Moving Consciously

Somatic Transformations through Dance, Yoga, and Touch

Sondra Fraleigh

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097492
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Performing Arts

The popularity of yoga and Zen meditation has heightened awareness of somatic practices. Individuals develop the conscious embodiment central to somatics work via movement and dance, or through touch from a skilled teacher or therapist often called a somatic bodyworker. Methods of touch and movement foster generative processes of consciousness in order to create a fluid interconnection between sensation, thought, movement, and expression. In Moving Consciously, Sondra Fraleigh gathers essays that probe ideas surrounding embodied knowledge and the conscious embodiment of movement and dance. Using a variety of perspectives on movement and dance somatics, Fraleigh and other contributors draw on scholarship and personal practice to participate in a multifaceted investigation of a thriving worldwide phenomenon. Their goal: to present the mental and physical health benefits of experiencing one's inner world through sensory awareness and movement integration. A stimulating addition to a burgeoning field, Moving Consciously incorporates concepts from East and West into a timely look at life-changing, intertwined practices that involve dance, movement, performance studies, and education. Contributors: Richard Biehl, Robert Bingham, Hillel Braude, Alison East, Sondra Fraleigh, Kelly Ferris Lester, Karin Rugman, Catherine Schaeffer, Jeanne Schul, and Ruth Way.

PART ONE

On Somatic Movement Arts

CHAPTER 1

Why Consciousness Matters

Sondra Fraleigh

Ethereal Dance

In 2006, on one of my trips to Japan, butoh teacher Nobuo Harada-sensei saw my somatics students practicing teaching through touch, our developmental and therapeutic technique that involves what we refer to as matching in pairs. One partner in the role of the teacher finds and guides the lines of least resistance in the other partner’s movement, matching emergent movement patterns with slow, gentle, somatically attuned touch—as in lifting an arm and holding it a few moments to feel the weight of flesh and bone, then waiting for release of held tension before letting the arm rest. This is one simple way to begin a series of phrases that eventually involve the whole body, somewhat unpredictably, since the practitioner learns about the student’s movement disposition along the way. As a tactile-kinesthetic noninvasive form of bodywork practiced at Eastwest Somatics Institute, matching usually involves touch with movement, but it can also be done through a simple semblance of movement without touch, as in matching through walking, an example I take up in chapter 2. Learners frequently tap into untried and non-habitual pathways, as they identify improvements in movement and understanding. Learning takes place through movement, not through dialogue, even as explanations may aid the total process.

I thought Harada-sensei wouldn’t understand what we were doing. We hadn’t yet met, and he wanted to see how I taught, because we were to teach a butoh dance workshop together, ending with an informal improvisational performance for the public. During tea, after his hour of observation, I asked him if he had enough understanding of my approach, even though he hadn’t seen me teach dance. “I saw the dance,” he said. “I saw the etheric dance.” So we smiled. We both understood the ethereal and elusive in butoh, as also in somatic practices.

His remark reminded me of the subtle disposition of the Japanese, and why I like butoh, a dance form that appears in various contexts throughout this book. The notion of ethereality is sometimes ascribed to otherworldly or even ghostly qualities. Ether is the rarefied and disappearing element formerly believed to fill the heavens. It is also true that butoh—the postmodern dance movement arising in Japan after World War II, now with global adherents—sometimes appears otherworldly. One can work with an image of disappearance in butoh. To the outward eye, no one actually disappears, but the imagistic affect is nonetheless real for the dancer and the witness. The floating visage of the head and morphing facial expressions are often quite beautiful, even as the dancer’s knees softly bend, and she walks with an eternally slow pace, where with each tiny slide, the foot never leaves the ground. This would be the serene soma of butoh, and there are also more intense somatic affects, tumultuous, even explosive.

