, and we look rather than see. To look is to reach, to see is to wait. We look. The large brow-made eyes of the man with red hair, he is named Robin, the red breasted bird. The seeking eyes of the soft mammal dancer, her brown hair and melting corners become her Delphine. A large blink



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and soft twitch, tiny twitch and a large twitch the marked twitch another twitch always tiny with the big eyes Caroline.

We breathe and look and sometimes a camera is looking but it is okay. We breathe and look and then we do this thing. The thing is the eye thing. We follow the eyes like they’re brain. But it’s new, they lead, then some-thing, then there’s a long time.

How to explain. Melt. This was just to melt, to melt, this was just to melt.

(Melt. The immobile fear, the hard hard tissue, the too hard tissue, the needlessly hard tissue, the open marked tissue, the marvellous tissue, the meek and excited tissue, the leftover murky tissue).

What is a hard cornea

What is a melted cornea

Oh look, look, I just want to look at you

And at a world of something

3. Explosion from eyesHe runs back and forth, then begins stomping. It is generous. How do we know, it is generous, it is something expanding, it is generous not kicking, not killing, it is something very real we are witnessing. It is not birthing but it is like birthing, it is not release but it is releasing, it is letting something out but it is not gratuitous. It is letting something out but it is not just let-ting something out. It is impulse but refined. It is something very core. He is giving us that thing. And so we all also want to give it. We all also want to give it because if we didn’t give it we would just have nothing else, and nothing else is not interesting to us. Nothing else can be interesting to us and therefore we are here. Somehow we have gotten here where nothing else is interesting to us. Thank you we say but we don’t say it, we do it. What is a gift. A gift is something like thank you but it is not. It is something else. It is gift it is not holy it is not sacred but it is something so strong tast-ing. The words of the mouth must describe it, it is an honest flavour, a strong flavour, a subtle flavour, a really marked flavour, it is not a preten-tious flavour, it is a flavour of the soil of the land of the food. It is a flavour like the tomatoes in Italy, like a pineapple in Hawaii, we can small the land and it is the land that likes the fruit, the land has bounty, we welcome the bounty, this is an explosion of bounty, we open arms and receive bounty.

4. Receive To receive, to receive, she says, we must receive this bounty, this bounty. She is right I think. There the bounty is and we must receive it or shut our eyes. The membranes are touching. The cornea is letting in his rays, his rays. He sings. Ohhh… the singing makes my knees tremble, it is such powerful singing, I haven’t heard that before in the room with me, oh, she is melting, her cornea is melting. This was the beginning of it, the opening to it, the eyes. Then everyone’s eyes led to something, everyone’s eyes were



the place where something was giving and receiving, everyone was excited, this space of encounter. So we touched and touched with eyes and then after the explosion we lay down on the floor and our feet talked.

5. FeetFor feet to talk, feeling. For feet to feel talking, feeling, feet. First gentle touching of everything, activating the skin, butterfly fingertips, stroking. Then the feet, simply on the floor communicating, there they are. Talking with feet. To make feet be the place talking happens, oh yes, to make feet be the talkers and the ones with touching voices. A big foot a small foot a socked foot. Who are you when you are only feet. Who are you when your feet are feet. If you were only feet who would you be. It is wonderful to know feet. It is wonderful to introduce feet to feet, with no bothersome looking and drawing conclusions from hard corneas. Instead the feet can be what they are and have their own skins, their own minds, their own, and you are someone else as feet

Oh so surprisinglydelicate

Figure 3: Still from Intimacies (2008), videography: Ludivine Allegue, choreographic direction: Yvon Bonenfant, performers: Caroline Gill, Robin Dingemans. Copyright Yvon Bonenfant and Ludivine Allegue.


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oh so gentlyrefined, so much to saywith such careful accentsso much to warm with such open mouthssuch lovely warm tendrilssuch marked discovery

simple walkinga simple walking storyto the feet

6. Hands

Pure careful thought in a boundary of membraneWhole worn live histories crowded into boneBaby reach nevermore care children wantingWrinkled line history burning in song

Open the palm face I rush into likingOnly the seeking and caring rings on In this skinography bio biography All the remembers are waiting in tissue

Seek me, seek me when you can seek. I wish you to seek I wish to be sought. Seek the whole hand, the divine hand. These hands are full, these hands are resplendent. Bounty bounty

A touch of hand like twitter. Birdsong. Every kind of bird. Vulture call eagle high call little songbirds a ravenous turkey robins crows and some squawking ostrich. Kiwis. When ravens. Hands. When ravens and the wild dark birds: hands are full. Hands do loving. Hands do everything. Hands do striking, and beating, and killing. Hands do butchering, hands do. The human hand.

The human hand reaches. The human hand touches. The human hand is exquisite. The human hand the human hand

The human hand wanders. The human hand

I touch your human hand. Baby hand. Adult hand. The life of your hand is in your hand. What happens when it’s the hand what is the skin of hand the skin of hand

The reaching skin of human hand

Oh

Oh

Oh



SECTION 2: AFTER EYES, FEET, HANDS

We are prepared. The preparation prepared us.

The director didn’t do it. The director did it not by doing it but by bringing us and then by stimulation. It was a way of starting conversation. And now the conversation is going. It is intercourse, the gift, the receipt, the exchange. We are people who want to be skin. We are people who want to be hands and feet. We are people whose corneas are softening. We are people who want to move and some of us want to make sound.

7. Improvisations: portrait one

When we show this simplemark on our elbowwhen we rise with brown hairand kiss the lightwhen we swat into the air



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with a quirky rhythm and funny mouththe others see.

when we mark this space outwith pacing paces and a bright roundwith a few dropped metal tools and bit by bit more clothes drop off, abandonednot stripping, more like sheddingunneeded bark

The bark does fall, the bark does its fallingThe bark and the metal tools and climbing the walls in the corner

8. Improvisations: portrait twoSomething of the adolescent. Something of the teenage boy. Something of the frustration. Something of the adult man. Something of silence. Something of someone who is looking for what he wants. Something of the pursuit. Something of profound frustration. Something of yesterday. Something of tomorrow. Something of pacing. Pacing, pacing, the edges




of the room the pacing the edges a prison not a prison pacing in the black walls pacing the pacing witness paces the camera paces the pacing the pacing of the room paced pacing in the numbers of steps just seeing what next a sudden fart the pacing of the space with sound climbing the walls and a posture. A simple posture with a treading eye and the simple posture waiting.

Not knowing what will come next.

Not knowing whether what will come next will come next

A sense of profound troubledness, a sense of a certain fresh scar, a sense of overcoming (scar the thickened skin of the wound, whole again but memory like the photography itself, are photographs scars are they scars) overcoming but also of a kind of radiant joy, how could. A strong smell of male body with a spice and space funk.

Climbing.

And then he waits for it all to be the all of it.

This is a large skinned back. This is the skin of a large wide back, these are shoulders.

9. Improvisations: portrait threeShe is, with a certain high lightning. She is lightning with a brown soft-ness. She is speed. I am blind, I cannot see her, I must close I must close, I cannot see her to her I am blind, I can feel her though. My skin remem-bers her, I contemplate her, but she was not there to see. I saw her with skin not with eyes, the corneas so soft they can’t catch her speed. She is really wanting to be there. She is what we hope can be there.

Fire

Spark and flame, or asandy crackle of coal. Marked essence of pine. A rounded crazing. A warm separation from me (When she talks I can’t hear her. Somethingelse is speaking louder: some bowel blazesome slick memory)

She strikes whole compound chords with fistsit is the contemplationof the tornadothe still eye the still eyewith the sweeping winds around itshe twists screams zing zing


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wild flurry wild flurry(she is not snow) cornea drinking

A small stream, rounded with buttercups, crowned with overhanging moss, a bear fishing for salmon, her paw dipping in and out, a relaxed firm power, waiting for the tasty fish but ready to spring, a breakneck courage, an ability to run up the tree, a heaviness that can spring like feather, a gift

She is panting and we have felt her fishWe have felt her fishingShe wants to lick the taste of catch

Each tart loop of tongue sought a marvelling tingle

the dark phases of the night moonssoftly shining on skin

Figure 6: Still from Intimacies (2008), videography: Ludivine Allegue, choreographic direction: Yvon Bonenfant, performer: Delphine Gaborit. Copyright Yvon Bonenfant and Ludivine Allegue.



could her warm heartpulse wildly enough to let her breastsflicker and wade in the swamp of dreams

10. Improvisations: portrait fourAgain sudden twitch. Huge Bambi eyes, blink and then move sideways. Saccadic, saccadic like a bird’s head, each movement a tiny jut and stroke. Observation and looking in each direction. Swatting irritated swatting is funny.

Legs can go right behind the head, hands can go right behind the push, face can go right behind the hair, wigs. Wigs of spill from the crown of the skull, wigs spill from skin and the crown of the skull shining with halo blue light.

She charges.

It is a breath and accumulation she tries we see the wings the wings as she tries to beat the air with and a charge. She wants but there around

Figure 7: Still from Intimacies (2008), videography: Ludivine Allegue, choreographic direction: Yvon Bonenfant, performer: Delphine Gaborit. Copyright Yvon Bonenfant and Ludivine Allegue.


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there is something that is something else she wants struggle and there with something else there is struggle and the more with it there is with the breath she keeps build the something savage a kilt I think a kilt and a sword maybe thick bagpipes sheep’s bladder inflating prepare to unleash the sound of war.

The struggle is charming its intensity builds all skins crackle and wait all skins charge all skins the halo struggle is charming the wait the skin builds crackle delightful she is delightful and the delight charge the fine bones the fine bones in the downlight her fine bones run to the wall run and lean she looks up oh the fine bones the fine bones cheekbones cheek-bones the fine bones come to the charge oh the fine bones the strong bones the electric fiddle the fine eyes close the fine spill of hair the fine charge the strong, strong muscles the fine strong muscles and a build with more finally the mouth opens.

A sung h with open field o, o, the letter o the sound o the room spins her skin her skin has charged and she has sung it we have felt the song behind the fine bones

It wants to come out It wants to come out(our skin alive with wait)

Figure 8: Still from Intimacies (2008), videography: Ludivine Allegue, choreographic direction: Yvon Bonenfant, performer: Caroline Gill. Copyright Yvon Bonenfant and Ludivine Allegue.



11. Pause (contemplation of hair) One, a tousled rusty Wheatfield, a metallic auburn, blustering in the tor-nadoed wind. The next, soft drapery of earth. Another, spun metallic ochre red and a fine long beard. A scampered spill of jet black burls. Finally, a soft fuzz of stubble and the exposed skin.

This hair, extending from the skin, skin made fibre, hair of animals spun into extra skins for us, hair of humans like extended skin and reach.

Music is hair. Singing the dance is the singing of hair: layers, colours, twists, curls, caresses, manipulations, sweepings, combings.

12. A final solo (autobiography)These things all emerged.

The new age uses words like trust and self-confidence. This was those things but was also something else, something more passionate and less cosy. It was bodies in dialogue who want to dialogue. Bodies who have something to say and want to be heard. Bodies looking for a space to just do the thing they do. We were all lucky that we found this process. These were bodies in this process and we found each other at this time. We were ripe to find each other in this time. A word like love can be used.

Each of us in a journey without words but with talking feet, talking hands, talking skin, talking hair, talking eyes. Talking surfaces limps and organs, talking tissues. And then, the way we listened meant hearing was hearing.

Choreography writing with the body ends. No more inter. Instead trans, a trans-disciplinary field, where every gesture sound movement voice word is part of impulse coming, and impulse coming by stimulating a world of skin and contact.

Each body to hear.

And so in my world, where I worked so hard to let passion flow, I felt, in this room, with these people, that I had undone the work of the ones who work to do up the body with whalebone stays well I mean in my body. Everyone has stays of their own and the others also were unpicking versions of stays to do that with me was a gift and thank them for their bounty. This was moving and they gave me moving. Holding up hands to sob a special kind of radiant sob; a sob-laugh, a heart party. For the somatic impulse led to this party, this party of the heart and this public sob. Sobbing in the public sphere with both sadness and mourning but also with laughing joy.

13. HoldA final thing to melt into armsbefore a departure.

Simple softened spines and a try to give in

Asking to be held by ones who can actually love and not the rigid harness of false tenderness


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Yes

Thank them

SECTION 3: VIDEO AND SOUND

14. Painter videoThis time there had been a camera. The camera was what it was, that is to say it was a camera that looked, in the hands of a painter. The painter was recording like a painter. Not the dance but the bodies. The bodies dancing. Not the content of the dance but the painter’s eye painting and looking. The painter’s eye can see with body because the painter dances. The painter is used to tiny fingers dancing above bare feet on the studio floor, bent over a whole home of dancing colour, blending and wiping and add-ing water. And so the body surfaces are painted by a video making painter, they are seen like this painter sees. This painter can see this because this painter tries to undo the stays.

Figure 9: Still from Intimacies (2008), videography: Ludivine Allegue, choreographic direction: Yvon Bonenfant, performers: Yvon Bonenfant, Robin Dingemans. Copyright Yvon Bonenfant and Ludivine Allegue.



5. I thank my collaborator, Ludivine Allegue, for her notion of vision: the imagined space, the empty hunger that precedes the actual manifesta-tion of an artwork’s material being. In other words, for her, ‘vision’ is the impulse that pre-exists the creative product we might make.

But to make somatic video, to make it, can it be made. Well no, I don’t think so, for anything recorded digitally can always be dead, or in other words, not dead but the memory of being alive, it is a complex trace. The painting is a complex trace that manifests a human vision. The painting is a complex trace and the video in the hands of this painter traces and remem-bers a certain vision.5 Not the vision of the painter but a vision of what the painter can capture and use the tool to remember. So the video is a scar, for it is the memory of skin actioning, and this painter video was dancing with us, was being with us in a way that made looking a form of moving. So there was no worry about the moving looking, it was just there and there was a heart behind it and vision, and a spill of vibrant jet black hair and some carefully chosen comments. It felt skin, it felt skin, it felt skin.

(Always there she was always there in the room and somehow never really not there yet beingwith the process completely and I wished she was a dancer but itwasn’t there a dancer it was a painter. The painter and the fine filigree dance of her fingertips telling the gasps of the encounter and itsnever-ending levers into the souls of our live bodies and itrushed into the window of her lens without the darlings and theirlens their lens of blinking she leftblink inside her eyelid it justlooked until the willow filigree brushed down and the camera was deposited she saidcome and be my window she said

I could not be a performer. I do not like to do that. I danced young it is not what I like, to bare it all like that in that way

Instead she is there and observes and they ask her questionsand it feels like she is there not not there it feels like she is never without another direction hertouching is all remember it is keep that eye the distance I can’t

(when we see what she caught it is half of what happened yet also she was happeningnothing can ever be full of its own endnothing can ever be full of each fingertip flashing in that way. Take

take,

the image is Taken. It is taken and to be taken it becomes another memory it is empty


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without the lost one, the lostwithout the lost and if lost

There is something soft about her and itThere is something softThere is something soft about herThere is a quiet dance in the cameraThere is a painter’s danceThere is the nose of the painter, seeking the fractureThe space in which to paint, the blank page betweenscribbled sheets: there she iscurling hair rounding her faceNowNowcapture

15. MusicTo remember memory and to make layers.

To remember the sensations and the attachments from the whole body and not just the picture. To do this before the pictures get made.

To make manifest interiority and to bring interiority to exteriority.

To show the interiority, to risk this profound intimacy.

To help to feel the sound-touch of the interiority, the vibrating voice.

The recorded interiority of the vibrating voice in layers like hair.

The recorded memory of the vibrating voice in layers like hair structures.

