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

THE PLACE OF DANCE

Publication of the book is funded by the

Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund

at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving

Dancer: Susanna Recchia

An Instant of Form

Greenwich Park, Canary Wharf, and Southbank

Photograph © Christian Kipp

A SOMATIC GUIDE TO DANCING AND DANCE MAKING

THE PLACE OF DANCE

Andrea Olsen, with Caryn McHose

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, Connecticut

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

© 2014 Andrea Olsen

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Katherine B. Kimball

Typeset in Minion and Quadraat Sans by Passumpsic Publishing

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative.

The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Publication of the book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Olsen, Andrea.

The place of dance: a somatic guide to dancing and dance making / Andrea Olsen, with Caryn McHose.

   p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8195-7405-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)—

ISBN 978-0-8195-7406-0 (ebook)

1. Dance—History. 2. Dance—Psychological aspects. 3. Somesthesia. 4. Senses and sensation. I. Title.

GV1601.O57    2013

792.8—dc23    2013024221

5  4  3  2  1

For the next generation of dancers,

especially Lucas and Tula Isabel, Caitie and Arleigh,

and all the young ones

who deserve dancing as part of their lives.

Drawing by Helen Ingle, age eight

Contents

Preface

Caryn McHose and Andrea Olsen Amphitheater at Epidaurus, Greece

Photograph © Sophia Diamantopoulou

Speak the truth as you experience it; someone else can speak his or her truth.

—Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

Dance is a place I go to know myself and the world experientially and intellectually. The creative process offers a forum in which to pose questions and investigate possibilities. I chose dance for graduate school, over my two other loves, history and biology, because dance encompasses this broad terrain. The creative process was the link.

In my writing and choreography, I often jump, assuming connections between things that might not be apparent. Edge zones bump up against each other, creating areas of heightened possibility, like the terrain between forest and field. The bane of some readers looking for continuity, these sometimes surprising juxtapositions encourage nonlinear and recursive thinking. Distinct disciplines and art forms overlap, and material cycles back on itself, offering both vitality and unity.

Modern dance making, at least since Martha Graham, has been a serious endeavor. The inner and outer lives of the dancer are under investigation. This is my lineage, seeking movement experiences where personal inquiry and ecstasy meet. Somatic practice (trusting the intrinsic intelligence of the body) and the desire for art making (the impulse to shake up habits while giving form to emerging impulses) are in conversation. Responsibility and resilience are inherent. We are embedded in larger systems, remembering our place in the larger order of things.

Writing is consistently present in my life. I remember, at age six, standing by my childhood desk and promising myself I would write—and not let schooling confuse me. I was a good student but not bookish. Often the title rather than the content was my jumping-off point for making dances, paintings, or stories. On the other hand, I’m reminded daily as I write that a trail of books has shaped my life: Homer’s The Odyssey, Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Mabel Todd’s The Thinking Body at critical moments have shifted how I perceive the process of art making. With the embodied memory of those changes, this book offers a collection of possibilities for creative connections.

The author’s voice in this text is mine, a view of contemporary dance through the lens of one life. As indicated by her byline on the cover and title page, colleague Caryn McHose offered much vision and time to this book. Indeed, many parts would simply not have existed without our three decades of intense collaboration. Ideas from co-teaching and shared explorations suffuse the work. My desire is thus to claim Caryn as an essential colleague and to acknowledge her work, even though I must take responsibility for the words themselves. Beyond the two of us, the book also enters into dialogue with the ideas of many other people who make dances, engage the body, and consider the values of art making.

In our collaborative process, I’m a notetaker and proliferator of ideas. Caryn is intuitive and distills. We both are rooted in the art of dance, the Midwest landscape, and a heritage of seeing with undergraduate degrees in visual arts. Caryn brings diverse influences to her teaching: her heritage of outdoor improvisation with Betty Jane Ditmar, Continuum with Emilie Conrad and Susan Harper, tonic function with Hubert Godard, Somatic Experiencing with Peter Levine’s training program, years of private practice in embodied movement, and her shared writing and research investigations with Rolfer/husband Kevin Frank. I bring my training in ballet and with modern dancers (Martha Graham, José Limón, Merce Cunningham), along with depth of study in anatomy and philosophy with Dr. John M. Wilson, experiential anatomy with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the discipline of Authentic Movement with Janet Adler, and environmental education and writing with John Elder, plus years of performing. Caryn and I share influences and value various modes of articulation: touch, word, and performance.