Butoh has a somatic basis, but this is so of all dances because all movement has qualitative somaticity—smoothness, for instance, or bitterness—translating taste to movement imagistically. The question for somatics as a discrete study is whether one pays attention to somatic qualities and potentials. Contrasting subtle ethereal movement would be solid strongly delineated movement, restrained and earthy. We find some of these strong qualities in the invigorating stamping dances of India and Africa. African dances move with pelvic power and are seductive, having a somatic influence on performers and witnesses alike. The dynamic northern Indian Kathak literally shimmers with stamping and vibrations. Kathak embodies epic storytelling and vibrant energetic somatics.

Somatic Potentials and Expressive Imagination

Above we’ve seen examples for further definitions of somatic phenomena and their various appearances, along with preliminary definitions of soma and somatics in the prologue. In this section we employ a spiral return of somatics as a concept, a practice, and a field of knowledge, which can be seen from several vantage points. Somatics might also be identified more narrowly with somatic affectivity and phenomenological awareness, as Hillel Braude’s chapter takes up. Our present definition starts with the body (soma) and widens progressively.

As a concept, somatics derives from soma and psyche as reflexive, or self-perception, as noted in the prologue. Such perception is not passive but rather an ongoing active-receptive process with content. Perceptual processes are not possible without sensate content. Something nudges perception into being. We pay attention because we become interested in our external surroundings or something we ourselves are doing as we move, work, and play. The contents or objects of perception in animate terms of somatics would be movement qualities that have internal affective influences. Individuals identify these in various ways, often as feelings or emotions that their own movements encourage in awareness of self and other.

Affectivity involves the relational self, since what we call self exists in the life-world and the social and cultural world of others. Responses, reactions, approaches, and withdrawals are some specific relational modes. We don’t often stop to think that we have a choice in how to respond, but there are somatic techniques that teach choice. We can disrupt habitual responses by noticing what we are intending and then taking a breath before acting. In the gap, something uncharacteristic of “self” might emerge. The use of breath to interrupt habitual responses and immediate reactions is especially useful in stressful situations. In somatic contexts, we also have a chance to rest or just to “be.” Hopefully, we also have a chance to be creative, moving from relaxed clarity as from the clutter of consciousness. Both are matters of affectivity in movement and self-awareness. In our work, we allow whatever is present to be present, without judging the contents.

As a practice, movement-based somatics refers to approaches that cultivate experiences of the lived body, sensory appreciation (aesthesis and aesthetics), and awareness through movement. (Other somatic fields, specifically somatic psychology and somatic leadership, are differentiated in the prologue.) Somatic movement approaches include movement patterning, experiential anatomy, developmental movement, somatic yoga, and dance for personal and community development. These approaches often make explicit use of performance and expressive imagination. The use of touch is also prominent in movement-based somatics, especially as applies to movement facilitation in bodywork and yoga, and contact in dance. In addition, somatic practices develop the potentials of moving interactively with others, playfully, and intuitively.

Broadly, somatics is a field of study and practice concerned with holistic body-centered approaches to assist people in experiencing and transforming the self through awareness relative to the living world, the environment, and others. Somatics is evolving a field of practices that benefit from study and research. For many years, Professor Seymour Kleinman directed a PhD program at the Ohio State University dedicated to the study of somatics. The California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco also offers advanced degrees in somatics, assisted through the work of Don Hanlon Johnson. I have already mentioned my development of somatic studies in dance at the State University of New York. In several ways my colleagues and I build on this beginning in the present book.

We see from the foregoing that “self” and “self-perception” are central to somatics, but a word of caution is helpful here. The theoretical stance of positivist research is based on the assumption that the world preexists as separate from you and me. The present study leads me to question clear separations of self, world, and other. The perspective of phenomenology is that the individual ego cannot be separated from the world. The world and others are the conditions by which self and self-as-knower (the latter is Antonio Damasio’s term) become possible. Self-perception would be void without perceptions of otherness. Movement qualities and images arise through perceptions that have internal markers related to external circumstances. Soma and psyche as reflexive refers us to somatic qualities in experience that we can name. These qualities (values or valences) of movement are the “somatic” subjects of somatics. Movement itself is somatically affective, as we say in many ways, but the affective qualities have referents. For instance, slow, gentle movements performed without stress have the capacity to bring lightness and serenity to people. These would be ethereal—light, airy, tenuous, refined, rare, exquisite, fragile, and insubstantial movements—less earth than air—even as giving in to the earth, releasing and letting go, is somatically potent in its own way.