The bodies doing, the poetry of being there with them, watching with soft cornea, feeling with soft skin, hearing with soft eardrum, nerves tingling and we are all very alive. Screaming, laughing, crying, moving, silently, pulsing, jerking, swatting, stamping, we are all very alive and that alive-ness is the aliveness that we are being.

To let this aliveness of five people in one course through tissues.

To make this coursing through tissues be something of every nature present.To make this coursing through tissues this sensation of coursing this emotional sensation this muscular sensation this skin sensation these memories.

There is one clear and delightful word: tingle.

Tingle sing.

To sing with the tingle and to make layers and harmonies like human hair.



To layer complexities with simplicity and complexity of human hair.

Tingling with layers of hair, tingling in excess with these layers of human hair of all colours and sizes and thicknesses, rampant hair growing like ivy, a single strand and even the bald skin between hairs oh the human being and the word tingle.

Moving through the coursing stages, coursing stages flow. The music is the starting place, this music is touch because it is vibration. This music is touch because it is tingle. This interiority is coming out because tingling is social. Private social tingling.

To sing the private tingle social tingle the sing the ting tingle.

Every kind of powerful singing. Tenderness is powerful and the gesture. Trans. Trans-discipline I gesture with my virtuosity I gesture the way each did gesture, looking hearing and feeling. The tingle is the alive way and it is a memory and we record layers of it like human hair.

Tingling human hair, tingling jungles of hair, sometimes simple grasses, a strand.

16. Final video editI send the music it is finished. The images captured by the painter then carefully chosen. Edit, selection, morsels of painted memory emerging from tactile being, from somatic places, structured into a shared vision of remember. The recorded voice provides structure. Reflection on let-ting it be.

Selection, it is to watch and to selection, to watch and to look and the endless, ceaseless selection, it is the selection, when will we select the selec-tion, she was alone and there was where selection had to be. The selection was where it was, where it had to be, there it was and it happened and she chose it.

She chose that because there was not time not to choose, she had to choose. She chose it and each choice became a morsel. Each morsel became some way of remembering but not always that way, to watch is not to remember, to watch is to watch in the inside. It was inside and so the side came in, the skin side, the contemplation, the side came in and the contemplation came in and this was becoming a music video with so much care.

Reflection on memory and the final record. Reflection on how the record becomes memory. Cultural issues. We let the sob be and then we know that the sob can’t be anything except a powerful sob but any such sound can confront. We let the long sequences be what they are and we remember it that way. She remembers the way, the painter remembers her painting fig-ures and chooses, negotiates a way. She lets it develop, she lets it stay. She remembers the long sob and the long sequence and the long moment. She remembers duration as a painter’s brush can last a long time, radiance can last a long time, colours do nothing to radiate they just are, and so a painter’s brush in the eyes and brain makes a choice that remembers how long feeling can be there, not there, come back, stay, go and whoosh.


86 Yvon Bonenfant

This is it, a snapshot of time, bringing to you the time we remember, bringing to you the time and memory of a share. Bringing to you another time and memory. Bringing to you five interiorities. Bringing to you a shared memory of energy.

These words try too.

Works citedBesson, Jacqueline (1992), ‘Techniques des massages biodynamiques’, in

Jacqueline Besson (ed.), Manuel d’enseignement de l’Ecole Française d’Analyse Psycho-Organique, tome 2, Gargas Gaudiès, France: EFAPO, pp. 201–212.

Boyesen, Gerda (1985), Entre psyché et soma: Introduction à la psychologie biody- namique, Paris: Payot.

Bonenfant, Y. (2006), ‘The embodied politics of intention, therapeutic interven-tion and artistic practice’, Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 1:2, pp. 115–127.

Bonenfant, Y. (2008a), ‘Toward a politics of felt pulsation: de-disciplining voice and movement in the making of a musi-dance performance’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 28:1, pp. 39–58.

Bonenfant, Y. (2008b), ‘Sound, touch, the felt body and emotion: Toward a hap-tic art of voice’, SCAN Journal, 5:3 http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=126. Accessed 16 March 2009.

Nunnely, Peg, (2000a), The Biodynamic Philosophy and Treatment of Psychosomatic Conditions, Volume 1, Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang.

—— (2000b), The Biodynamic Philosophy and Treatment of PsychosomaticCondi- tions,Volume 2, Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang.

Reich, W. ([1949]1975), Character Analysis, third edition, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux/Noonday.

Roux, C. (2007), Danses performatives, Paris : L’Harmattan.

Vaudaine, E. (1992), ‘De l’esprit à la lettre. à propos d’une classification des massages’, in Jacqueline Besson (ed.), Manuel d’enseignement de l’Ecole Françaised’Analyse Psycho-Organique, Gargas Gaudiès, France: EFAPO tome 2, pp. 186–197.

Suggested citationBonenfant, Y. (2009), ‘Enskinning between extended voice and movement:

somatics, touch, contact and the camera’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1, pp. 65–87, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.65/1

Contributor detailsYvon Bonenfant is an artist-academic who pursues experiments in voice, move-ment, emotion, and intensity across media. An extended vocalist himself, in recent years, Bonenfant has explored the links between extended voice, gesture (choreog-raphy) and emotion: voice and costume; voice and silk; and voice and scenography. His recent piece Soie soyeuse (Silky Silk) (2007) has been performed in Paris, New York, and Wales, with the video version in Tallinn, and an artist book based on it published by Editions Talmart, Paris, in 2009. Other recent projects include the installation ‘B(earth)’ [with Ludivine Allegue] (2007–8) and the street interven-tion ‘The Opposite of Trauma’ (2008, Paris, London, Cardiff) with the Galloping Cuckoos. He has published in: Performance Research; Body, Music and Dance in Psychotherapy; Studies in Theatre and Performance, and others. He is a member of



the Performance as Research Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research and an overseas research associate of the IDEAT, University of Paris, 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. He is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the University of Winchester, and an Overseas Research Associate of the Institut d’Esthétique des Arts et Technologies, Université de Paris, 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Contact: The Masters’ Lodge, University of Winchester, West Hill, Winchester SO22 4NR, UK.Tel: 01962 8207505E-mail: [email protected]


“

”Everything begins with an idea.

Earl Nightingale

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Keywordsparadoxfamiliarityawarenesschoicepowertransformation

1. The plié is a warming-up movement done at or near the begin-ning of a classical ballet class. It is not however confined to the ballet class and is used just as much in other dance forms such as jazz, contem-porary, ballroom, and newer forms as funk, hip-hop, street and grunge. The feet stand in parallel or the classical ballet positions, 1–5th, or any variation of these, the knees bend to either demi plié (keeping the heels on the floor) or full plié (allowing the heels to come off the floor, with the exception of full plié in the 2nd position of classi-cal ballet), then the knees straighten as the heels return as soon as possible to the floor. Various arm

The potent persuasive pleasurable unappeasable pliéJennifer De Leon Independent Choreographer and academic,

Director Poyema Dance Co.

Abstract I am thinking about a movement that I, as a psychotherapist working with dance and movement, have reframed and re-visioned as a therapeutic tool. Every dance sequence contains this movement in it. It is a movement that all people who do not think of themselves as dancers also, unknowingly, do. The movement is named ‘plié’.

I think about the plié. I: dancer – teacher, choreographer, educator, writer, or any combination of the above – certainly have done and certainly know about, the plié. My objective in speaking about the plié is to bring to our attention the capacity, inherent in this most familiar of acts, for healing and transformation.

IntroductionMy area of dance scholarship is in the field of Dance Therapy. My essay ‘The Plié’ arises from my roles as a dancer, a choreographer, a ‘dance-academic’ and a psychotherapist who specializes in dance and movement. It is an out-working and expression of these four discrete, yet overlapping, aspects of my life.

My paper is about something that probably most, if not all of us involved in dance, have – at some stage of our lives – done. It is familiar, habitual and repeated; it has become a ritual some of us may perform every day. We have done it consciously, but sometimes without aware-ness. It may have become not quite – but almost – autonomic. This paper suggests that it is something that may be for us and our students, clients and fellow dancers, the key to powerful healing.

This is the humble, oft-repeated and oh-so-familiar – plié.1

In my life as a dancer I have done thousands of pliés. This bend of the knees that heralds a thousand other movements is fundamental in classi-cal ballet training, heralds the beginning of many classes and occurs many times throughout every class. It is my comfort and my torment, as familiar to me as breathing and as known as my breath.

I have chosen the plié as the key focus of this paper because, as dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, director, dance therapist, psychotherapist and dreamer, I perceive that the plié is a metaphor. Pliés seem simply ‘knee bends … good for limbering the leg muscles and heels … (and for) a well-stretched Achilles tendon which is necessary for a dancer as it is her springboard’ (Streatfield 1963: 25–26) – but, as I present here, they can

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90 Jennifer De Leon

sequences accompany the different positions of plié and these are typically set by the teacher at the com-mencement of the plié exercise. The muscles of the entire body are engaged during the plié.

be interpreted as so much more, a tiny symbolical microcosm of a uni-verse of meaning.

The Plié – what is it?A plié is a bend of the knees. Pliés can be done in many different posi-tions: first, second, third, fourth: open and crossed fifth, and parallel. In all cases, the left and right knees bend equally, although certain position of the feet, like fourth open, cause a slightly uneven distribution of weight – making the achievement of even-ness in the knee-bend very challenging.

In a demi-plié, the heels remain on the floor: in a full plié, except in second position where the heels remain on the floor, they rise just enough to allow the torso to lower to a position just above the heels. The calf, thigh muscles, muscles around the knee and Achilles tendon elongate, the entire groin area widens, the soles and arches of the feet are worked. As the plié deepens, and the heels rise, the same muscles must elongate further. Commonly the back is held straight during a plié, but the plié can just as well be and, in choreographic patterns, often is also executed with a bend or inclination of the torso: forward, upwards and backward, and sideways.

While doing the plié, the arms execute a ports de bras. These are arm pathways that have evolved through the classical ballet tradition to frame the body and flow congruently with the dynamics of balance, grace and fluidity. (The plié, ports de bras and the characteristics of balance, grace and fluidity are common hallmarks of all vocabularies of dance, whether it be folk, ballet, ballroom, jazz, contemporary, modern, funk, hip hop or new wave).

In styles of dance where teachers have developed levels to mark the degree of execution excellence, the ports de bras to accompany different positions of the plié are ‘set’ as syllabus, for example, the Royal Academy of Dancing classical syllabus.

Why do we do pliés?The principle reasons for doing a plié are to engage, stretch and warm the muscles of the legs, ankles, groins and hips. In the act of bending the knees while initially maintaining the heels upon the floor, a considerable stretch occurs immediately through the Achilles tendon and whole ankle area. In a full plié this same stretch amplifies.

Because stretching and warming is vital to the actions of dancing, in order to gain the fullest value of the movement the plié is done slowly. Typically, the dance instructor will set pliés in four, eight, or sixteen counts. It is quite usual for the plié sequence to be done in all five positions of the feet and on both sides (holding the barre with first one hand and then the other), so sets of ten or twenty pliés are not uncommon. One rea-son for doing many pliés is that, as well as stretching, the plié is a center-ing and quieting movement. In order to execute this seemingly simple knee-bend with correct alignment and interplay between lifting and sink-ing, opening and tightening, the mind must become quiet and focused. There is an optimum tension between holding and releasing, and to find that ‘place of grace between the tension of opposites’ is a task that requires


91The potent persuasive pleasurable unappeasable plié

commitment, concentration and care. Doing many pliés seems to facilitate mental progression to this state.

In working with the plié, the dancer/dance tutor/or choreographer may choose to use any combination of upper torso bend whilst doing a plié in any position of the feet. Thus as well as being one of the key movements for warming-up and preparing the body for a dance class or performance, the plié is also a movement containing almost unending choreographic potential.

The choreographic imagination may roam … from a deep knee-bend the body can rise: directly upwards, or rotating upwards, or inclined to the right or left. Equally, from the plié, the body can sink to the floor, twist into a knee-spin, fall in any direction … the possibilities go on.

A certain formality is implied here and certainly in a classical ballet class the plié must be executed with precision and concentration; this author argues that when a plié is done with anything less, the full meas-ure of what it can offer is missed.

What is our relationship with the plié?For the trained and experienced dancer a plié is like an old, familiar friend. There is a certain comforting recognition in doing, again and again, a movement we have done so many times before. Despite the wide-ranging and arguably complex metaphorical dimensions of the plié, the movement itself is simple: tricky footwork, agonizing back-bends and precarious bal-ances are not part. For dancers who are newly acquainted with the plié, be they young or old, it is a relationship to be discovered. For we who have been raised with the ballet syllabi, it is comforting to do something we know we know how to do.

The approachIt is not however, simply a matter of ‘doing pliés’. In order to do – we first approach. It is somewhat analogous to the master violinist when he deter-mines to play his violin: first, he lifts his instrument – he turns the keys – tests the strings – plucks them and runs his bow across them – maybe he caresses the instrument for a moment. It is analogous to the moments before we begin a conversation, or give a hug: we move towards – we approach our friend. Even so, we approach the plié.

The physical mechanics of this approach is a gathering-coordinating function of the muscles, fluids and fibres, as noted:

the muscle spindles where the two halves of the nervous system, the sensory and the motor have their closest physiological association, where movement and sensation are joined directly together in a firm embrace, where no inter-vening barriers exist and no intermediary messengers are necessary.

(Juhan 1987: 193)

The belly floor muscles lift, and the distance between the head of the femur and the socket in which it sits, increases. The legs have a sensation of lengthening. The coccyx lengthens downwards towards the heels as the back of the head lifts upwards and the back of the jaw aligns more verti-cally above the base of the throat. It is as if the spine grows longer,


92 Jennifer De Leon

straighter and stronger. The shoulders and upper torso widen, open and soften as the lower torso narrows. The arms lengthen as the shoulders relax, in preparation for whichever ports de bras is chosen to accompany the plié.

The transcendental, the soul dynamics of the approach are to do with engaging with the realm of paradox. As we give ourselves to the act of centering and grounding, we simultaneously work with the opposing dynamic of lifting away from the constraints of gravity and bondage to the earth. At the very beginning, before we have done the plié itself, we are in the dimensions of both and. Already, at this beginning, we move to a deeper level; maybe perceiving that this elementary preparation is rep-resentative of the eternal struggle to reconcile nothing less than heaven and earth – the upward yearning for simplicity, order, meaning and free-dom, with the downward need for complexity, change, moodiness, root-edness and attachment (Moore 1992: 15; De Leon 2005: 37; Epstein 1996: 145–146).

The preparation initiates the plié. But, a warning here! For inherent in the familiarity of this gathering and co-coordinating is the danger that it becomes action without awareness. Without awareness, the act of the preparation – basic yet so quintessential – has physicality but no meaning. Without awareness the body becomes silent, ‘Suppressing and restricting its wisdom, knowledge appetite, emotions, joy and pain through self-denial and self-constraint’ (Rea 2001: 125).

Without awareness, neither the preparation nor the plié are anything more than a mere bending of the knees, a grinding of the muscles to sup-port us, and a quotidian familiarity of ‘same old, same old’ – that elicits from us little respect and even less joy ‘we need to re-inhabit the body in joyful, respectful and expressive ways’ (Rea 2001: 125).

The actAfter preparation, we ‘do’ the plié. This daily enactment of the same ritual may be likened to greeting a dear, familiar friend. Muscles find their known pathways: doing, with the cellular and somewhat arcane knowing danc-ers call ‘muscle memory’, what they know to do (Czikszentmihalyi 2001: 7, Nissinen 2001: 87, Kain 2001: 115). It is not simply the bending at the knees; there is also the right measure of holding in the quadriceps and gluteus maximus, (thighs and buttocks). If the plié is in a turned out posi-tion, the degree of rotation must be executed throughout the whole leg, initiated at the head of the femur and sustained throughout the leg. If it is a full plié and the heels are raised, they then press towards the floor in order to initiate the return to standing, and throughout, the coccyx and buttocks remain centered above the heels, maintaining the ‘heel to coccyx connection’ and anchoring the torso in its most efficient alignment between the crown of the head and the floor. The head, neck, spine and entire torso are adjusting continually to accommodate the subtle shifts in balance and organization that are occurring throughout.

