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

Move with awareness of your sexual and reproductive organs, a base of identity and creativity. • Orient to the weighted fullness of the organs. • Consciously widen your pelvic floor: tail back, pelvis stable and horizontal. If tethered to the tail or pelvic floor, you may experience

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.

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,

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

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.”

Change levels and explore new spatial orientation. Stay rooted. Don’t judge. Let the little ticker tape of self-criticism become background noise that you ignore. Return to sensation.

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

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