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

Simply by letting my body move me instead of trying to control it, fascinating movement and useful insights would emerge. I felt the expansiveness of my own vocabulary as a dancer, rather than wondering if I could come up with one more evocative or unusual movement in the studio.

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

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

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

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 Authen

Basically, there are different sources of movement that have been described as the personal unconscious (personal story); the collective unconscious (transpersonal and cross-cultural); or the superconscious (connected to energies beyond the self).

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.

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

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.