The familiarity of the plié may be likened to returning to the embrace of our long-time, long-cherished friend. Again, though, the danger exists of the familiarity engendering a certain dismissiveness or casualness.

Let us not forget the sacredness of the familiar.



Psychotherapy and danceAs a psychotherapist who dances and a dancer who practices psychother-apy, a principle objective of my life and work is to discover what links may exist between these. Specifically with regard to this paper, I wonder about the meaning of the plié in terms of psychotherapy.

Firstly, a word about psychotherapy; psychotherapy is, essentially, about the soul. The word ‘psychotherapy’ derives from the Greek:

• Psukhe meaning the soul; spirit; mind; the breath; life; and the mythic ‘beloved of Eros’.

• Therapy meaning: ‘attending’.

Thus psychotherapy, literally, is attending to the soul. Moore (1992: xv) calls it ‘service to the Gods’ – seeking the development of the whole person wholly involved in the business of cultivating soul. Cultivating soul – heal-ing the soul – and psychotherapy, are not about solving the puzzle of life, they are about appreciating the paradoxical mysteries that surround us, that are the raw material of life itself. Cultivating soul – healing the soul – psychotherapy, are about applying poetics into the ordinary and everyday, and to re-imagine what we think we understand.

In its broadest sense spirituality is an attempt to approach or attend to the invisible factors of life and to transcend the personal, concrete, finite particulars of this world. Spirituality is not specifically religious. Mathematics is spiritual in the broad sense, because it is abstracted from the concrete details of life.

(Moore 1992: 232)


94 Jennifer De Leon

Dance then, as mathematics, is one of the supreme ways of ‘abstracting from the concrete details of life’ and of bringing poetics into the ordinary and everyday. Since the dawn of time, dance has been an act, a manifesta-tion and an agent of soul activity (De Leon 2005: 94; Foster 1986: 42; Evans 2003: 43). As well, for that long, dance has been an agent for the healing of mind, body, heart and spirit. In this realm of cultivating, heal-ing the soul, we find core elements of our existence meeting and min-gling … soul work, religion, spirituality, inner healing, dance.

And the humble plié is one part, one element, without which the dance cannot exist. What can the plié mean in and to psychotherapy?

A concrete, ordinary, everyday detail of life is – we bend our knees. Another concrete detail is that in the activities of life, the muscles of our bodies need to stretch and lengthen.

But by what means may the animal be moved by inward principles … by means of what instruments? Let us compare automata … Is the first instrument of movement spirit, or natural causes … like the movement of the heart?

(Harvey 1986; De Motu Locali Animalium)

When the natural, autonomic impulses, reactions, movements and heart-beats are abstracted and shaped into acts that move beyond the category of ‘necessary functioning’ then what we have is an abstraction. The plié (and all of choreographed dance) is an abstraction. The abstraction is available, like the blank page, for emotion, interpretation, meaning, defini-tion and purpose to be laid upon it. Unlike the blank page, the plié comes with characteristics – of choice, commitment and paradox that point it in the direction of the soul.

When we do the plié, we consciously and deliberately shape our bodies, moving from the autonomic process to something in which we engage, like breathing, again and again; unlike breathing, we do it because we choose to.

In the choosing we can make an observation about two important aspects of life: processes and practices. A process is something that occurs in nature, such as the orbiting of planets, or the flowing of a river, or the production of chlorophyll in a leaf. These processes are not the product of human intelligence. They are governed by immutable laws; they are deter-mined by the structure of nature. Perhaps, depending on your belief sys-tem, you could say they are the creation of God.

Practices are the creations of people – events that result from human decisions and actions, such as this paper, or the formation of political boundaries in an otherwise seamless world, or our conversations with each other, or falling in love. These events are the function of human intelligence interacting with environment. Certainly, these events have a measure of regularity, but they are not governed by immutable laws.

Many people, and religions, hold that their actions and decisions are not within their control; that these activities are governed by a Divine entity they name God, Allah, Krishna, Guide, or something other. I, how-ever, argue that although our environment profoundly affects us, natural, immutable laws do not determine our ideas and behaviours. To quote Oakeshott (in Postman 1992: 6) there is an ‘irrevocable difference between



a blink and a wink.’A blink is a process, which can be explained and understood within established physiological cause-and-effect dynamics; a wink is a practice, filled with often unknowable meanings, and impossible to explain as a product of causal relations.

Is the plié, then, a blink or a wink? It is of course, a wink, a practice, and inherent in this fact that it is so absolutely one and not the other, is its power. Whether today it hurts or not: whether today we feel too tired, or bursting with energy, whatever the feeling state, we do it because we have chosen to. Working from choice means the feeling, perception ‘powerless’ is no longer valid.

Doing therapy, albeit from choice, is most often precipitated by the per-ception that some situation in life has become choice-less; unmanageable. The client, aware of his or her inability to ‘work it out’, decides to come to therapy.

What then is the link between psychotherapy, the plié, and the deeper dimensions of choice, paradox, power and healing?First: we acknowledge that the client has chosen to come to therapy. This act of choosing suggests the possibility, however latent, that the client is willing to change something and is accepting or perhaps grab-bing desperately at the chance of this. Secondly, if the plie – though it may seem unorthodox – is used as a therapeutic tool, it is powerful. Why is this so? Because it is chosen: the therapist offers – the client chooses to accept. The act of deciding, of choosing, brings the activity into the same category as a wink: a practice filled with often unknowa-ble meanings, impossible to explain as a product of causal relations. Cryptic sounding, yet meaning unequivocally the opportunity now exists for emotion, interpretation, meaning, definition and purpose to be imbued upon it. Potent with metaphorical meanings, the plié now becomes a symbol – for the paradoxes that lie un-reconciled and for their containment.

Second: the act of executing the plié requires a body, a mind and a body-mind alignment instantly connotative of consciousness, organiza-tion and intention. These are qualities symbolizing a shift from confusion and disorganization. When the level of organization, intention and con-sciousness moves beyond that ordinarily demanded in ordinary life, then the transformative activity of therapeutic healing has begun.

Third: the plié is physical, tangible, dynamic example of paradox.

The simplest visible element of this startling and paradoxical operation is the plate between the axial-stable and the surface-mobile bodily movements, or, in other words, the struggle between the binding power of a knot and the loosening power of an untwisting line with an intermediary lemniscates.

(Laban 1966)

Paradox is a core dynamic of life and to experience and engage with para-dox is a task to which we are called throughout our lives (Kvale 1996, Raab 2004). The situations and crises which provoke a client to therapy are situations of paradox: opposites perceived to allow no way out: paradoxes which seem to contain no place of rest or resolution. The plié,


96 Jennifer De Leon

in which we seek to deepen (the bend) more, and lift (the pelvic floor) more, widen the (turnout of the hips) more, and narrow (the buttocks and hips) more – altogether and at the same time be stronger, straighter, more ele-gant, and more relaxed, fluid and flowing – this indeed is a symbolic micro-cosm of the great dance of opposites.

Fourth: the plié is a dance uniting and containing the opposites, where diverging paths of energy cross and unite with each other. The plié is a fluid, coherent, shaped, intentional ‘unity in paradox’. Epstein’s words (1996: 94) might have been written about the plié: ‘the fluid ability to integrate potentially destabilising experiences of insubstantiality and impermanence.’

Fifth: being in mindful relationship with the plié falls into the category of ritual. Ritual is inherent in its strangeness – this environment, activity, dis-comfort. Doing pliés is a kind-of rite of passage, pitching the do-er (or the client) out of his or her comfort zone. The client willingly, participates in ‘The function of the ritual: pitching you out, not wrapping you back where you have been all the time’ (Campbell 1988: 84).

The juxtaposition of familiarity, the common-ness of this movement, with the oddness of it, immediately calls the do-er to consciousness. I choose – and having chosen, I must ask what does this mean for me?

Sixth: plié-ing takes time. To really engage with the plié we have to be … rare in our caught-up-ness with the world’s tendency and urgency to do. This tendency is reflected in today’s psychotherapy. In step with the times, it is slick, speedy, clever and cost-efficient. It is diagnostically-directed, oriented for solutions in six–twenty sessions, ego-centred and essentially secular. It does not allow for plié-ing – for painstaking repeti-tion, for working and re-working and re-re-working of the same theme, for dwelling in the same dynamic progression time and time and time again, for doing them demi and full, in every position, on both sides. Why is this so important? Repetition, re-working, dwelling in, and time are essential for the richness of the experience to unfold; for the distur-bance to unfold – ‘Disturbance is the seed of a new process, bringing personal growth, expanded awareness and enriching experiences of life’s mysterious ways’ (Claus Bermann, Process Work meeting, July 1998) – or the paradox of this experience, its light and shadow, its pain and release, to unfold. In the repetition of the plié, over and over again, is opportunity for the alchemy of consciousness to do its work: a ‘dwelling in’ in which there is space for reflection, consideration and ultimately, acceptance to arise.

Finally, importantly, the plié is not the final statement about anything. Neither its value nor its meaning are absolute – these are rather, by each individual, given. This is what makes the plié available for use as a thera-peutic tool, and a symbolical act of soul … for the giving of meaning is not concerned with solving the paradoxes, it is about meeting – acknowledg-ing – containing – accepting – celebrating them. It is deepest soul work: it brings us home.

The poetry by T.S. Eliot could be said to epitomize the paradox of the plié. Surely the richness of the plié can only be known through the grace of sense and when it is done thus, surely it is lifted and moving … and as dancer and choreographer I feel, I know the plié has at its core, the still point.



At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest or movement. And do not call it fixity,Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance….The inner freedom from the practical desire,The release from action and suffering, release from the innerAnd the outer compulsion, yet surroundedBy a grace of sense, a white light lifted and moving.

– T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, (1936)

ConclusionThe plié is about what life is about. Life is, of course, about every subject possible – and some impossible, and I am not suggesting that the plié is as all-encompassing as to be about LIFE. I hold however, that the plié con-tains metaphorical, symbolical and ritualistic material that places it as an act that speaks about life dynamics. Beginning with the preparation, prior to even doing the plié, we engage with the fundamental life condition, par-adox. We engage with – we do these synchronous paradoxes of lifting/ deepening/tightening/releasing/grounding/seeking to ascend and so, we are, in the plié then, joining with a vast cosmic dance of The Wave and its Undertow: (that which goes in a different direction to that at the surface). If we broaden the metaphor, we may perceive that we are engaging with ‘cosmic’ tensions …

Earth/sky, yin/yang, anima/animus.Working with the metaphor of the plié is to engage with the tran-

scendent. This seemingly simple even quotidian movement contains that which would disturb the quiet vacuity that threatens to overtake us should we take too many things for granted. This paper recommends engagement with the plié as a powerful and provocative tool in thera-peutic practice.

Finally, if we dancers, dance theorists and dance therapists can allow the Mercurian qualities of wit and humour to be present, there is a good chance that the humble plié could be for us, our students, audience and clients, a symbol – a motif, of the greater dance of our souls and our life-journey to wholeness.

Works citedBermann, C. (1998), July Process Work meeting, Auckland.

Campbell, J. (1988), The Power of the Myth, Doubleday, N.Y.

Czikszentmihalyi, M. (2001), in Not just any body, complied by the Steering Committee of the ‘Not just any body’ Conference, The Hague and Toronto, November 1999, Canada: The Ginger Press.

De Leon, J. (2005), Dance and Stillness, AUT Publishing, Auckland, NZ.

Eliot, T. S. (1936), Collected Poems, Faber & Faber, London.

Epstein, M. (1996), Thoughts Without a Thinker, Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, Basic Books, N.Y.

Evans, B. (2003), ‘Fully Alive’, Dance Magazine, October, New York.


98 Jennifer De Leon

Foster, S. L. (1986), Reading dancing, California: University of California Press.

Geller, J. D. (1978), The Body, Expressive Movement, and Physical Contact in Psychotherapy, in J. L. Singer and K. S. Pope (eds), The Power of Human Imagination: New Methods in Psychotherapy, N.Y.: Plenum Press.

Harvey, W. (1986), in O. Sacks (ed.), A Leg to Stand On, Quickening: London: Pan Books Ltd.

Juhan, D. (1987), Job’s body, New York: Station Hill Press.

Kain, K. (2001), in Not just any body, complied by the Steering Committee of the ‘Not just any body’ Conference, The Hague and Toronto, November 1999, Canada: The Ginger Press.

Kvale, S. (1996), in W.T. Anderson (ed.), The Fontana post-modern reader, London: Hammersmith.

Laban, R. (1966), Choreutics, London: McDonald & Evans.

Moore, T. (1992), Care of the soul, New York: Harper Collins.

Nissinen, M. (2001), in Not just any body, complied by the Steering Committee of the ‘Not just any body’ Conference, The Hague and Toronto, November 1999, Canada: The Ginger Press.

Postman, Neil, (1992), Conscientious Objections: Stirring up trouble about language, technology and education, USA: Vintage.

Raab, K. (2004), Mysticism, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis: Learning From Marion Milner, invited essay, Dept. of Religious Studies, St. Lawrence University.

Rea, K. (2001), in Not just any body, complied by the Steering Committee of the ‘Not just any body’ Conference, The Hague and Toronto, November 1999, Canada: The Ginger Press.

Streatfield, N. (1963), The first book of the ballet, London: Edmund Ward.

Suggested citationDe Leon, J. (2009), ‘The potent persuasive pleasurable unappeasable plié’, Journal

of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1, pp. 89–98, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.89/1

Contributor detailsJennifer is the founder of Poyema Dance Company and of The Healing Dance Movement Psychotherapy. Her roles thus encompass Choreographer, Company Director, Performer, Teacher, Psychotherapist and Counsellor. She is also a mother and a crone.

Contact: 12 Notley Street, Westmere, Auckland, New Zealand.E-mail: [email protected]: http://www.danz.org.nz/jennydeleon.php





Keywordssomatic awareness embodiment professional

development reflective learning

Breaking old habits: professional development through an embodied approach to reflective practice Elizabeth Smears Liverpool John Moores University

AbstractPersonal embodied experience impacts upon the way in which we present our-selves professionally. Somatic practices emerge as a way of developing an embodied awareness and a way of exploring the meaning of experience. Through narrative and reflection, this paper explores how somatic awareness can add to professional development in areas that, historically, have been ‘disembodied’. It addresses my subjective experience of a critical incident, a cycle accident, and how it interrupted my habitual sense of embodiment. It explores how the experience presented an opportunity to visit again my body as ‘ground of my being’ and ‘my body as first home’ (Halprin 2003), and to listen through silence to the layers that give way to somatic awareness. Reflection offers an opportunity to pause, and explore the space for deep engagement in what it means to be professional.

This paper addresses itself to the theme of the embodied professional educator. To acquire professional recognition as an educator, there is a requirement to reflect upon the domains of activity through which core knowledge and professional values are evidenced. The process of evidenc-ing practice through reflection is useful, for it offers an opportunity to pause, and explore the space ‘in between us’, and ask what of the ‘per-sonal’ infiltrates the ‘professional’. For some educators their sense of embodiment is all too habitual to be even noticed, for others their sense of professionalism is founded upon their focus of embodied self-awareness. A question that is raised in this paper is what impact does personal embod-ied experience have upon the way in which we present ourselves profes-sionally, and how does acknowledgment of personal epistemology inform the ways in which we engage participants, students and pupils in their own learning.