At some point, we both picked up The Thinking Body and felt a shift in our dancing toward somatic practices. Together, we created our own weave of explorations and synthesis of information. Our prior collaborations are embedded in three books: BodyStories, Body and Earth, and How Life Moves. Our current collaboration is rooted in a seven-year Body and Earth Training program taught in Wales and other sites in England and Italy with a dedicated group of students. In this period, we developed the practices and philosophy that underlie this book, culminating in a BE-ING (Body and Earth-ing) score for outdoor dancing. In this book, ten specific exercises are shared and sequenced in what Caryn calls a body of inquiry, included through the To Do section of each chapter. Our intention is that skills for embodied awareness are applicable in life as well as on stage.

We’re not going to tell you everything. This is not a recipe book or traditional how-to. It’s soil and seeds; you nourish what you like, what catches your attention and is useful. We offer a sequence, but you can be independent and enter anywhere in the progression. Backtrack, hop forward, turn around, and stretch into your imagination. Follow your curiosity.

Andrea Olsen, 2013

Introduction

Dancing in a New Place

Dancer and photographer: Ben Brouwer The Tutu Project (2003)

Understanding Body

In the past century, dancers and movement practitioners have seen a revolution in attitudes about the body—from the Cartesian view of body as object (or machine) to body as subject in dance—through experiential anatomy, bodywork, and performance research. We have also tracked some of the cultural, scientific, and religious history that got us into the dilemma of this dualism from the start—separation of mind and body, separation of humans from the rest of the natural world. As the mechanistic worldview gives way, dancers are in a unique position to encourage an understanding of body as part of Earth. Humans co-evolved with the rest of our planet—we are not separate or superior. Yet this is not the familiar perspective. We as dancers are reteaching, relearning, what was once obvious at an experiential level: the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.

Understanding Place

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 buildings that our movement patterns, perceptual habits, and attitudes have been formed. Architect Yi-Fu Tuan describes it this way in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience: Place is security, space is freedom. We are attached to the one and long for the other. […] What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.¹ As dancers, we hold both place and space in our awareness as we work, rooting us in the moment and opening us to unseen dimensions.

Principle of Interconnectedness

Although there are many definitions of place, certain modes of writing and dancing enhance our understanding that humans are part of larger systems. As humans feel the reciprocity and vitality that come from opening ourselves to natural systems, we see that we are intricately involved with the air, water, animals, plants, and soil. The stream you enjoy after a dance class is inside you, resonant with the blood coursing through your veins—not as metaphor but as material, substance, or matter. That’s the essence of ecology: interconnectedness. That’s also the thinking we can encourage in our lives and in our creative investigations. If site work focuses on place only as backdrop for our human stories, we have missed the point—that we are embedded in something larger.

Relevance of Dancing

How can dancers bring the dimensionality we know in our bodies to our relationship to place? Contact improvisation, release work, the discipline of Authentic Movement, and many other investigative movement practices have contributed to conscious, skillful bodies and luscious dancing. Yet the dance field on the whole remains separate from the larger discourse about preserving the Earth systems that support our lives. Why? Perhaps it’s because we still don’t think that what we do as dancers has impact. Environmental activists are energized by the immediacy and difficulty of what humans have to do in the face of global environmental challenges, with climate change as a key issue. They also know that the arts are essential to the discourse; scientists can’t change human hearts and actions by statistics alone.

I feel that dance, in particular, has a unique role to play in rehabilitating humans’ relationship with Earth. We need both a cognitive (mental) and an experiential (embodied) understanding to make a change in behavior. Drawing on the depth and detail of our research and experiential knowledge, dancers bring an embodied, integrative, cross-disciplinary perspective to contemporary issues. Are we ready to engage with others in visioning new possibilities?

Encountering Grief

Once we genuinely embrace the principle of interconnectedness between body and Earth, we can often encounter grief, along with a full spectrum of emotions that come with an empathetic resonance with natural systems. If we recognize that we are part of Earth’s body, then we feel more intimately the damage we’re doing, and we may initially be overwhelmed. All the layers that we have encountered while rehabilitating our individual and collective relationship to body are present as we bring our awareness to place—from anger at the damage inflicted by an objectified view, to the ecstasy of union. Eventually, bringing attention to place grounds us in a larger context, takes the edge off separateness, and can move grief and anger into action. Layers of understanding connect so that all we have learned as movement practitioners can be released into a larger dialogue.

