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

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

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.

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? •

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.

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

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.

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

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.