Personal testimony has historically been a mechanism for consciousness raising. Sue Wendell (1989), like many feminists, acknowledge that contributions from experiential accounts offer vital insight into the rela-tionship between the nature of embodiment and the experiences of oppression and empowerment. It may be informative if educators, participants, students and pupils alike have access to the narratives of how as individuals we have negotiated and navigated our lives through the prevailing discourses of embodiment. The value of bringing the personal into the professional may connect individuals within, between and amongst

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one another, and in that process present a transparency to issues of embod-ied connection, support and empowerment.

As a teacher in Higher Education, and as a woman who has always enjoyed being physical and connected to my body, I offer in this paper personal testimony. I reflect upon my subjective experience of how a criti-cal incident, a cycle accident, brought to the fore a revelatory layer to my experience of embodiment. It explores how the experience has presented me with an opportunity to visit again my body as ‘ground of my being’ and ‘my body as first home’ (Halprin 2003), and to listen through silence to the layers that give way to somatic awareness. It is a narrative that gives you, the reader, a flavour of how the experience of embodiment can provide a conduit to a source of knowing that has far reaching impact upon a sense of ‘being’, and concomitantly how I continue to engage in the tension that resides in the space in between personal experience and professional practice. The focus in this paper on phenomenology and embodiment has pedigree through the work of Merleau-Ponty (1962): his writing on the body as lived experience is seminal to framing a narrative account of embodiment.

Through his case study research on embodied action, Merleau-Ponty argues that the body has a dual role of being both a vehicle of perception and an object perceived. The body, therefore, has a paradoxical quality; he proposes that the intentionality of experience underlies the possibility of perceiving of all kinds. In other words, it is as if we elect to locate our per-ceiving selves, one which gives us the vantage point of how we want to be in the world.

The centrality of the body as a source of knowing feeds our ability to perceive. These ideas are developed further by Linda Hartley in her work in somatic psychology and education (2004). She provides insight into the depth and breadth of knowing that the body presents. It could be argued that a prerequisite for professional recognition is to be ‘embodily’ aware, and that by exemplifying this good practice, educators sanction a more expansive and navigable route for students and pupils to develop their own learning. However, to make a convincing argument about these propositions it is useful to explore further the relationship between subjectivity, embodiment, and professional practices. To this end, this paper visits the phenomenological accounts of the body that excavate experience, and provide a scaffold for the exploration of how experience is infiltrated by historical and cultural discourses and impacts upon our reflective processes.

Being physical is a core theme in my biography. Movement, and the experience of my physicality, have been so very important to me through-out my life. The hinterland of somatic awareness has been less known; accessibility to the terrain of the sensate body that, arguably, is a subtle yet omnipresent source of knowing has remained at a level of conscious dis-tance. In part, I attribute this to the way in which I have been inculcated. In Eurocentric cultures, a somatic basis to knowledge generation has occupied a lower order position within the hierarchy of what constitutes valid and reliable knowledge. Indeed somatic engagement as a resource for develop-ing learning, understanding and indeed claiming one’s wellbeing has long been derided as irrelevant in the quest to make sense of our experiences.

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101Breaking old habits

Cartesian dualism that polarizes mind and body continues to have a ripple effect through western scientific tradition. Rationality, reason and objectivity have triumphed to the detriment of the subjective, sensing and emotive body. Somatic education endeavours to arrest this partial view of knowledge by emerging from the shadows. Drawing from the heritage of different cultures, somatics endeavour to give volume to what have hitherto remained as ‘quiet voices’, the voices that rest upon embodied presence as a source of knowing and argue for a subjective interpretation of reality.

Creative approachSomatic education has evolved from the vision and energy of those work-ing in health and movement contexts. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (1993), Daria Halprin (2003), Thomas Hanna (1979) and Linda Hartley (2004), amongst others, have developed practice that supports individuals in their personal and professional development and their exploration of wellbeing. These architects of practice have harnessed their creativity and encouraged their disciples, and their clients, to do likewise.

The connection between somatic education and creativity is worthy of some consideration. There is a literature that wallows extensively upon definitions of creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1997; Gardner 1993; Perkins 1981; Robinson 2000; Sternberg 1999) exploring the concept through an examination of individual genius, multiple intelligences, artistic products, and the process of human ingenuity. What emerges as significant is the early writing by Koestler who recognizes creativity as the capacity to ‘perceive ... a situation or event in two habitually incompatible associative contexts’ (Koestler 1964: 65). In other words, creativity is not necessarily about novelty or individual capability but the capacity to select, reshuffle, combine and synthesize already existing ideas in original ways. This may be about reclaiming lost knowledge, or by working across domains: taking ideas that may have a mundane currency in one context, but be perceived as fresh and exciting new concepts in another. Somatic education may reflect a creative practice that is emerging through those disciplines that engage the subjective and sentient body, particularly dance and a range of body therapies e.g. Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, Continuum. Following the theme of creativity being about the transference of ideas and practices into new domains, I am interested in how somatic awareness can have relevance in areas of professional practice. Specifically, can somatic awareness add to professional development in areas that have his-torically been ‘disembodied’, where the focus is primarily upon intellectual development, for example, those engaged in teaching and research in higher education.

Making sense of experienceThere is a body of literature that has endeavoured to excavate the process of learning through reflection (Kolb 1996; Moon 1999). The commonality shared is the cyclical process, whereby ‘doing’ an activity provides the basis of experience. The cycle of learning through reflection proceeds by recog-nizing the role of observation and a way of recording the experiential proc-ess. This then evolves to reflection, whereby analysis and theory-making



take place, and concludes with a focus on planning, a phase whereby learning is taken forward into the next level of experience. This framework illuminates the way in which surface learning evolves to deep learning; however, the depth to which they engage in the process of experiential learning limits the models.

It is in the writing of John Heron (1992) that presents an added dimension to the different ways of knowing what I experience. Along with Peter Reason (1988), they develop a model of cooperative inquiry. They recognize three different kinds of knowledge: experiential knowledge, gained through direct embodied encounter with persons, places or things; practical knowledge, that is knowing ‘how’ to do something often associ-ated with skill or competence; and propositional knowledge, that is knowledge about something, often expressed in statements or theories. Heron (1992) adds to this the notion of presentational knowledge, which he explains is based on how, in the first instance, we order our tacit expe-riential knowledge into spatio-temporal patterns of imagery, a symbolized sense of meaning which is evident in movement, sound, colour, shape, poetry, drama and story. Imagery/imagination appear to be the catalyst that bridges the divide between experiential knowledge and propositional knowledge.

As I encounter the literature from somatic education, I am drawn to arguments that suggest a similar emergent theme to the process of how we develop understanding and awareness that acts as a basis of knowledge. Daria Halprin (2003) suggests that at a level of silence it is possible to connect to the body-self, through an exploration and open intention to experience that is of a sensory nature; this is developed further by McHose and Frank (2006), who suggest that by focussing attention in the perceptual realm, sensate experience is translated through the process of categorisation, evaluation, judgement and interpretation. This, they argue, allows for inner awareness to be generated. Daria Halprin develops her ideas of the metaphorical qualities of the body. As she excavates sensation, feeling and emotion, she reflects upon the frameworks that foreground one’s capability and capacity to listen, which offer rich terrain for the imagination to find expression.

Susan Griffin (1982) illuminates for me the tension that resides between knowledge, language and the body. Her writing on poetry as a way of presenting knowledge recognizes the body as a source of truth. She suggests that the body is the seat and author of intellect, perception, imag-ination and vision. It is in returning to the body that buried feelings, bur-ied perception and lost knowledge can be found. She suggests that the language of poetry is a medium of sensuality and thus it allows the body to speak its knowledge. According to Susan Griffin, poetry as a way of knowledge allows for the relationship between art and politics to blend:

Poetry, by making a pact between the body and soul, gives to the political imagination a dimension of meaning without which it loses its way.

(Griffin 1982: 241)

As I ruminate on the significance of the body in our lives, and I listen to those who advocate for a more integrated and connected approach



to understanding embodiment and wellbeing, I am reminded again that it appears that it is through experiential engagement that the inner landscape of somatic awareness is revealed. It is this framework, coupled with the insights of Susan Griffin, that provide the rationale for using narrative to provide insight into the meaning of experience.

Language can be constraining, and here I depart from the more usual academic style of writing. It seems that for me to communicate about physicality I need to embrace a more creative expressive language that comes in the form of stories, poetry or unsubstantiated prose: that falls off the end of my fingers as smatterings of ideas and ruminations that are doused with thought and feeling; this is the order of my subjective experi-ences of embodiment.

The backgroundIt’s 14 June 2007, a lovely bright day, intermittent sunshine, little wind, and an empty cycle path alongside the River Mersey. I pedal along, com-muning with the seagulls, taking in the space and aware of my breath and the heat generated in my body from cycling at a comfortable speed. No great hurry, likely to be in good time to catch my ferry home. I feel confident in my body, mildly invincible. I rest on a history of athleticism, physical competence, good spatial awareness, quick reaction times, strength and endurance. In a previous life, I have been a competitive sports woman, county badminton player, county squash player, regional cross-country runner and so on and so forth. My academic work and pro-fessional practice have also engaged with themes about the body and physicality. I have worked with disabled people, many of whom have a greater awareness of the fragility, vulnerability, mortality and arbitrari-ness of human experiences. I have an identity that is interwoven with my physicality. And I am aware that it is so often the case that we become immersed in those things that interest us most because we need to find a way in which we can integrate what we find out into our own lives.

The accidentI take the corner, not fast; there is some limited vision because of the high wall which I am circling. I take a wide trajectory, to gain a greater arc of vision. I have my hands gently resting on the cruise holds, and then immedi-ately in front of me is another cyclist. From nowhere then, to here and now, we simultaneously turn to avoid one another, both in the same direction and then comes the slow and unstoppable crunching sounds of our collision. We are both thrown in opposite directions to the ground, bikes remaining behind us mingled in an echo. I lie there still. I remember making small noises that were there to tell me I had hurt myself, however I don’t remember having immediate pain. What I do recollect are the light hearted thoughts like ‘whoops!, wonder if I’ll catch my ferry, wonder if my bike is still good enough to cycle on, hope the wheel isn’t buckled’. And finally, ‘can I move my body, what’s the damage?’ I have no idea for how long I lay still. There was, what seemed like, a noisy expansive silence that appeared to surround me.

I eventually phone for an ambulance, at which point I start to feel extremely cold, and have a sense that I am hanging onto my life, the thread is unfurling and I’m not sure how much longer I can ‘hold on’. I tentatively



feel my shoulder, there is a significant protrusion, I take my hand away, I realize that there is justification for not trying to progress my travel. I am so very cold and it seems like life is draining out of me. I hear in the distance the sound of a siren, I hope it’s an ambulance, I hope it’s for me.

Paramedics arrive, they ask some details, they ask me if I can stand and walk to the ambulance. I grunt, nod, but can hardly communicate. I can’t make eye contact, I have closed down within myself, and all my resources are dedicated to keeping myself ‘here’. I stand but find I can barely move, my legs can’t move, I shuffle a first step supported by a para-medic. I’m dizzy: I realize the paramedic is talking to me in a caring way, and asking gentle questions about the accident, about my family, about how we are progressing and what I need to do, encouraging words. I can’t respond, the paramedic is talking to the me that is not here.

I am supported as I get into the ambulance, helped to lie down, checked for pain, given oxygen, asked questions about my personal details. I’m given analgesics, told they’ll take a couple of minutes, asked to score my own pain. I don’t know, I can’t compare my relative experiences of pain; childbirth is so very different to trauma. My focus is about trying to stay ‘here’. I am concentrating deeply, trying to retain some recognizable aspect of myself, I feel like I am really fighting to stay, and at the same time the paramedic is trying, through conversation, to retain some sense of a shared reality with me. He talks: I listen, with occasional responses, as the ambu-lance heads off to the hospital. I wonder where I’m going, I wonder for the whole journey. I want to know where I am being taken, but I cannot find the vital force within me to ask this simple question. It’s the Royal Liverpool Hospital Accident and Emergency department.

We arrive, the paramedic driving the ambulance opens the rear doors, she comments that I’m getting a little colour back; I don’t look quite as ashen as when they first saw me. I have been in shock. I start to feel the impact of the morphine, I feel cushioned, life is moving about me like a series of scenes. I am wheeled on my bed through corridors to a cubicle in A&E: great care is shown by the paramedics, my personal possessions, including my dear bike, are accounted for and left with me in the cubicle.

I am seen by house doctors, registrars, nurses. I wait, and some more, then I am sent for X-rays. I meet my fellow cyclist in the X-ray waiting area. We don’t talk; we make brief eye contact, though this speaks volumes. I have no sense of any anger or animosity that we could hold towards one another, just a reality that we are both here. This is what has happened to us today.

The doctor returns to show me my X-ray. There is no fracture; I think ‘great, nothing broken’. There is, however, a severe displacement of bones, which suggests that a number of ligaments have been torn. I am to return to the next fracture clinic. I am damaged.

the lost voicetragedy to be namedbody to be claimedrhythm to be movedheart to be soothedspace to be sharedvoice to be heard



What follows over the next days, weeks and months are innumerable visits to hospitals for consultations, surgery twice, physiotherapy three times a week, and six months of strong pain relief. I have been submerged and I have lost myself in the medicalised world of mortality. A trauma, of whatever form, takes time to adjust to; we are not the same as we once were. Aspects of one’s sense of self are thrown up in the air and what comes down seems to be reconfigured. Issues of confidence, in my case physical competence, are reviewed and reconsidered. The fragility of life has become known again, a dusting of chance, or encounter with fate leads to a reappraisal of issues of agency and control.

Subjectivity and reflexivity A theme that emerges through this account is how we access knowledge of our self, and what bearing this has on our professional practice. Ethnomethodological tradition in sociology suggests that it is the process of reflexivity that creates a sense of order to the descriptions of our experiences. Early work by Mead (1934) and Garfinkel (1967) identified reflexivity as a way in which the individual turns back and attends again to their experiences. In this way, the whole social process that has bearing on experience is captured and brought to conscious awareness.

At the level of theory, Foucault (1977, 1980) illustrates the binding tension that determines our subjective experience. He presents a critical analysis of the ‘new paradigms’ of modernity which value human agency. He suggests that the individual’s ability to manufacture and control meaning is a misnomer that is based on the person being both subject and object of their own understanding. Foucault argues that the person as subject is glued from within by the phenomena of responsible agency, which he writes about in terms of ‘confession’, and from with-out by the apparatus of surveillance, which he terms ‘discipline’. The result is that the self is both the subject and object of discourse; we repro-duce the constraints to which we are subjected in a way that validates our own subjectivity. The question that Foucault raises for me is can a critical incident impact upon one’s subjective experience so dramatically that it allows for a significantly fresh appraisal of how meaning is con-structed?

The cycle accident brought me into contact with a number of dis-courses. I became acquainted with the discourses that reside within the healthcare system, and in due course I became reacquainted with those that make up professional practice in education. What I became intimately aware of is the connection between the ways in which my embodied self becomes integral to the processes of power that permeate our institutions and their practices. For Foucault, power infiltrates every dimension and aspect of our lives, as he explains:

When I think of the mechanics of power, I think of its capillary form of exist-ence, of the extent to which power seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right into their bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture what they say, how they learn to live and work with people.

(Foucault quoted in Sheridan 1980: 217)



The recognition that we are embedded in the discourses that envelope our lived lives and experience is at issue when considering the power rela-tionship between staff working in Higher Education, and between staff and students. How professionals in practice engage with the theory is of significance. What, I believe, receives relatively little recognition is how professionals create awareness of the power dynamics that envelop their practice alongside strategies to engage in wider and deeper self-knowing.

