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

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

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

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.”

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

Follow the line of energy and take a ride. There’s an element of release, following, allowing. • Try low-energy pendular: middle energy, high energy. Explore anywhere on that continuum, yielding control. (This is like going with the flow, seeing where you end up.) • Try sustained movement. This requires lots of paired muscles as you move slowly in

Slowly

Bebe Miller spent Saturday mornings from age four until twelve (1954–1962) crafting her mastery as a future

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.

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