Creating Community

Dancers often have complex relationships to place: moving every few years, spending much time on tour, maintaining a nomadic mind state where home is primarily in the body. The egoism and hyperindividuality so prevalent in America—the idea that you are the center of the Earth and everything should rotate around you—runs counter to the process of contemporary dancing and dance making. The requirement among dancers today for increased awareness—of the body, and of others within collaboration—shapes people who really think and move differently from the cultural norm. The sense of ourselves as separate from the culture at large, as well as from our local communities, can create a feeling of alienation, unless we recognize ourselves within a larger context. Macro and micro perspectives—zooming in and zooming out—let the aperture of perception move close as well as find distance, enhancing both a local and a global relationship to place. In this process, we develop communities with shared sensibilities beyond political boundaries. Dance networks create new ways of interacting, new relationships to community.

Taking Our Place

Where we focus our attention affects what we perceive. As dancers, we attend to the body as the medium through which we experience the world. As we open our senses to the world outside and to the world inside, we come to recognize them as one. From this perspective, without changing anything else, we are dancing in a new place. And there is no prescribed response; new forms, new visions, will emerge.

Experiential knowledge of body is essential in this time of disembodied rhetoric and environmental destruction. My hope is that we can and will inspire each other to keep going with our investigations, to connect knowledge of body systems with Earth systems, to see what comes, and to articulate our findings. Like climbing a mountain for a larger view, dancing offers the opportunity to feel refreshingly small while engaging with something grand. Locating ourselves in place, we can appreciate the moment, recognize what we have to offer, and step forward to face the challenge through dancing and dance making.²

Andrea Olsen

About This Book

Paul Matteson in studio

Photograph © Bob Handelman

This is an experiential text in which time and space are integral. The goal is that you think and move. Each chapter is short, with time to do both. Through our words, we hope you will find deeper connection to your own creativity, engaging whole-body learning while honoring the historical lineage of embodied artists who have investigated dancing and dance making before you.

The thirty-one Days in this book lead you through multiple processes of dancing: moving, making, collaborating, and living a life. In this way, the structure is applicable to students studying creative process; technique; composition and choreography; improvisation and performance; and somatic practices, including health, healing, and environmental dimensions. Each day, or chapter, offers information based on scientific research and experiential views. There’s a lot to know about dancing—a lifetime of investigation.

The To Do sections in each chapter have three themes: a somatic practice, a dance exploration, and a writing prompt. If you engage all three, by the end of the book you’ll have refined embodied awareness, created a dance for personal pleasure or performance, and filled a writing journal, clarifying personal voice and artistic aesthetic.

The studio notes are drawn from workshops, classes, and lectures by a variety of artists. I’ve always been interested in how dancers use language to evoke an experience, create a learning environment, or point to the mystery of art making. These handwritten notes are about catching direct lines from the artist-educators themselves. It’s how I learn—not transcribing every word or the full progression of thought, but collecting kernels to provoke inspiration and evoke investigation. Due to the nature of perception, these kernels inherently blend my ways of interpreting what I hear with the specific intent of the artist.

You will see that as a teacher, I tell stories. Sometimes they are the most efficient way to communicate complex ideas, by synthesizing multiple layers into a cohesive whole. Emotions are evoked as essential links to engagement. An anecdote is the shortest story you can tell with a beginning, a middle, and an end—it’s the story you tell over and over to help you understand something, until it’s honed down. Hearing and reading stories encourages you to remember and tell your own, connecting memory and imagination to amplify the present.

Somatic investigations invite the body’s intelligence—you are your own laboratory and teacher.¹ The experiential exercises may seem opaque, but let yourself explore. Engage the theater of your imagination and allow the words to be a sound score. You can read through the whole exercise, record yourself reading, or partner with a friend. Or, you can enter the experience simply by moving and then notice and reflect on what happens. There’s no right way to begin. Mind affects movement, movement affects mind. Allow your curiosity to be your guide.

Photographs are partners to dance, outliving the life of performance. Some are works of art in their own right, both documenting and transcending the specificity of the moment. A good image does much to make a page of writing come to life, by coupling the visual imprint of a moment with the ephemeral art form of dance, and allowing repeated viewing.

As far as I know, everyone engaged in the studio notes, photographs, and anecdotes has been consulted, participated in editing, and said yes to their views as included. Sharing material reflects the generous nature of the arts. Ideas, exercises, favorite quotes, and images to inspire are passed from one to another—sometimes losing the source.

