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

Remembering the roundness of the three body weights (skull, ribs, and pelvis) releases tension.

Shift your weight toward your toes, your heels, and then circle the weight around the circumference of your feet. Close your eyes, circle your head, and notice the tiny adjustments of the twenty-six bones of your feet.

Often students ask why their first experience with Authentic Movement is so serious, their first dances so sad. Generally, we push into the unconscious what we consider to be negative—our sadness, our meanness, our fear. But below that layer of unexpressed movement is the wealth of human experience. That is the resource from which we draw in

effort involved within any shape as part of a continuum of effort, space, weight, time, and energy. Within

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

energy, qualities include sudden, sustained, bound, free, light, heavy, direct, and indirect.4 Four basic movement qualities offer good practice for energetic range: sustained, pendular (swinging), vibratory, and abrupt. As you dance each, you can access low through high energy, expanding your capacity for dynamic range.

Begin with abrupt movement. This is sharp, faster than you can think. Try to surprise yourself. Explore abrupt actions—a slice, kick, or jerk. • If you feel yourself starting to pattern your movement, pause. Abrupt is unpredictable—that’s its charge. • Now explore low-energy abrupt. How little energy can you use and still create abrupt movement? •

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