What’s not to like about gathering with a group of like minded peers and sharing your latest explorations? Maybe that after a few presentations I just want someone to challenge this somatic status quo, to say “yes but” the way some of my students are prone to do, or to acknowledge that quiet questioning I do in this somatic teaching adventure. Don’t get me wrong I am firmly committed to a somatic approach in dance training having come through many years of my own training in which I was continually replicating someone else’s patterns with little concern or attention to my own moving sensibilities. But one of the attractions for me of a somatic perspective is the built in possibility for change and renewal. A practice such as open attention with a directive toward noticing and embodying, questioning and growing can take one in all sorts of unusual directions. It can transform one’s moving, feeling, thinking, imagining, and creating. But sometimes the current somatic landscape looks too similar to the one I wandered into nearly 20 years ago as I began investigating Laban and Bartenieff Fundamentals, Ideokinesis, Continuum, Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, and Body-Mind Centering—and I wonder why? Maybe it is just conference somatics. These events always get me thinking about everyone who is not here. I wonder what they are doing that is “somatic” that I could be excited by, that would feel like new terrain to explore, to wander through?
Teaching Somatics-Based Dance Technique Conference Reflection
One of the workshops at the conference I was excited by was “Dance improvisation as a tool to deepen student learning for technique and performance”. We followed a few of the teacher’s movement ideas and patterns in gentle and fun ways. So there was the challenge of moving in someone else’s skin. We also had plenty of opportunity in the hour and forty-five minutes to explore “dancers choice”—in relation to a pattern or structure that was given or in totally free movement styling. We laughed and bantered back and forth as we manipulated movement material into our version of it. But the thing that was most apparent at the end was our individual sense of accomplishment in a broad movement spectrum from warming up to focused body exercises to specific body initiations leading through space to a little piece of choreography that we quickly made our own–to watching others and dancing ourselves. Wow! a lot–of fun! In listening to my own moving desires and choices for “what’s next and how?”, I got to know myself a little better and I also revealed a bit of myself to the other dancers in the space. And this is when I return to thinking about everyone who is not here and wonder what if there were a bit of this somatic perspective sprinkled throughout the bigger dance world. Would the dances made look different? Would the physical relationships experienced run deeper? Would the dancing group be differently composed? Would I be changed by other perspectives??
–Sherry