Shin Somatics® often conceives the body energetically and symbolically through Eastern paradigms. There we encounter the first chakra in yoga—rooted, strong, and grounded energies through the feet, legs, and pelvis—including the popular warrior postures (asanas). Fluid and creative energies reside in the belly, the second chakra, which is understood as feminine because of pregnancy and birth. For this, I often teach crawling positions and processes, including one I call the lazy lizard, encouraging primordial connectivity of belly, navel, and earth. Just above the belly, expressions of the will develop around the solar plexus or the primary breathing diaphragm, originating on its own central tendon, attaching at the base of the sternum in front, to the lumbar and lower mid-back, and to the lower ribs on both sides. This wonderful umbrella (or dome) below the heart is the complex third chakra. In Shin Somatics, we cultivate this as the anatomical body center where the breathing muscle (the diaphragm) meets the psoas muscle, connecting the upper and lower body in walking, reaching, twisting, and bending—in every dance.

Yogic concepts can be projected beyond specific yoga postures into movement patterning and dance expressions that have lived correlations. The heart, for instance, lies just over the diaphragm, as the central organ and fourth chakra where we express giving and receiving, love and forgiveness. As centering the self through shin (oneness), the heart is the messenger and transformer. And when we are listening, it prompts compassion. Inspiring soft, surging movements, the heart represents the expansive embrace of love and surrender to loss and grief. The heart and torso activate the arms lyrically in forms of reaching out, drawing in, grasping, and yielding. Simple dances of lyrical arm patterns, sitting, standing, or moving through space, encourage forgiveness as a life-affirming principle. It is very satisfying to use touch in relation to the heart with infants, cradling the infant and rocking while covering the heart gently with the free hand. Most infants love this, unless they are hungry. They often respond with calm connectivity, sometimes curiosity. Parents can also learn how to comfort infants through touching the heart space with a soft, melding hand. Infants teach us about the literal energy of the heart, and symbolically about the heart as home and the importance of touch and holding.

Then comes the fifth chakra, the throat, where we say “I have a voice; my voice matters.” Releasing the jaw in somatic bodywork can assist the effectiveness of the voice (and swallowing). Moving up behind the eyes, we experience the mystical third eye, a common symbolization of vision in the Eastern world but less familiar in the West. Through this eye, the sixth chakra, we envision the future—and not just in yoga but also in dances that look out to the horizon. Semiotics of the body become lighter as we ascend to the seventh chakra at the crown of the head, symbolized in the white lotus blossom, an image for wisdom, age, and transcendence. The final section of Land to Water Yoga (2009) includes a process of unwinding the chakras. I conceive this progressively from the root to the transcendent lotus. Jeanne Schul, a longtime student of mine, now a Jungian psychologist and also an author in this book, first introduced me to a variety of chakra processes that envision the body creatively and improvisationally. She includes her conception of dancing the chakras in her chapter. My work concerning the chakras continues to evolve. I hold that the body is always one in its connectedness. The first chakra relates to the seventh and beyond. In butoh, the ascent to the lotus requires the mud of earth. Hijikata Tatsumi, the founder of butoh, famously declared the source of his dance: “I come from the mud.”

In the perspective above, we are relating body, movement, and expression through imagery and also drawing together major features of art and anatomy. We might speak inclusively of somatic movement arts as incorporating varied approaches to moving somatically. Concerning art as an overarching principle, the purpose of art is aesthetic, which also means affective. To move with a somatic purpose is to move with an aesthetic purpose, or affectively with a focus on feeling. Somatic experience is affective experience, and structuring situations for somatic experience to occur is an art, if not a fine art, at least an artful acti...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Prologue on Somatic Contexts
• Part One: On Somatic Movement Arts
• Part Two: Soma and Change
• Part Three: Performing Consciously
• Dance Maps: A Guide for Dance Experiences
• Glossary: Key Terms, Methods, and Narratives of Somatics
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index