The social constructionist account of reflexivity develops this theme by suggesting that in giving accounts of ourselves we are constituted and reconstitute our social worlds. Reflexivity, argues Giddens (1991), is one way in which we can retain control over our personal world, which can bring with it self-confidence. Paradoxically, reflexivity also opens the doors to uncertainty and questions, which may well diminish a person’s confi-dence in self. For me, the significance of engaging our bodies to develop greater embodied awareness is the sine qua non of erudite, effective and useful practice. The question that is raised for me is what impact does a reflexive account of my physicality, post-trauma, have upon my own pro-fessional practice?

Embodied knowing According to Mary Starks Whitehouse (1958) movement is a manifestation of oneself in the social world, one that is both a language and a communi-cation. Whitehouse argues that our sense of body awareness is often neglected and therefore seldom developed; the result being that our move-ment repertoire is diminished and, as a consequence, we are only partial in our awareness of self.

Her theory is that for most people the tempo and pattern of physical movement is habit formed, automatic, unconscious and usually organized towards a utilitarian end. Having experienced an accident, my body can no longer move in its habitual way. Movement is constrained and painful. There is well-documented evidence (Sanford 1991; Herman 1994) that describes detachment from one’s body as a means of distancing oneself from the associated feelings of distress or pain. By making the body-self an ‘it’ and relegating the ‘I’ to the mind, we split ourselves into thinking and verbal beings with bodies that consist of feelings and non-verbal expres-sion. The result is that the body becomes alienated and therefore unknown; it is irrational, makes no sense and it is without words. The language of the body seems to be without meaning.

The question of how one derives meaning from experience is of central concern. The experience of embodiment that magnifies the critical impor-tance of the body suggests that bodies ‘make themselves felt’. In this light, movement, and indeed physicality, can be recognized as a non-verbal lan-guage and one that may allow meaning to evolve. Whitehouse argues that it is the subjective experience of movement that is the basis of our authenticity, and therefore recognition of our sense of self. Whitehouse believes that awakening the kinaesthetic sense is possible in all kinds of movement, but this only becomes conscious when the inner connection, the subjective experience of movement, is found. In this sense, authentic movement arises from listening to the body; it is the basis of allowing the body to be moved and only through this process can one speak of being



embodied, physically conscious, fully focused and alive. It appears that in order to access sensorial awareness, a degree of creativity needs mobilis-ing. In the first instance, giving language to unknown experience requires intention, patience: attention to the subtleties of the lived body and defer-ence to being open to chaos (Conrad 1993; Halprin 2003; Hartley 2004). The experience of listening to one’s body can be disturbing, for it demands an engagement in the unconstructed.

The more we reclaim body awareness, that is, our capacity to observe and our willingness to feel, the more ways we can communicate. The development of skills to access embodied knowing is a critical resource for reflective practice and inter-professional communication. It can be argued that professionals, who develop an embodied awareness of self, have a fur-ther and useful resource to draw upon when communicating with others. By trawling experience through the filter of embodiment, insights into learning and reflective practice may be revealed. It seemed to me that in order to reconnect to my sense of self and begin my recovery, I needed to ‘walk my talk’. The necessity to listen to my traumatised body had never been more prescient.

Reflections on the accidentThe biographic backdrop of the accident is brought into sharp relief, the twine of my life thread is felt and I can see again how I have ravelled myself. And yet it is as if I can see for the first time. I have woven myself together to create a physical biography that has provided me with a line of continuity. It offers strength and enduring recognition as an embodied woman. This accident has proved to be an opportunity to notice what I have, and indeed have not, integrated into this narrative. If my narrative expands, what are the implications for how I continue to live in and through my body? How has this accident, this new embodied awareness, changed the way I see myself and my professional practice?

For example, in teaching and learning, the tension that I now recog-nize that I hold in my body, how does this impact upon the ways in which I relate to colleagues and student? Is there a relationship, and indeed some insight into how I recognize ‘will and surrender’ in my body and how this is played out when I structure learning opportunities for students? Is there a stridency in my voice that I can now recognize on particular occasions? This awareness gives me more choices; I can choose to let my voice be heard in a variety of ways. With greater awareness come greater choice, and a greater capacity to be.

In answer to the questions that cascade about my accident, I reiterate ‘it wasn’t anyone’s fault, just bad luck’. This resonates, ‘bad luck’. How do I deal with things that don’t go my way? Do I hold steadfast, become more resolute, and look for the ‘silver lining’? Can I continue in the way I intended or do I have to let go of some grand design that I had on my work, relationships, health, and body. How do I work with people who do not get what they want? How do I respond to others who request more from me?

My performing body is not responding as it used to. I do not have the control that I once had, and by will power alone I cannot make this imme-diately better. I cannot control my body; it is experienced as a loss of



physical control, but for me it resonates much more deeply, it is grief. When I felt out of control and so physically and emotionally compromised, how could I negotiate the healthcare system, and, as I returned to employ-ment, how could I work again with colleagues and students?

This lack of confidence offered me a chance to engage afresh with how I responded to vulnerability and weakness. It has offered me the opportu-nity to engage again with how students might perceive the education system. I have been able to engage more with students’ experience of fragility. I have been more willing to listen to students when they express concerns about how they feel anxious and out of control. I have been able to respond when they express how overwhelmed and excluded they feel in a Higher Education culture – a culture that speaks a ‘foreign language’, which follows procedures that are unfamiliar and not understood.

I reflect upon how I engage in learning. I consider how I received the authoritative information that was proffered about my body by the healthcare professionals. It was so alien to me, like the two dimensional drawings that illustrate ‘something’ about the body that I inhabit. I can work with visualizing the constituent elements of my body and how they need to move in three, no, four dimensions. I need to revisit how I convey ‘information’, what media I use to support student learning. I need to con-sider a more embodied presence in my teaching, and offer students access points to their own embodied presence.

I have been a medical case, a ‘subject’ who has been duly assessed, diagnosed, offered treatment and rehabilitation. I agreed to this process. So what does informed consent really mean? How did I voluntarily submit my body, indeed myself, to the trauma of surgery, not once but twice – to have my bones chopped and drilled and artificially bound in an attempt to ‘repair’ the damage? How could I have consented to something that I only understood in an abstract way? This makes me question how I claim knowledge and share information. I reconsider the sources of information that are relied upon in order to be more informed. It is a question that goes to the heart of my personhood, not about the source of knowledge, but about the capacity of human beings. What persons do I need to trust, and what does trust really mean?

It is an ontological insecurity that places me in the midst of our post- structural and postmodern world. And yet this grief, which is an experi-ence that gathers momentum drawing in the losses of a lifetime, is a life process. This loss of ‘my world’ is a transformative opportunity, for it allows for the emergence of a reconstituted self; the purging process that grieving presents can find resolution in a realignment of oneself with a ‘voice’ that reclaims afresh one’s sense of agency.

The curiosity for greater self-awareness has impacted upon my profes-sionalism. This critical incident, a traumatic accident, and the rehabilita-tion and recovery took me away from my routines and expectations in my ordinary and familiar life. The imposition of having to take time off work allowed for a reconfiguration and ongoing resettlement of some aspects of my sense of self. I am left wondering if it is only through critical incidents that one can shed that which is habitual. What I am assured of is that through the process of disturbance one can gain greater clarity about what is important.



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Foucault, M. (1980), ‘Body/Power’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, New York: Pantheon Books.

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Hanna, T. (1979), The Body of Life, New York: Healing Arts Press.

Hartley, L. (2004), Somatic Psychology, London: Whurr Publishers.

Herman, J. L. (1994), Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, London: Pandora.

Heron, J. (1992), Feeling and Personhood, London: Sage.

Koestler, A. (1964), The Act of Creation, New York: Macmillan.

Kolb, D. (1984), Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Mead, G. H. (1934), Mind, Self and Society, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M., (1962), Phenomenology of Perception, New York, Humanities Press.

McHose, C. and Frank, K. (2006), How Life Moves: Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness, California: North Atlantic Books.

Moon, J. (1999), Reflection in Learning and Professional Development: Theory & Practice. Kogan Page, London.

Reason, P. (1988), Human Inquiry in Action, London: Sage.

Robinson, K. (2000), Out Of Our Minds; Learning to be Creative, Oxford: Capstone.

Sandford, L. T. (1991), Strong At The Broken Places, London: Virago.

Sheridan, A. (1980), Michael Foucault: The Will To Truth, London: Tavistock.

Sternberg, R. (1999) (ed.), Handbook of Creativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wendell, S. (1989), ‘Toward A Feminist Theory of Disability’, Hypatia, 4:2, pp. 104–124.

Whitehouse, M. S. ([1958] 1999), ‘The Tao of the Body’, in P. Pallaro (ed.), Authentic Movement, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Suggested citationSmears, E. (2009), ‘Breaking old habits: professional development through an

embodied approach to refl ective practice’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1, pp. 99–110, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.99/1



Contributor detailsDr Elizabeth Smears is a Senior Lecturer in Education within the Centre for Postgraduate and Professional Development at Liverpool John Moores University. She is also an Honorary Lecturer within the School of Health Sciences at the University of Liverpool.

Contact: Liverpool John Moores University, Centre for Postgraduate and Professional Development, Faculty of Education Community and Leisure, IM Marsh Campus, Barkhill Road, Aigburth, Liverpool L17 6BD. E-mail: [email protected]





Keywordssomatic dance processesmovement interviewTufnell

Keeping Your WitsSuna Imre University of Winchester

AbstractThis article sets out to begin a validation of why the application of somatic proc-esses to dance and movement is so important to recognize and nurture in the twenty-first century. It takes as its subject an interview with one of the leading practitioners in the field, Miranda Tufnell. The conversation generates discussion about improvisation and performance, our relationship with each other and our-selves, our connection with the environment, our spiritual selves; and how somatic processes can help us develop and heal as human beings.

Miranda Tufnell is a dancer, Alexander teacher and craniosacral thera-pist. She has taught widely throughout the country, including fourteen years within the NHS for a GP practice. With Chris Crickmay she has co-authored two books on the body and imagination, Body Space Image (1993), and A Widening Field (2004). She has also developed an arts and health project, ‘A Breath Of Fresh Air’, for people living with chronic ill-ness. She is currently Visiting Professor of Dance at Coventry University, and runs an ongoing workshop series entitled ‘Creative Space’.

The discussion below took place on 27 November 2008 at Miranda Tufnell’s home in Oxfordshire. It was going to take the form of an inter-view with pre-set questions but evolved into a conversation that went far beyond academic dialogue. As a result, this conversation is a unique insight into not just Tufnell’s practice, but the ideas, influences, values and fundamental principles behind her life’s work.

What is the value and relevance of this type of work to the twenty-first century? I think fundamentally this work is about developing awareness. We live in a culture that is profoundly out of touch with the sensing body and that has huge implications for how we perceive and manage our lives. For me, this work is about redressing a balance, getting out of our heads and back into direct sensory experience. It is about feeling our way towards a more sustainable relationship with our land, air, water and communities. We need to value our direct sensory experience, as a first step in moving out of passivity and a sense of powerlessness to a way of being where we are using every ounce of our wits; physical, sensory, imaginative, intuitive – to restore balance; and this includes a sense of personal value and meaning.

Most of the time we live at such a pace that we are out of touch with ourselves and our most basic needs, and inevitably this affects the quality

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of every aspect of our lives. Much of the time we do not notice things that are fundamental to our well-being – our breath, how we nourish and care for ourselves and others, and our environment. We end up blind to or out of touch with vital aspects of life; we become what people often term ‘ungrounded’, out of touch, lacking a vital flow of information that comes to us through our body selves.

Movement awakens so much more than our aerobic capacity, it devel-ops all kinds of social and sensory skills that come from a more confident informed and present sense of self; it develops trust, expressiveness, and insight. I quote from Dean Juhan:

What might be the cumulative effect of more individuals being more in touch with their bodies, their lives and with each other…. What would it be like if people were more skilled in quiet boundary negotiations, tolerant deference to the rhythms and style of others, in supportive and consoling touch, and mutual concern …. From the tragic high mortality rate in orphanages we learn how vital physical contact and play is for the maturing of an infant’s nervous system. Without adequate tactile stimu-lation autonomic reflexes are not initiated, without sensation the infant’s nervous system cannot locate and move crucial muscles. Children who are undernourished in movement have a muted capacity for self awareness,

Figure 1: Iris Photo: Paul Beaumont.


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self regulation, personal intimacy, and adaptive responses to the naturally changing conditions of their lives.

(Juhan 2003: 8)

There are many different strands of somatic work – and it has a history going back many years to the great pioneers of Mabel Todd and Isadora Duncan. I think where Chris and I are engaged is the territory of body and imagina-tion, a place where a language of gesture, poetry and visual image emerge from the wide field of our everyday sensory and imaginative experience. Awakening the imagination is a vital activity of our body mind, imagination that engages all our feeling, thinking senses, and that is where I see somatic practice as being of such importance as it creates a meeting ground for body and imagination, and thus it is route towards language and meaning.

Why do you think people in our culture find it difficult to let go and move in an uninhibited, expressive way? We live in a way that is very cut off from our environment. Our culture is very target driven and evidence based, where vast numbers of the popula-tion feel spiritually disenfranchised and disempowered, and that their voice has no importance. Mostly we do not realize we have a body unless it breaks down; and yet feeling in touch with the body is crucial to feeling a sense of ease and self-confidence. Working in the NHS, it seemed my role was simply to bring people back into a common sense awareness of their body and what was happening: to notice breath, posture, chronic tension – all of which might be affecting how they felt – just slowing down, appreci-ating ordinary things and taking time to reconnect with needs – for fun, for friendship, time to recover a sense of enjoyment in life.

This issue of Resurgence (Sept/Oct 2008) is very inspiring because it’s about the way tribal, aboriginal people see the world, and it’s a completely different way of seeing and being in relationship to our own; I quote from Hugh Brody, ‘development often creates the conditions of under develop-ment while progress on the large scale is so often accomplished by losses, wars and destruction’ and ‘no society with the kinds of disparity between people that we have created, could be anything other than tense, discon-certed and doomed to a minor breakdown’ (Brody 2008: 21–25). I think that is very much where we are.

It seems like such a huge thing to turn around and I wonder how we can do that? What steps can be taken? How can it be communicated to ordinary people who don’t have it in their worlds at all?I think it is there for all of us, just under the skin of our everyday function-ing and awareness – and that it is a question of reawakening; it maybe that this credit crunch is a blessing that slows us from the rush of wealth back into the ordinary daily pleasure of being alive. There have been experiments carried out on people with hypertension and blood pressure problems, and it’s been proven that by simply holding someone’s hand, you can lower blood pressure; so we need to get back to ordinary human contact. And we dancers can see ourselves as ambassadors for the body and a way of being in the world.


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An elderly woman came to me for chronic lower back pain – in the course of our talking I asked, ‘what are the things you really love?’ As we worked she suddenly said, ‘I love the squirrel coming to my bird feeder, and the way it hangs upside down’.

I found myself wondering, ‘Can you imagine yourself with a squirrel’s tail?’ Together we laughed, ‘can you imagine going about doing the clean-ing or sitting down with such a tail?’ she said ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’ The follow-ing week she reported being much more able to manage, and she had far less tension and pain – not just in her back, throughout her whole body.

That’s lovelyYes, it’s wonderful. I am always fascinated by how swiftly and miracu-lously change can come. But I don’t want to imply that it is easy, more that our thinking has a profound effect on our body and an image can shift how we feel.

