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

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.

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

This includes the skinesphere—space within the skin3—and kinesphere—space around the body.

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

I feel that dance, in particular, has a unique role to play in rehabilitating humans’ relationship with Earth. We need both a cognitive (mental) and an experiential (embodied) understanding to make a change in behavior. Drawing on the depth and detail of our research and experiential knowledge, dancers bring an embodied, integrative, cross-discipli

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.

Bebe Miller spent Saturday mornings from age four until twelve (1954–1962) crafting her mastery as a future

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

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? •