Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2023

This article provides an overview of the First International Congress on Release of Tension and Re-Education of Functional Movement that happened in Copenhagen in 1959. Acknowledging their common interests in the emerging field of psychosomatic studies, the congress gathered creators of somatic practices, some of their students, and professionals with medical, artistic and pedagogical backgrounds in order to share theoretical information and practical classes, and to further collaborations amongst peers. In this article I present historical information in the form of a first-person fictional narrative based on factual evidence and descriptions from actual attendees in order to offer an immersive experience of the event, recognizing it as the first collective effort for Somatics as a field early in the 1950s.

This article proposes a methodology and theoretical foundation for practice-based transpersonal research in the arts, which involves an immersive engagement with place and matter. This kind of engagement allows the artist-researcher to move beyond their conscious mind, to let work emerge directly from the felt experience of being in an outdoor location and from the interaction of the place’s materiality with the artist’s body. The model is interdisciplinary and draws on Nagotomo’s Attunement through the Body (1992), the theoretical literature of parapsychology, somatic practice and Cajete (2000) and others’ writings on Indigenous methodologies.

Somatic practice gives agency back to the body, allowing it to reconfigure itself, thus integrating the mind into an empowered body. Yet, I question whether the reliance on individualism, humanism, scientific study, authentic movement, and liberatory processes reinforces and normalizes racially biased behaviours, attitudes and theorization. An autoethnography of sorts, this article puts in conversation my embodied and theoretical experiences with my own internalization of whiteness. Somatics, in essence, gives me the space to explore how I make sense of those feelings of discomfort and ease, uncertainty and confusion. Does my embodied experience somehow reflect my unconscious day-to-day enactments of white vulnerability? Do I expand into, seeking and sensing stability? Or rather, do I actively and unconsciously withdraw from discomfort? Do somatics reaffirm or dismantle my whiteness? I ask within the intrapersonal, immediate and ephemeral experience, is my white American fragility revealed through somatic practice?

The Digital Touch Project took place between 2019 and 2020 and is part of wider research considering wearable technology in dance-making. In questioning the use of body-worn digital tools/aids in the dance-making process, the project aimed to discover more about how technology-assisted creativity operates and its influence. Six experienced dancers/choreographers utilized the prototypes in their choreographic practices. The workshops enabled data collection via a mixed-method approach of semi-structured interviews, embodied participation (researcher as a participant), fieldnotes and movement analysis from video footage. The coded data and thematic analysis have been collated with the transcribed movement and provide evidence towards two different forms of digital touch and its promotion of heightened attentional focus, greater fluidity of interoceptive and exteroceptive abilities within improvisation and varied working relationships with the prototypes.

This article analyses my work for the digital storytelling archive Humanizing Deportation, which documents the human consequences of deportation, as well as the contact improvisation technique I co-developed for moving-with these stories. Moving-with offers a way of disseminating narratives of deportation by authors in Mexico but also reveals how their voices resonate in different body-minds in California. One story in particular, ‘Tireless Warrior’ by Esther Morales (2017), clearly affirms the narrator’s connectedness to networks of care that are limited and fragile, enduring and adaptable and that entangle us all. Moving-with Esther’s story demonstrates how the experience of witnessing can reach beyond the individual self, moving us past passive spectatorship to feel-with an individual narrative as a collective experience that implicates witnesses as viscerally response-able. Moving-with digital stories of deportation can thus become a reciprocally humanizing experience that amplifies both speakers’ and listeners’ capacity to affect and be affected.

This article investigates a somatic approach to movement on ice in several contexts. First, the examination of figure skating training and whether a somatic movement approach could be beneficial for the development of competitive athletes or recreational skaters. Second, whether this approach may diversify movement forms and artistic outcomes on ice. For this empirical research a mixed methodology was used and included an international survey, as well as Practice as Research process in the dance studio and on ice. This article argues that knowledge and research of somatic techniques integrated into contemporary dance training are transferrable to figure skating training, bringing a variety of positive developmental effects. The PaR process resulted in a performance installation titled Body Melts and suggests that there is potential for figure skating as an artform to be recontextualized and for audience expectations to be challenged.

Review of: Dynamic Embodiment℠ of the Sun Salutation: Pathways to Balancing the Chakras and the Neuroendocrine System, Martha Eddy and Shakti Andrea Smith (2021)

London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 256 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-91208-599-6, p/bk, £32.50