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- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015
Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015
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Moving in, out, through, and beyond the tensions between experience and social construction in somatic theory
By Jill GreenAbstractThis article is a reflexive analysis of the author’s movement through the positions of different somatic theories. While some somatic theorists and practitioners focus on ideas of self and experiential knowledge, others are moving into a more postmodern realm by looking at bodies and somatic experience as social constructions. The author traces her movement through these theories and towards a non-binary postmodern view of somatics that does not dismiss the role of experience. Two narratives serve as a vehicle whereby the author wrestles with the issues.
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Somatic education and embodied discourses: Using the Feldenkrais Method to challenge dominant discourses in the sexually abused body context
More LessAbstractIn an autoethnographical study for a master’s degree in dance, the author shares how somatic education enabled her to challenge the dominant discourses that were integrated following the incest she experienced in her childhood. Considering that our identities are a function of the constraints that act on us and influence our subjectivity, the author explains how these discourses have influenced her relationship to her body and how the Feldenkrais Method made a new perception of self and of the world possible. She describes her experience of the self-educating process, a process that revealed the plasticity of a self capable of adapting to the whole of her life experiences. From the development of somatic authority to creative self-fashioning, the author draws from a variety of inspirations to nurture her thinking about, and show the role played by, somatic education.
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The presence of absences: Unconscious performances and muscle memories in Pilates
More LessAbstractThis article synthesizes the scholarly areas of dance studies, somatic research and kinaesiology, to illustrate how Pilates history continuously overlooks values culturally transmitted from body-to-body through Pilates practice. In this process, I suggest that not all embodied memories have liberatory effects. This could be potentially problematic, especially with respect to the historical marginalization and invisiblization of non-white bodies. I maintain by making the goal of Pilates an ‘unconscious’ and therefore unreflective performance of its exercise, it perpetuates specific cultural and behavioural values.
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Reflections on somatic learning processes in higher education: Student experiences and teacher interpretations of Experiential Anatomy into Contemporary Dance
By Laura GlaserAbstractThis article sets out to interpret documented experiences of students studying contemporary dance through the introduction of experiential anatomy. Processes of their learning build the basis for this evaluation, which is motivated by the teacher’s interest in the validity of a somatic approach to learning dance in 18+ pre-professional dance artists. In the immersive experience of learning experientially, reflection is integrated in the process and provides opportunities for meaning making. It also offers data for analysis: documents – which include drawings, journal entries and interviews – act as a feedback to the teacher and to the subject within this educational environment. Interwoven in the following article are student responses to somatic learning methods and processes, their experiences of embodiment and insights regarding the development of each student as a dancer, artist, person and learner.
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Sensing possibility: Anatomy, sensation and dancing
More LessAbstractThis article discusses the question of bodily change in a research-based dance practice. The research was led by my admiration for certain dancers and their particular qualities of dancing, and my desire to bring other ways of moving into my body when I dance. Whilst anatomy forms the basis for conceptualizing processes of change, sensations are also the tools for and the subject of investigation as well as being evidence of or in research. Thus, I introduce the concept of ‘dancer’s anatomy’, my term for the combination of sensation, imagination and anatomical knowledge through which I consciously work on my dancing. In addition, a piece of choreography called Thematic, by Russell Dumas, together with my understanding of his practice, acts as a further research element that could be thought of as a kind of ‘control’ in the study. The research design called for repetition of this phrase over a two-year period such that the changes that were occurring in the body could be seen as those that occurred as a result of the dancing processes, and not as changes in the ‘choreography’. The article also documents how anatomy, dance movement and sensation mutually transform each other.
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Soma in the City: How does listening and responding to a ‘somatic podcast’ affect one’s relationship to urban space?
By Korina BiggsAbstractThis article describes a small piece of research carried out as part of an MA in Dance and Somatic Well–being at the University of Central Lancashire.
The basis of the research was: a) An interest in bridging the gulf between somatic perceptual/movement practice and being in a challenging urban environment. b) Curiosity in how using digital technology can possibly create more, rather than less, connection to psychophysical self and environment.
It assumed embodied person–environment mutuality and reciprocity, and was influenced by ecopsychology, the value of attending to movement, and by the somatic practices, particularly the Alexander Technique. The research methodology is influenced by Moustakas’ heuristic approach and involved an embodied first–person practice–led development of the content of the podcast. There were six participants and research ‘data’ was drawn from the time we shared together ‘post–podcast’. Conclusions were drawn from extracting themes from the subjective experience of the individuals.
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The touch of sound: Dalcroze Eurhythmics as a somatic practice
Authors: Karin Greenhead and John HabronAbstractDalcroze Eurhythmics is a rich and multifaceted, living practice that has developed a wide range of applications and pedagogical approaches during more than a century of endeavour. Most researchers have situated this work within music education, dance and theatre history and therapy of various kinds. In this article we argue that it may also be considered a somatic practice owing to the ways in which movement, space, sensation, presence, touch and improvisation are central to the method. While recognizing that not all somatic practices include touch and improvisation, we focus on these aspects to explore the notion of the haptic nature of vision and sound, as they are manifest in the Dalcroze class. Drawing on practical examples of widespread practice within the Dalcroze community as well as personal experiences, we assert that the touch-like nature of sound not only makes contact with the body, inciting physical and emotional movement, but also develops awareness of self, others and environment due to the social nature of musical participation in general and of the rhythmics class in particular.