You’ve spoken briefly about contemporary dance, and I am really interested in how this type of work can be communicated through performance? How you can work with somatic practices in performance, and I suppose I wanted to ask you ...How do you not work with somatic practice in performance? If we are not present to the experience of the body – the body either has a feel of a pup-pet or the curious feeling of the person moving being strangely absent, a ghost.

I would suggest that lots of people don’t....But then one sees dancers in a company such as ‘Sankai Juku’, and you know that their moving is arising deeply from the feeling sense of the body. The great classical dancers – Fonteyn, Nijinsky or Baryshnikov – have a strict technical training but their feeling sense of the body is there; and I think that is all somatic practice is, it is that feeling sense of the body. For many, a classical training erases the personal, moulds the indi-vidual to a style, and it is that unique individual personal body that we are seeking to reclaim and make visible.

Is your performance work always improvised?It is always improvised. A structure evolves through improvisation, what I term a landscape of sound, movement, imagery, which is difficult to define – a landscape that evolves very, very slowly, often in collaboration with another. I spend up to a year sourcing, improvising, and listening to see what the body is thinking, what is arising through the body: connect-ing to dreams, to world events, being very aware of what I am noticing, what, as it were, is noticing me. Gradually a piece appears that reforms itself every night of performance yet is somehow the same territory. I’ve been very lucky in my collaborations; they are long, ongoing ‘conversa-tions’ – with Martha Grogan, with Dennis Greenwood, with Eva Karczag and Chris Crickmay. This last twenty years I have worked with a wonder-ful musician called Sylvia Hallett. I saw her perform with IOU – she was hanging dripping clothes on a washing line, and the drips fell on lids and pieces of glass and created this exquisite percussion. She arrived in Cumbria



late one evening and we went into the studio and just began improvising, a strange magical kind of listening that happens in a creative space together. Over a year in and out of meetings we made our first piece, Land Light. I made a series of slides from butterfly wings, seeds, grasses and dried leaves which formed a lightscape and Sylvia gathered sound from the environment, sounds of bird calls, water, wind – and gradually a world emerged between us three dancers and Sylvia’s sound.

It’s trusting in that process isn’t it? Yes it is, and it’s about being in that very open wide field of attention where things come into view and take form. So I go into moving to begin to perceive. It’s a way of bringing to the surface what inhabits my field, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with people who are open in that way. Everybody I work with has that quality of attention; it’s an improvis-ers mind and it’s an enormously important aspect of mind.

Do you ever get frustrated that this type of work doesn’t get enough visibility?Yes I do. This work is not fashionable, it doesn’t fit easily with the pace and demands of our culture; it is about another way of being, it is inti-mate, slow, gentle, surprising, and asks the audience to enter in with it. It makes visible an aspect of being that is so real, so human, so needed. I feel sadness that so much beautiful, pioneering work of these past years has gone unnoticed and had relatively few showings. I would have loved our own work to have spread more widely.

When did you first realize that working from the inside out was the way you wanted to move forward?This goes back a long way. When I was very young I used to go to dance classes, and I loved it, I felt deliciously free for that hour. Then one day, on my way to dance class, my mother told me that the young woman who used to look after me wasn’t coming back. In that moment I felt I died – and I couldn’t face dancing for many years. Then my grandmother took me to see the Ballet Rambert do ‘Blind Sight’. A beautiful piece in which everybody was blind, stumbling on stage and there was this feeling sense in their bodies, of being very trapped; and then one of them gained sight and began to move so exquisitely – I was very, very moved.

Later I was at university studying English, and I used to meet my sister for lunch at The Place; and I thought how physically at ease the dancers looked, and that was something I wanted to find for myself. So I audi-tioned and started training as a dancer. I hadn’t a clue what my body was doing. It was a real training in attention, because my mind was racing around, and my body was always this fumbling awkward stranger, some-how locked away. My mind was caught up in words and had so little rela-tion to feeling or sensation; so it was absolutely fascinating learning to notice my body. I was there for eighteen months, but I soon became disin-terested. Then I saw Eva Karczag at the Royal College of Music. She was simply rolling and it was so beautiful, her body seemed transparent, it was as if I could see and feel with the movement of her body, touch the ground with her, see the movement of her breath, and that moved me so deeply – a


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turning point in my life. So I began another kind of training – Tai Chi, Alexander Technique, this was 1973; and I went with Eva to New York, and went to performances and classes. I came back to study Alexander technique with Bill Williams, and I worked with him for ten years. I think of Bill as being the person who taught me to dance, because he taught me to really connect body and mind. I began making performance as a way of training myself to express what it was that interested me. At that point I was making dances that involved walking, all aspects of walking.

What kept you going? Did you ever have doubts about what you were doing?I have always had doubts! Doubts alongside huge passion! Doubts about my own capacity to articulate, and of finding ways to make this precious, invisible, yet vital way of being in the world, accessible and relevant to our daily lives. This is what impelled me away from London to work for many years in Cumbria, both as an artist and body therapist within the NHS, and in other creative work with people living with chronic health prob-lems. All our performances had their first showings in the local village hall so that we could test accessibility and I was actually very heartened by people’s responses, which were often more open than in London.

I always struggled, it felt like such a private vision, and actually there was a very important moment when Martha [Grogan] and I did an open

Figure 2: Photo: Paul Beaumont.



gallery performance at Chapter Arts. We were performing our walking dances, and some kids came in, they loved it and wanted to join in. The kids invented all kinds of strategies within our walking dances; it made me realize that our work did connect with the every day, and it wasn’t just a personal investigation. With my work in the health service, and seeing the dances that have given somebody a voice, a gesture that has released something in their psyche, that has affirmed life in them; then I know that this work is vitally important. Every time I work with someone, I feel this need for movement, this need to sense through the body, then I know this is fundamental to how we are alive, and that as dancers, we are kind of ambassadors for this feeling sense of the body; and that it is actually our area of common sense, it’s not esoteric, it’s actually ordinary; it’s not pro-saic, it’s magical, playful, compassionate, and ordinary!

How does your work affect the rest of your life?I think I do not make a distinction between work and life! Work is ongo-ing, a journey in every moment of perception and language – an ongoing daily exploring of the body and HOW we are living. I’m always hunting, searching, exploring.

I remember the time in my life when I knew, after many performances and much teaching, that the next step in my own learning was to have children, and following that another choice, or rather, need – to live on the land, and to know a place through the seasons, weather and years. Watching trees I have planted grow from a foot high to a wood alive with insects, birds, squirrels, and deer. I learn daily from nature, from being outside – it is a lens, a way of investigating the ‘nature’ of body. I always begin my days outside in the early morning, sitting, meditating, watching and moving. Noticing what comes to my attention, always what I notice – changes of light, of weather, of birds, air – and it loosens and deepens my seeing and understanding.

Perhaps I would reframe the question to how does life affect my work, and the degree to which movement, creative work, gets squeezed out! Sometimes there is so much pressure to write, a need for verbal advocacy, that I am on the computer for hours on end and not giving myself body time, which I know narrows my thinking. I have to remember daily to plan in body time, time to breathe, stretch out in the senses. Body intelligence is something that has to be nurtured regularly – in the way that we wash our faces each morning, drink water, eat nourishing food. I suddenly realize I am tense, tired, and have somehow internally narrowed my perceptual, imaginative world, and have lost that wider mind that helps me feel con-nected to myself and what is around me. I am stiff from inside out!

In terms of your family, and the relationships you have with people, I guess it’s had a huge impact?I wonder what my sons would say to that! My sons, and family, have had a huge impact on my work, and are central to my life and how I work – having children and the moment by moment attention to their needs and fluctuations of being, taught me so much about the human need for touch and holding, for play and communication: a breaking and reforming, an ongoing process of letting go, of plans or ideas in favour of what is arising


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NOW. You could say life is an improvisational process – a constantly shift-ing field of people, events, energies; and what we have to do is to keep curiously and sensuously in touch with the arriving moment, always challenging us with differences, and we have to be like surfers following the rise of the next wave.

I love the nature of this work, the quality of playfulness, the wit and intimacy it generates. It has brought me rich and wonderful friendships, comrades in the journey – a way of moving out of conventional conversa-tions into a whole range of creative enquiries and sharings. I have many close, passionate friendships and they have all grown out of work and exploring together.

Is there a spiritual element to your work?It’s a difficult word, ‘spiritual’, and I sometimes feel it is a separating word. I think somatic practice trains you in awareness of being part of a whole; con-nection is fundamental to being, and in that wider mind you are no longer yourself, self is imbued with something bigger than itself. In performance I do not make personal choices, I feel that I’m acted on, and my work is to make myself available to this other kind of attention, and this finer quality of energy. In one sense I would say that everything about my life has a spiritual aspect, and the spiritual is also in the mundane; it is in the moment by moment, making a cup of coffee, my relationship with the ground when I’m digging in my bulbs. If I can make myself available to that finer quality of energy that comes in when I’m in that wider mind, I make decisions that are allowing of others around me, rather than excluding or cutting them off. So that quality of being in tune is fundamental to how I try to go about living my life. I was brought up in convents and there were aspects of that which were ghastly and aspects that were wonderful because they assumed a mys-tery. So that is very much the heart of my enquiry actually, we know so much about the human body, but there is so much we know nothing about, we just listen for it, and we ask to feel more informed by paying attention.

What inspires you today and informs your work? Every time I really meet someone I feel inspired, every time I see someone being just themselves, I find the beauty of that outstanding. I’m inspired nearly all the time when the light comes through my window, I love that. I read, Deane Juhan inspires me very much; this theme in ‘Resurgence’ (September/October 2008) around indigenous intelligence inspires me. There is something about that quality of mind; it is less arrogant, it is much more respectful of the environment; and it is desperately needed in these times as a sort of quiet beauty, and groundedness. Poetry inspires me a lot, the work of David Abram – The Spell of the Sensuous is an abso-lutely brilliant book (Abram 2007).

How have you known that the path you have taken, along the way, has been the right one? How did you make those choices?I think it is exactly like improvisation – the unforeseen. You make these decisions and something in you knows: something in you is tuning in to what the next step is. I find one of the most interesting things in life is how



you get led from one thing to another, and I have never known what I have wanted to do. I still sometimes think I don’t know what I want to do; but I’m fascinated with what I’m doing. For instance, the teachers that I have found along the way, Franklin Sills who teaches Cranial, Don Burton who trained me as an Alexander teacher, Bill Williams, my first teacher; even the dancers I have worked with. Something inside one knows what is right.

One of my interests in embryology is that there is some forming process in the development of the embryo. It is so vast, and it is so assured, where one part differentiates and forms in one way, and another differentiates and forms in another, until you have this constellation of a human being. It’s so beautiful, precise and exquisite, and I think that same inherent knowing is in us moment by moment if we can pay attention to it. That is the other important thing about somatic practice, it is life training in per-ceptual skills – a perceptual and sensuous openness both to what one’s inner needs are and to what is out there, in the environment. I see people who don’t do this work are often blinkered at some level, I see them run-ning in verbal circles not having some inner orientation process that might help them connect more effectively with what life is sending them. We call it somatic process but actually it’s a human process we have educated out of ourselves. That’s why indigenous people know so much about plants, they navigate the stars, they are aware of what is going on around them, and it’s a kind of knowing that the western world has erased. That is some-thing we need to cultivate again, what is the feel of the ground? What is the feel of my breath? What do I notice around me, what is the feel of that? Most of the time we live so fast we don’t notice any of those things.

What are the strategies that can turn that lens? It’s not an esoteric journey, you can do it very, very quickly, and you sud-denly can surprise someone into another kind of mind. Sometimes it can be as simple as smile, or something in one’s presence. For instance, Mandela and the way he calls people into a very ordinary humanity; or the quality of Obama’s presence, he’s very direct, it is an embodied presence.

There is so much we have lost, so much we have suppressed and silenced and shut away. Loneliness and alienation are the two greatest diseases in our culture I think. Those are the diseases of lack of connec-tion, lack of human contact and interchange. So I suppose I see somatic practice as utterly connected to that. How do we connect?

Works citedAbram, D. (1997), The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More – Than –

Human World, London, UK: Vintage Books.

Brody, H. (2008), ‘Stations of Life’, Resurgence, 205 (September/October), pp. 20–25.

Juhan, D. (2003), Touched by the Goddess: The Physical, Psychological and Spiritual Powers of Bodywork, U.S: Barrytown Ltd.

Tufnell, M. and Crickmay, C. (1993), Body Space Image, London, UK: Dance Books.

Tufnell, M. and Crickmay, C. (2004), A Widening Field: Journeys in Body and Imagination, London, UK: Dance Books.


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Suggested citationImre, S. (2009), ‘Keeping Your Wits’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1,

pp. 111–120, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.111/1

Contributor detailsSuna Imre is a dance artist and senior lecturer in dance at the University of Winchester. She specialises in improvisation and has collaborated with a diverse range of artists to create cross-disciplinary installations and performances through-out the UK. Her key interests include developing movement vocabulary that is sourced from the application of somatic processes; and investigating closely the interface between the moving body within specific environments. Future work includes the creation of an improvised duet that utilizes aspects of authentic move-ment and contact improvisation as its foundation, to be performed in the UK from April 2009, and a collection of interviews with practitioners and educators in the field of somatic dance practice.





Keywords Anna Halprin Sea Ranchenvironment kinaesthetic self-portrait dancesembodiment

Anna Halprin and the Sea Ranch Collective, an embodied engagement with placeHelen Poynor Coventry University

AbstractThis paper examines Anna Halprin’s life-long engagement with the environ-ments that have supported and inspired her dance practice from the 1950s to the present. It traces the evolution of Halprin’s practice in locations that include the dance deck in the redwoods at her home in Marin County, her work with the ‘San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop’ in the city and with the ‘Sea Ranch Collective’ on the Californian Coast. Drawing on extensive personal interviews with Halprin and members of the Sea Ranch Collective, and the experience of participating in the Sea Ranch Retreat in 2005, I examine in detail Halprin’s current approach to creat-ing dances in the environment. The paper elucidates Halprin’s understanding of the relationship between the ‘natural’ world, human beings and dance-making. It analyses the processes used to heighten sensory awareness and engender a kinaes-thetic engagement with nature to create embodied dances which are of personal significance to the dancer, and which demonstrate an awareness of the wider envi-ronment and an aesthetic sensibility. This includes Halprin’s use of self-portrait visualizations and performances in the environment.

At the core of Anna Halprin’s practice over the last fifty years is the deeply interwoven relationship between her life and her work, and between her life’s work and the places that have been the stimulus, birthing ground and container for it. These locations provide an ongoing connection between the various strands of her practice, a continuity spanning half a century, which is exceptional in contemporary globalized society. The sen-sory and kinaesthetic experience of the natural environment has perme-ated Halprin’s practice throughout her life. Her experiential approach to dance integrates kinaesthetic exploration grounded in knowledge about the structure of the body, a sense of personal meaning and an awareness of the wider environment. Halprin’s emphasis on sensory and kinaesthetic awareness, and her concern with the embodied experience of the dancer, indicates a clear relationship between her work and somatic practice.

After a brief introduction to some of the principles underpinning Halprin’s practice and an overview of the environments that have been central to it, this paper will focus on her work with nature in the context of her ongoing research with the Sea Ranch Collective. The collective ‘an eclectic, multinational group of innovative performers and installation artists’ (Halprin and Sea Ranch Collective 2003), led by Halprin, gather

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annually for an autumn retreat at Sea Ranch on the coast approximately a hundred miles north of San Francisco to ‘explore, exchange and develop environment based dance’ (Halprin and Sea Ranch Collective 2003). The environment at Sea Ranch has been a consistent inspiration for Halprin, alongside the environs of her home in Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

Halprin’s radical approach to dance flew in the face of the burgeoning of contemporary dance in the 1950s, and was profoundly influenced by working on the outdoor dance deck at her home. This dance deck, created in the 1957, is an irregularly shaped platform which ‘floats in a ravine surrounded by redwood and madrone trees on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais’ (Halprin 1988: 7). Working with Halprin on the dance deck, and in the surrounding environment, was a formative experience for a number of influential postmodern dancers and performance makers. These included members of the ‘Judson Dance Theater’ in New York: Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Meredith Monk – and genera-tions of students from both the USA and overseas who, through their work in education, community, therapy and performance, have passed Halprin’s legacy on to a wider public.

