The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making

In my view, place is space known through direct experience in the body, involving sensation, thought, memory, and imagination. Place exists both outside the human body and inside that marvelous membrane we call skin. Relationship to place is a process of assimilation—it takes time. It is through our interaction with specific landscapes and building

Musician Mike Vargas suggests four qualities to bring to improvisational explorations: “Be aware, be available, be responsive, and be clear.” ≈ Nancy Stark Smith encourages: “Take a little more time on the way past first reactions toward actions. Absorb more of the moment before moving.”

Move within an imaginary sphere of space, your kinesphere. Maintaining awareness of spherical movement, let the globes of your three body weights meet the spatial globe. Explore roundness in your movement. Feel the roundness inside, the roundness outside.

Slowly

roll the circumference of your skull on the floor. Take your time; the rolling of the skull moves your body. Sometimes it feels like a hard-boiled egg, slowly cracking and softening. Allow the sensation of touch to bring awareness of the globe of your skull. Roll to the top center of the skull; touch all the surfaces. • Slowly roll the circumferenc

Follow the line of energy and take a ride. There’s an element of release, following, allowing. • Try low-energy pendular: middle energy, high energy. Explore anywhere on that continuum, yielding control. (This is like going with the flow, seeing where you end up.) • Try sustained movement. This requires lots of paired muscles as you move slowly in

“warming up into dancing.” Penny Campbell is guiding us into parts of the body: playing the scales of each body part, as one way of opening the whole.

Repetition is a kind of incantation, a cycling back and calling forth. A phrase or image appears once, repeats, or develops—it’s not the same.

Move with awareness of your lungs: the lungs empty and fill.