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Contact improvisation as an art of relating: The importance of touch for building positive interaction
More LessAbstractThis article analyses the specific characteristics of Contact Improvisation (CI) that can support building positive interaction and well-being in community contexts. It examines the possibilities of the dance form to widen attitudes towards touch and to build skills in touching and communication, also with people experiencing difficulties with touch. CI practice proposes a different way of being and relating to people, challenging normative behaviour and creating communal feelings by emphasizing togetherness and connectedness. It can have many positive effects, including enhancing awareness and encouraging playfulness and mutual support, as well as increasing the joy of life, as demonstrated in my study with professionals and women in vulnerable positions. The article also suggests that, although the potential for negatively experienced touch needs attention in CI practice and in society at large, building skills and awareness in qualities of how to touch can reduce such experiences. In terms of currently acceptable modes of touching in contemporary culture, touching in particular ways can also be seen as political, suggesting a strong potential influence of dancing on everyday life.
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Movement in the Men’s Movement: Contact improvisation and social change
By Jess CurtisAbstractDuring the 1970s and continuing through to the 1990s, a significant number of American men participated in activities that became collectively recognized as a ‘Men’s Movement’. Nearly simultaneously the development of Contact Improvisation (CI), questioned many of the gender roles in traditional dance, allowing for a much broader range of physical interaction for both men and women. This article looks at intersections between these two ‘movements’ and argues that CI and related body-based performance practices were, and can continue to be, significant tools for social change.
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Light-Dark-Light-Heavy: Reflections on an art–dance collaboration
More LessAbstractThis article describes an interdisciplinary collaboration in the making of a new performance piece. In this work we explore visual and movement possibilities using a dancer carrying a single portable light – how the shifting qualities of space, light and shadow are created out of, and feed back into, bodily sensations of weight, breath, touch and momentum. The article raises issues concerning the making process in a collaborative practice where both partners work on equal terms and both are involved in all aspects of the work. An improvisational approach to making and performing the piece leads to the concept of ‘emergent form’ as opposed to a set choreography. The work exemplifies a ‘relational’ approach to performance, focusing on the interaction between the performer and her surroundings as a continuing dialogue within an integrated art–dance practice. Consistent with this interactive approach, the performance environment is conceived as a variable ‘kit of parts’, rather than a pre-determined set.
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Body-mapping and the Human Spirograph: Performance drawing in Thirdspace
More LessAbstractIn performance drawing, the dancing body performs within particular kinds of spaces, leaving physical trace marks behind on surfaces such as plastic sheeting or paper. In this article I analyse Tony Orrico’s performance of 8 Circles (2010) to question the relationship between lived body and graphite mark. I draw on Soja’s theory of Thirdspace (1996) to rethink performance drawing as a bridge between different types of knowledge. This understanding of performance drawing reveals liminal spaces of heightened sensory and motor awareness where body, graphite and movement plane combine to become reflections on a body’s energetic flows, manifest as a body-map of somatic practice.
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Somatic commonalities in the study of Budō and Zen
More LessAbstractThis article explores the central place of body-mind practice in the Japanese martial arts, known as Budō, and the Sōtō Zen sect of Buddhism, as I have encountered them in Europe. Drawing on my experiences from the study of Budō and Zen, my purpose is to explore a body-mind synthesis in subjective–objective experience, as described by the medieval Japanese Zen master Eihei Dōgen and the philosopher Yasuo Yuasa, which I find to be the fertile shared ground of these two systems of self-cultivation. It is ground that is, I think, all too easily overlooked and left fallow, but which it has been my good fortune to encounter in the training methods of the Tetsushinkan dōjō, in east London.
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Interview with independent dance artist Cecilia Macfarlane
Authors: Emma Meehan and Cecilia MacfarlaneAbstractIn this interview, independent dancer Cecilia Macfarlane talks about her project with the Japanese Contemporary Dance Network (JCDN) in 2013. To date, Macfarlane has undertaken eight trips to Japan, primarily to introduce her community dance practice to Japanese artists. However, during her visit in 2013, she was invited to learn folk dances from the north-east of Japan, in the Tohoku region most affected by the earthquake and tsunami in 2011. The interview is movingly interwoven with Macfarlane’s experience of losing her son. The sudden devastation following his death is described by Macfarlane as a ‘personal tsunami’, which is discussed alongside the loss and destruction wrought in Japan by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear devastation. In this way, autobiographical material is brought to bear on understanding the experiences of the survivors and to contribute to the development of Macfarlane’s artistic process alongside the project.
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