The deck also hosted years of innovative teaching of the children in the Marin Co-operatives (founded in 1947) and was the site of the creative explorations and collaborations which seeded Halprin’s early performances. From the late 1970s, it served as the training ground for students at the Tamalpa Institute, founded by Halprin with her daughter Daria Khalighi Halprin in 1978 to develop the training aspect of her work. Visited by diverse artists and dancers including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham and Min Tanaka, the deck has also served as a site for performance and participatory events. Its location, among the redwoods on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, has sustained and inspired Halprin’s artistic, therapeutic and educational practice as a dance maker, performer, director and teacher from the 1950s until the present.

Halprin’s approach to dance was profoundly affected by her formative training with Margaret H’Doubler, who pioneered the first dance degree programme in the world at the University of Wisconsin in 1926. H’Doubler herself had been influenced by the educational philosophy of John Dewey, with whom she studied. From this legacy, Halprin evolved a holistic and experiential approach to dance that emphasizes the integration of body, mind and feelings, and the inter-relationship between dance and the life experiences of the dancer, while being grounded in a thorough knowledge of anatomy. For Halprin, movement is both a means of understanding and a language with which to express the dancers’ experience of themselves in the world. Halprin’s philosophy incorporates a two-fold spiral that spirals inwards to deepened life experience and outwards to an expanded artistic expression. The two spirals nurture one another and are inseparable – neither is seen as inherently more valuable than the other. This principle is at the core of Halprin’s Life/Art process, which is the cornerstone of her approach.

In addition to the formative influence of the environment in Marin County, Halprin’s work with the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, which grew out of her early collaborative explorations and operated from the


123Anna Halprin and the Sea Ranch Collective, an embodied engagement with place

1. The term ‘natural’ in relation to environ-ments is being used for convenience to indicate environ-ments where natural elements such as trees, ocean, rocks predominate, while recognizing that few environments in the contemporary world are unaffected either directly or indirectly by human intervention.

mid-1950s until the late 1970s, reflected a lively and subversive engage-ment with its urban surroundings. The group claimed the street and the city as a site for performance, leading to a number of brushes with the authorities. During the 1970s, Anna, in collaboration with her husband Lawrence, scored several events based on experiential explorations of San Francisco’s cityscape designed to heighten the participants’ sensory and kinaesthetic awareness. These culminated in City Dance in 1976–77, an artistic intervention into the life of the city in the wake of the infamous murder of the Mayor, intended to regenerate a sense of community and a revitalized connection to the urban environment. In Marin, Halprin’s work also played a significant role in the relationship between the local com-munity and its environment. In the early 1980s, a series of performances and public rituals on Mount Tamalpais, seen by Halprin as ‘the spiritual center of our area’ (Halprin 1995: 8), reclaimed the mountain for the community after a number of brutal murders had closed its trails.

Halprin’s embracing of both ‘natural’ and urban environments as sites for artistic endeavour, together with her rejection of the approach to movement and the body enshrined in contemporary dance, were accom-panied by an iconoclastic approach to the use of theatrical environ-ments.1

Alongside her work in Marin and San Francisco, Sea Ranch has pro-vided a place of retreat and artistic practice for the Halprins since the early 1960s. The Sea Ranch settlement was conceived through a detailed process of environmental planning to blend with an area of exceptional natural beauty minimizing the impact on the natural environment. Lawrence, one of the original architects of the project, applied the princi-ples of the RSVP cycles for collective creativity to the design. The Halprins have used this collaborative process in a diverse range of creative endeav-ours, including environmental planning, dance theatre performances and participatory community dance events. For over forty years, the environ-ment at Sea Ranch has supported the evolution of Halprin’s practice. In the 1960s, the Halprins ran experimental summer workshops that united architects and dancers in a process of collective creativity. Anna facili-tated intensive residentials at Sea Ranch with the multi-racial group formed after the ground-breaking Ceremony of Us (1968–9), a perform-ance project which brought together young white people from San Francisco with black youngsters from the Watts area of Los Angeles, shortly after the race riots there in 1967. In the 1980s and 1990s, Halprin regularly took groups of students from the Tamalpa Institute to work at Sea Ranch. The beaches, meadows and redwood forests of Sea Ranch have also been used as a ‘healing tool’ (Halprin 2005b interview) in Halprin’s work with people suffering from life-threatening illnesses, including HIV and AIDS.

In many respects, the environments at Sea Ranch and at Halprin’s home in Marin have functioned as Halprin’s studio. They are not alterna-tive sites to which Halprin periodically transfers her practice but are central to the development of it. Halprin’s approach to dance actively incorporated ‘natural’, city and theatrical environments as a fundamental component of her practice, well before the term ‘site-specific performance’ was in common usage.


124 Helen Poynor

I will now examine in more detail the inter-relationship between Halprin’s approach to movement, her working processes and her use of the environment in the context of her work with the Sea Ranch Collective, drawing specifically on the collective’s gathering at Sea Ranch in 2005. This collective, originally seeded by members of the Tamalpa Graduate Association (Harrison 2005 interview), mirrors earlier informal artistic collectives that have clustered around Halprin’s innovative practices and charismatic personality, including during the period of experimentation in the 1950s in which her distinctive approach began to emerge. The collec-tive nature of the group, which is planned and managed co-operatively, and the communal living situation echoes Halprin’s work with the San Francisco Dancers’ workshop where the artistic practice was also seen as a practice in community, and the basic principles which informed the artistic processes underpinned the administration of the organisation (San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop 1971: 3).

Although the majority of the group have at some stage studied and/or performed with Halprin, many of the performers and artists involved are well established in their own artistic careers. An abiding characteristic of Halprin’s approach is that she both attracts and invites participants from a wide variety of artistic backgrounds, in the visual arts, installation, film and writing, as well as performance and dance. The freshness of her vision is reflected in her openness to artists of any age who stimulate her creative curiosity. There is a strong inter-generational flavour to the group, which includes practitioners in their sixties who performed with the Dancers’ Workshop in the 1960s, those in their forties and fifties who trained with Halprin in the 1980s, and others in their twenties and thirties who are establishing themselves in their artistic careers. There is a significant minority in the group who have studied ‘Body Weather’, Min Tanaka’s approach to Butoh Dance, which also encompasses work in the environ-ment.

Halprin’s movement practice in nature starts from a heightening and refining of sensory awareness, often by working in a blindfold, and pro-ceeds through an ‘experiential cycle’ consisting of three phases: Contact, Explore and Respond. During the first session in the environment at Sea Ranch in 2005, the participants worked blindfolded on the beach between the ocean and the cliffs for a sustained period of time. This resulted not only in a sharpening of all the other senses through touch, sound and smell, emphasising a kinaesthetic rather than visual awareness of the site, but offered a fresh experience to many of the collective who were familiar with the environment. The element of risk highlighted the importance of sensory awareness. In addition to being spatially disorientating, the loss of sight intensified other aspects of the experience, both heightening emo-tions and liberating the imagination. Participants were instructed to work with whatever part of the site confronted them on removing their blind-folds. This use of chance, rather than conscious choice, confronted per-sonal affinities and preconceptions concerning the sites and elements that the participants may otherwise have selected, challenging both movement habits and the ability to work outside one’s comfort zone.

In the initial stages of working with nature, Halprin frequently invites participants to focus on one element within a site using the process Contact,



Explore and Respond, to develop an in depth working relationship to that element before moving on to other contrasting elements. Contact involves ‘becoming familiar with the materiality of the element through the physi-cality of the body and the senses’ (Worth and Poynor 2004: 89). There is a strong emphasis on receptivity in this process, a sense of seeking a phys-ical connection with the element concerned. Explore, the second phase of the process, is more interactive, involving an exploration of all the physi-cal possibilities of working with the element. This exploration is essentially kinaesthetic; movement activities and resources are generated by and explored through action. The third phase, Respond, develops the material discovered and introduces another dimension as feelings and personal associations are evoked, and the physical and sensory explorations become infused with meaning. For Halprin, embodiment is the culmination of all three phases of the process (Halprin 2001 interview). Permeating all of Halprin’s environmental work is a clear sense of reciprocity and inter- relationship with the natural world. She is adamant that it is not a question of imposing one’s own agenda and aesthetic on the environment but of being open to what may emerge through the processes described above. This requires an element of humility and receptivity that can be equally challenging to students of dance and theatre and established performers.

You don’t enter nature with a preconceived idea … you don’t try to control what’s going to happen … you want to come in empty and leave full, but not come in full and … leave empty because you haven’t learned anything, you’ve already decided what that tree’s going to mean to you or what you are going to do with it … One of the values for me of working with the natu-ral environment is that it can tap into buried mythology … buried feelings, buried associations which you don’t know are there but which are very deeply embedded in your physical being.

(Halprin 2001 interview)

Halprin is claiming that a responsive and physically engaged encounter with the natural world leads not only to a deeper sense of relationship to the environment but also to a clearer understanding of oneself. Central to Halprin’s dance practice is the integration of three levels of awareness: physical, emotional and mental (which includes imagery, associations, reflection and integration into daily life). In the third phase of the process described above Respond, all three levels of awareness are activated and ultimately integrated. Since Halprin states that embodiment is the culmi-nation of this process, it follows that for her embodiment includes not only physical awareness but also feelings and personal meaning. For Halprin then, an embodied encounter with the environment is also an encounter with oneself. A powerful description of the healing potential of this approach can be found in ‘Earth Dances’ (Halprin 1995: 212–225) in which Halprin’s account of a month long workshop at Sea Ranch is inter-woven with a participant’s experience of coming to terms with the death of his partner through a process of kinaesthetic, emotional and imagina-tive engagement with the elements in the environment.

Nevertheless in 2005, Halprin continually urged the Sea Ranch danc-ers not to impose their psychological baggage on the environment but to


126 Helen Poynor

start from what she calls ‘pure awareness’: a practice of being present in the moment that underpins both sensory awareness and kinaesthetic exploration. This allows one to approach the environment in a way which is open to new experiences and understandings. Halprin interweaves envi-ronmental work at Sea Ranch with a process of creating self-portrait visu-alisations and performances. These self-portrait dances have been an important manifestation of the Life/Art process and a significant compo-nent of the Tamalpa trainings for over twenty years. Halprin states that we experience movement differently when working in the enclosed space of a studio or in the natural environment and uses the simple gesture of extending the arm towards the ceiling or the sky as an example (Halprin 2005a Sea Ranch Retreat). By extension, the process of creating a self-portrait dance in the environment is significantly different from the same process in the studio and may enhance its transformative potential. Halprin believes that by creating the self-portrait visualisations and per-formances in relationship to the environment the participants are sup-ported in an expanded state of awareness, which creates a balance between their personal process and their surroundings, and allows them to per-ceive themselves in relationship to their context rather than in isolation from it. This wider perspective enables the participant to be aware of the art process rather than focusing solely on their subjective experience (Halprin 2005b interview).

For Halprin, creating dances in the environment entails an acknowl-edgement that ‘the environment (is) dancing too’: recognition that ‘you can’t do a dance any better than a flock of birds flying overhead’ (Halprin 2005b interview). This requires a conscious awareness of the degree to which the environment or the dancer is dominant. When dancing in the environment, the dancer’s body becomes part of a larger whole and as such is not necessarily the centre of attention. To illus-trate this point, she refers to a piece by one of the collective in which the dancer stood motionless and naked in a glade of redwood trees with his arms raised to the sky at some distance from the witnesses and with his back to them. For Halprin, rather than drawing attention to the dancer the quality of his embodied presence allowed the witnesses to receive him as part of the larger environment and to perceive the trees in more detail as a result. This reflects Halprin’s deeply felt conviction about the importance of recognizing human beings as part of a larger gestalt rather than as the centre of our world. The sense of interconnec-tion between human beings and their environment, and between individuals and the group/community, is at the core of the work at Sea Ranch and is reflected in both the collaborative principles underlying the work and the communal living situation.

Although Halprin eschews the label ‘site-specific performance’, post-dat-ing as it does her artistic practice in both urban and ‘natural’ environments, she does use the term ‘site’ in her environmental practice. Whatever the scale Halprin understands a site as ‘a complex combination of relationships’ encompassing ‘a complexity of elements’ (Halprin 2005b interview). Once again the emphasis is on the inter-relationships within the site and the place of human beings in relationship to them. Halprin uses the analogy of a spot-light and a flood-light to distinguish between an ‘element’ and a ‘site’.



At the beginning of the Sea Ranch retreat, members of the collective were asked to select a site for an initial one-minute self-portrait dance. The motivations for selecting particular sites, and the inter-relationships between the sites chosen and the self-portrait drawings, indicate a spec-trum of intentions, some of which were conscious and others more intuitive – the significance of the latter potentially being clarified during or after the performances. Some sites symbolically reflected the theme of the portrait or the movement vocabulary used in the dance, for example hang-ing branches mirrored a theme of devastation and were echoed by arms swinging loosely from the elbows. Some sites provided the physical resources needed to support a particular movement quality related to the theme of the portrait; for example in my self-portrait, dancing in a tree with my movements constricted by closely growing branches created a sense of emergency. Other sites offered a combination of physical and the-matic resources such as an avenue of trees, representing a clear pathway that the performer progressed along as other members of the collective attempted to divert her focus. Some were more generic choices, for example an open grassy area which gave a sense of scale or perspective. In a few cases, the chosen site seemed more like a holding environment within which a certain event could take place. When the environment was already a distinctive feature of the self-portrait drawings, the site chosen reflected the visualisation. In some cases, a specific element in the drawing was echoed by a detail in the environment, for example the split branch of a small tree. Unexpected challenges or ‘gifts’ offered by the environment tended to be integrated into the pieces, whether brambles snatching at clothing or the delight of a passing butterfly. For Halprin, the fact that nature is in a state of constant flux requires the performer to be able to respond instantaneously to changing conditions rather than attempting to control them (Halprin 2001 interview). In this sense, the site is an active partner in the piece, and the inter-relationship between everything that is happening there – including environmental sound and movement – is part of the totality of the performance. As a result the process of witness-ing, as well as performing, is radically different from watching a performance in a theatre, with the viewer being invited to widen their perspective to incorporate the whole environment rather than their focus being directed onto the body/bodies of the performer/s in a clearly defined space. At the same time, the witness also has a sensory and kinaesthetic experience of the environment.

