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

Slowly

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

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

Place your hands on your lower back, and feel the skin expand and condense as you breathe. Take your time. Be patient. Breathing is essential; it takes time to unwind holding patterns. • Volumize the body with each breath: the inhalation can be used to touch your own volume inside. Exhalation is a time to surrender, yield, and release.

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

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.

We rebuild perception daily, moment by moment. Because dance is both a visual and a kinesthetic art form, dancers learn to see-feel movement. Hence the relevance of eyes-closed and skin-focused somatic work to feed and enhance the sensory maps, along with “outside eyes” offered by teachers, mirrors, cameras, and—eventually—audiences to corroborate

Spatial patterning is the pathway the body takes. Axial is generally spine-centered movement, and gestural is more limb-centered. Movement can be both stationary, when fixed in place, and locomotor, when the body travels. Spherical movement arcs through circular, omnidirectional space, including the globe around the body. Level moves from floor to

Basically, there are different sources of movement that have been described as the personal unconscious (personal story); the collective unconscious (transpersonal and cross-cultural); or the superconscious (connected to energies beyond the self).