For Halprin there has been a recurring question about the inter-relation between her work in nature and aesthetic principles. In recent years, some of the Sea Ranch gatherings have focused on this theme. From the early explorations on the dance deck in Marin, Halprin became aware of a ‘form of continuity’ or ‘organisation’ within the apparently random events or sounds that occurred and the ways in which ‘nature’ weaves these together in unpredictable ways (Halprin 2001 interview). This informed her early kinaesthetic explorations, in which she isolated and combined a variety of anatomically based movements in unpredictable ways, and the layered structure of her early performance works. In ‘Earth Dances’, written in 1994, Halprin refers to the three beliefs that attract her as a dance-artist to the natural world, namely: ‘the human body is a microcosm


128 Helen Poynor

of the earth; … the processes of nature are … guidelines to my aesthetics and … nature is a healer (Halprin 1995: 214). Natural forms and processes consciously inform both the form and content of Halprin’s work, ‘The inter-acting forces in nature generate artistic forms … are wonderful models for dances … perfect compositions’ (Halprin 1995: 216), but it is the processes that Halprin identifies with most strongly in her work. Rather than attempt-ing to represent the ‘outward forms’ she seeks ‘to understand the natural world as a reflection of my human experience’ (Halprin 1995: 216). It is the ‘interface between our human ways and the ways of nature’ (Halprin 1995: 216) that interests her. This relates both to the need for an aware-ness of the balance between the dancer and the environment as discussed earlier and to the layers of personal meaning which infuse the perform-ances as a result of her working processes. Halprin suggests that because of the way in which human beings and nature reflect each other that ‘if you are working from a certain level of consciousness … your aesthetic will reflect the aesthetic of nature’ (Halprin 2005a Sea Ranch Retreat). Although this claim may be hard to substantiate, it implies that an embodied engagement with the environment has the potential to engender performances that are intricately interwoven in the environmental matrix in which they have been conceived.

The environments that Halprin has worked with in Marin and at Sea Ranch have become imbued with decades of creative work and personal and collective explorations. Halprin says that her familiarity with these locations, to which she returns repeatedly, and the knowledge of their distinguishing characteristics allows her to work at a greater depth and with more awareness of detail than would be possible in sites with which she was unfamiliar. At the same time, she asserts that familiar sites are different on each occasion because of subtle changes, for example in light or temperature or even where she finds herself within the site (Halprin 2005b interview). This sentiment is echoed by members of the Sea Ranch collective. Melinda Harrison, who has worked with Halprin since the 1950s and has attended the Sea Ranch gatherings for many years, speaks of finding new sites within the broader locations at Sea Ranch that she has never noticed before (Harrison 2005 interview). This is perhaps due not only to the naturally occurring changes within the sites from one year to the next, but also because of the detailed level of attention that is inher-ent in the work.

At the same time various sites, both at Sea Ranch and in Marin, clearly carry personal and collective memories for members of the group. For Halprin some of the sites have become ‘ritualised’ in the collective experience as a result of the work that has taken place there. She cites an area frequently referred to as ‘Jeff’s site’ which holds ‘a very deep memory’ of a ritual entitled Walking with the Dead created there by Jeff Rehg, one of the collective, when he was in the advanced stages of AIDS (Halprin 2005b interview). This ritual was performed again at Rehg’s request after his death in 2001 and has been repeated at Sea Ranch and Marin as a way of honouring all the deaths in the community from AIDS.

Individually, members of the collective speak of a sense of intimacy and relationship with sites in which they have worked (Harrison 2005



interview). Tiara Restar writes of the continuing significance of her rela-tionship with a particular tree on the dance deck in Marin:

On Anna’s dance deck, there is an overhanging oak tree that I once had a profound experience with. I often go back to this tree and work in its shadows or branches. It is like an anchor for me. In its presence I feel my own self in deep ways and at the same time connect to the world around me. Actually I feel as part of the tree and natural world, part of the greater scheme of things.

(Restar 2006 email)

This statement reflects Halprin’s belief that dancing in nature reaffirms a sense of kinship with it, at the same time as allowing the dancer to con-nect more deeply with themselves. Among the generations of dancers who have worked with Halprin in these landscapes there will be an overlap-ping web of connection to and memory of different sites, as participants carry strong memories of witnessing one another’s work as well as their own. When asked if this would affect her choice of sites in which to work, Restar replies:

Having memories of other people’s work forms a layer that I find interesting, but it does not dominate the site. The trees, plants, rocks … are so strong. This is their home. The people who pass by – dancers, hikers … are just one small part like leaves that fall and then decompose.

(Restar 2006 email)

Here the transience of the work is acknowledged, while this reflects the ephemerality of dance as an art form, it is a characteristic that Halprin underlines by her request that any structures that have been created on site are dismantled once the work has been completed. Any desire to leave one’s imprint on the environment is challenged by this philoso-phy, which once again invites humility on the part of the artist. It is also consistent with Halprin’s preference not to introduce extraneous sound or materials into a site which may distract from what is already there. At the same time, Halprin indicates that there are no absolute rules and that on occasion deliberately introducing an element of incon-gruity into the site can achieve a powerful theatrical effect (Halprin 2001 interview).

While it is not Halprin’s experience that specific themes are evoked in particular environments, she acknowledges that different elements do elicit certain kinaesthetic responses. However, she is quick to point out that the same element can manifest contrasting qualities and therefore elicit contrasting movement responses: wind for example can be fierce and uncomfortable or gentle and caressing (Halprin 2001 interview). Halprin does feel that certain sites might suggest ‘a common language’ (Halprin 2001 interview) and may be consciously or intuitively selected because of particular qualities. She refers to a site by a stream full of light and fresh growth, selected by one participant for a personal ritual that revealed his vulnerability and need for support and nourishment from the group (Halprin 2005b interview).

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The artistic outcomes of Halprin’s work with the Sea Ranch Collective were publicly manifested in Seasons, created on Halprin’s land in Marin and performed at the summer solstice in 2003. This event incorporated a sequence of performances and installations created by members of the col-lective, interspersed with participatory sensory workshops facilitated by Halprin and a food ritual created by the participants. Halprin acted as the artistic director of the whole event creating Pathways, a score performed by members of the collective, in a labyrinth of branches installed on the dance deck. Rather than attempting to transfer work created at Sea Ranch, the same principles were applied to a sustained and in depth process in the environment in Marin – with the specific intention of creating public per-formance. Most of the collective are familiar with this environment and some of the elements at Sea Ranch, such as the redwood forest, are also found there.

Another aesthetic manifestation of Halprin’s environmental practice, shown at her Eightieth Year Retrospective and incorporated into Seasons, was Still Dance: a photographic exhibition resulting from a collaboration with performance and visual artist Eeo Stubblefield, who has attended the Sea Ranch gatherings for many years. Stubblefield initiated this process of ‘weaving together “performance, body art, story, photography and the particularity of place”’ (Stubblefield, 2001, cited in Worth and Poynor 2004: 47) in the early 1980s, working alone and with others before cre-ating a sequence of work with Halprin as a solo performer between 1997–2000. The photographs, which capture ‘a distillation of the dia-logue between performer and place’ (Worth and Poynor 2004: 47), are an evocative series of images of Halprin dancing in response both to Stubblefield’s aesthetic body coverings, created on Halprin specifically for the environments concerned (many of them at Sea Ranch), and the envi-ronments themselves, some of which also incorporated Stubblefield’s design. The working process for this collaboration is documented in Andy Abrahams Wilson’s film Returning Home (Abrahams Wilson 2003 video). A recurrent theme for Halprin in this work (created in her late seventies) is an acceptance of her aging body and a preparation for her return to the earth in death (Halprin 2001 interview). In one sequence Halprin’s naked body, coated with molasses and tree rot, slowly disappears into the trunk of a fallen tree until she is completely indistinguishable from her sur-roundings. These pieces are at once highly aesthetic and deeply personal rituals.

Despite this emphasis on work in nature, Halprin’s first visit to Paris in 2004 for opening of the Festival d’Automne showed that her relationship to urban environments and street performance is still very much alive. Halprin’s group performed an extract from Parades and Changes (which had resulted in a warrant for Halprin’s arrest after a performance in New York in 1967 because of its use of nudity) and the more recent Intensive Care (2000), both intensely theatrical performances, in the formal theatre at the Centre Pompidou. Rather than remaining within the confines of the theatre building, Halprin created En Route – an amusing and unlikely prelude to the performances in which the company (several of whom are members of the Sea Ranch Collective) journeyed from their hotel to the performance venue attired in dark suits and bowler hats. They functioned



as a chorus accompanying G. Hoffman Soto (who has worked with Halprin for over twenty-five years) as the ‘joker’ in a maverick performance, inter-acting with members of the public and local shopkeepers (with whom he developed an ongoing relationship) and creating idiosyncratic dances to a faulty ghetto blaster in the public squares to the delight of passers-by. This street performance was largely un-remarked upon by the reviewers who were apparently unaware of it.

Halprin’s current work with the Sea Ranch Collective is the synthesis of a creative processes and approach to environmental dance which have evolved since her early explorations on the dance deck fifty years ago, embodying a holistic approach to the individual, to dance and to the environment. Halprin continues to refine and develop this approach in collaboration with artists and performers of several generations. Her current commitment to articulate the objective principles which underpin her work continues Halprin’s life-long endeavour to make her working processes as transparent as possible to those working with her, reflecting her belief that it is only by objectifying your material that others can personalize it for themselves.

Works citedHalprin, A. (1988), ‘Expanding Spaces’, In Dance, 15:9, pp. 1–7.

Halprin, A. (1995), Moving toward Life, Five Decades of Transformational Dance, (ed.), R. Kaplan, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press.

Halprin and Sea Ranch Collective (2003), ‘Seasons’, Part 1/summer, performance programme 21–23 June, Mountain Home studio/theatre, Kentfield, California.

San Francisco Dancers Workshop (circa 1971), untitled manuscript: 1–33, Anna Halprin’s personal archive.

Worth, L. and Poynor, H. (2004), Anna Halprin, Abingdon, Oxon & New York: Routledge.

VideoReturning Home (2003), dir. Andy Abrahams Wilson, Sausilito, California: Open

Eye Pictures.

Interviews, workshop discussions and emailsHalprin, A. (2001), interviews, 25–27 June, Mount Home Studio, Kentfield.

Halprin, A. (2005a), workshop sessions and discussions with the Sea Ranch Collective, 22–31st August, Sea Ranch Retreat, California.

Halprin, A. (2005b), interview, 30 August, Sea Ranch.

Harrison, M. (2005), interview, 2 September, Inverness, California.

Restar, T. (2006), email correspondence, 18 February.

Further readingHalprin, A. (2002), Returning to Health with Dance, Movement and Imagery,

Mendocino California: Life Rhythm.

Ross, J. (2000), Moving Lessons, Margaret H’Doubler and the beginning of dance in American education, Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press.

Ross, J. (2007), Anna Halprin Experience as Dance, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.


132 Helen Poynor

Suggested citationPoynor, H. (2009), ‘Anna Halprin and the Sea Ranch Collective, an embodied engage-

ment with place’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1, pp. 121–132, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.121/1

Contributor detailsHelen Poynor is an internationally recognized movement artist and teacher, and Visiting Professor of Performance at Coventry University. She runs the Walk of Life workshop and training programme in non-stylized and environmental movement on the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site in East Devon and West Dorset, UK. She specialises in movement in natural environments, site specific and autobiographi-cal performance and cross art-form collaborations in the UK and Australia. She trained originally with Anna Halprin in 1980–81 and is co-author with Libby Worth of Anna Halprin (Routledge 2004). Her essay, ‘ “Yes but is it Dance?” The dances of daily life … non-stylised movement as a medium of expression’ appears in An Introduction to Community Dance Practice, (Diane Amans (ed.), Palgrave Macmillan 2008). Helen is a Registered Somatic Therapist, ISMETA and a Senior Registered Dance Movement Therapist, ADMP UK.

Contact: 3, Marmora Terrace, Clapps Lane, Beer, Devon EX 12 3HE, UK.Tel: 44 (0)1297 20624



Poetic ReflectionJournal of Dance and Somatic Practices Volume 1 Number 1 © 2009 Intellect Ltd

Miscellaneous. English language. doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.133/7

KeywordsDance in the

landscapeAnna HalprinTamalpa

1. Studying with Anna Halprin and her colleagues in Tamalpa gave me an insight into different aspects of the Halprin process, and when taken as a whole, provided a multifaceted view of the Tamalpa work. The course was in three parts, Dance as Ritual with Anna Halprin, Self-portraits and Movement led by Jaime Nissenbaum and Expressive Arts in Nature, led by Jamie McHugh.

Reflections on Evoking the wisdom of body and imagination Anna Halprin Summer Programs; San Francisco, 23rd June – 17th July, 20081 (funded by a Lisa Ullman Travel Scholarship) Cecilia Macfarlane Independent Dance Artist

AbstractThis article has been written as a result of studying with Anna Halprin and her colleagues in Tamalpa, San Francisco, in the Summer of 2008. I wished to further my research into dance in the landscape. The course gave me an insight into differ-ent aspects of the Halprin process, and when taken as a whole, provided a multi-faceted view of the Tamalpa work. The course was in three parts, Dance as Ritual with Anna Halprin, Self-portraits and Movement led by Jaime Nissenbaum and Expressive Arts in Nature, led by Jamie McHugh.

I have found as I get older that I have increasingly felt “hemmed in” when studying in a traditional dance studio. The habits and memories of expected dance practice return relentlessly and distractingly and can seriously restrict my research and development as a dancer.

While the expected flatness and uniformity of a dance studio floor can be relied upon, the body cannot necessarily find compatibility with it; and while this can create wonderful dialogues at times, it is in the landscape that I delight in finding reflections of

my skin, muscles and bones, my curves, weight and breath; my energy, falling and stillness; my trust, doubt and despair; my rest, momentum and hope; my dance, delight and passion.

The landscape reflects back so much more than a dance studio mirror and offers, if I open to it, all that I need to research my practice and take me into the studio again, refreshed and reformed.

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134 Cecilia Macfarlane

The landscape contextualises who and how I am and strips away any accumulated affectation, making way for the more authentic me.

Through dancing, drawing, writing, I went on a journey that I had not planned, had no clue I needed and had no expectations of where it might go. I found a powerful black panther in me that finally gave birth to my self portrait.


135Poetic Reflection

“I am belly, I am wind, I am mountains, I am waterfall falling down mountains, I am deep forest, I am fresh grass, I am soreness, I am older, I am butterfly wings, I am love, I am mother, I am wise sage, I am history, I am present, I am future, I am wild, I am re-emerging, I am shouting, I am colourful, I am energetic, I am leaping, I am travelling, I am still pool, I am busy, I am the bottom of a mountain, I am see-ing, I am high, I am running, I am flying, I am arriving, I am rushing water, I am on top of the world, I am grounded.”

CM Journal, Summer 2008


136 Cecilia Macfarlane

There was a momentum to my exploration both physically and emotion-ally that felt inevitable.

It was the land, finally, that gave me all the answers that I needed; the rock that I could hide deeply under for privacy and space to be still, but also offering the possibility, while on top of the rock to be completely visible and heard. The warm sand embraced my curves and caught my every move. The Pacific Ocean washed over me playfully, pushing and pulling me. The air encouraged my newly found wings to fly me for miles, running along the empty beach. I could rest on the sand dunes and the fire warmed and rested me, charging my batteries for my return.

“I danced my dance, my spirit danced the wind behind moving me the sun above warming me the sea below washing me the trees around whispering, reminding me to spread my wings, to fly, to hover and to land home safely.”

CM Journal, Summer 2008

Suggested citationMacfarlane, C. (2009), ‘Reflections on Evoking the wisdom of body and imagination

Anna Halprin Summer Programs; San Francisco, 23rd June – 17th July, 2008 (funded by a Lisa Ullman Travel Scholarship)’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1: 1, pp. 133–137, doi: 10.1386/jdsp.1.1.133/7


137Poetic Reflection

Contributor detailsCecilia Macfarlane is an Oxford based independent dance artist with a national reputation for her work in the community. She was a Senior Lecturer in Arts in the Community at Coventry University for nine years. Her work is based on her passionate belief that dance is for everyone; she celebrates the uniqueness and indi-viduality of each dancer. Her work is influenced by her studies with Joan Skinner, Helen Poynor, Deborah Hay and most recently Anna Halprin.

Contact: 16 Portland Road, Summertown, Oxford, OX2 7EY. E-mail: [email protected]



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Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 1.1