In this era, we are fortunate to have available many training techniques, somatic practices, and spiritual modes of inquiry. One of the challenges is choosing what’s useful to your development at this time and committing to a practice. Dancing plays many roles in one’s life. Choosing what training pathways will enhance personal growth invites discernment and authenticity—a willingness to listen to your deepest longing.

Learning is not a linear progression. Like dancing and dance making, it can be fun or irritating or both simultaneously. Bringing anything complex toward a unified view, through the matrix of your own body, life, or pen is challenging. You will find that there’s room for error and for discovery.

What You Need

Find a studio. Identify a studio for consistent movement inquiry. Sweep the floor, remove unnecessary objects, and establish a level of privacy so you can investigate without inhibition. The studio doesn’t have to be perfect, but it requires attention. You are developing a relationship to your self, your work, and the space that will support your process. Developing a robust studio practice informs your investigation and inspires high-impact dancing.

Choose a writing journal. Engage writing as an exploration; consider narrative as a form of movement in time and space. Throughout this book, a progression of writing prompts encourages capacious themes—large enough to take anything you can throw at them! Put your pen to the page or fingers to the keypad and start writing. The suggested time length is for spontaneous writing: if you find a rich vein, write for as long as it takes. Choose a simple field journal—easy to carry with you—and not too precious. Write freely, waste pages, and risk discovering something new.²

Dedicate time. Show up! Consistent studio practice and journaling require a clear intention to value creativity in your life. You can move through the thirty-one days or chapters at your own speed, or give yourself a month to explore the whole.

What You’ve Learned

When I asked author Satish Kumar about his criteria for selecting articles for Resurgence magazine, he said, They need to have both scientific rigor and wisdom. It’s not enough to just offer the facts; we need to know what you’ve learned from your life.

Introductions

Writing colleague John Elder tells me that you can do anything in your writing as long as you say what you’re doing in the introduction. I hope he is right. I’m inviting you, the reader, to share my complex view of the world, interdisciplinary and holistic. It’s too much, and, I hope, just enough to evoke your imagination and encourage participation.

Part One

MOVING

DAY 1

Tanztheater Wuppertal

Choreographer: Pina Bausch

Nelken (Carnations)

Performer: Julie Anne Stanzak

Photograph © Jochen Viehoff

Basic Concepts

Dance is a way of living in the world.

—Lisa Nelson, interview

Dance is both universal and highly personal. It is common to all peoples and cultures, and framed by particular styles and desires. Every person is a dancer—yet fully embodied intelligence expressed through the moving, dancing body is rare.

Three basic concepts enhance our understanding of movement in contemporary life. When embodied, they inform where, how, and why we dance, and who we are.

Bodies are part of Earth. Humans co-evolved with this planet, and our perceptual and movement systems are embedded within every landscape and cityscape we inhabit. Orientation to weight and to space informs inner and outer movement. As dancers, we don’t create movement; we participate in a dynamic, moving universe.

Bodies have intrinsic intelligence. We share a highly efficient form, developed through 3 billion years of evolutionary history—beginning with the first living cell. A multilayered nervous system is present throughout our structure, reflecting this heritage. As dancers, rather than seek control over our bodies, we learn to listen to this deep intelligence.

Bodies locate us. Movement is inherent; we move to feel ourselves in relation to the Earth. The mysterious animating flow that moves through every cell in the body and all life systems is the creative source. For innovation in creative work, we need inhabitation—of our bodies, of the places we live and love, and of the ideas we want to bring responsibly back to community.

STORIES

Distinctions

When we were naming this book, a colleague said, "Please don’t use the word dance in the title. It leaves me out. I’m involved in movement, but I’m not a dancer. We pursued this with colleague Lisa Nelson, who responded, But dancing is what we do."

≈

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, founder of the School for Body-Mind Centering, clarifies that the difference between moving and dancing is the quality of embodiment.

Yield

At several times in my life, yield (rest) was not enough. I had to lay my belly down on the Earth and drain down, down—for hours—until I felt energy returning to my body. Then I stood and walked back into the world. The first time was on a rocky shore along Penobscot Bay in Maine. I was in a secluded waterside cabin, alone after a family reunion. Outside in the August morning light, I lay myself down on a bed of warm stones in the cove. Listening to the lapping of waves, I did not get up. Lunchtime passed and eventually the shadows of dusk arrived, the water moving closer and away. Collapse, waiting for the return of self at the end of deep, loving relationship was a letting go beyond what I knew how to do. Only the Earth was enough to hold me.

One learns the difference between yield and collapse. In the latter, all the body systems call out to receive what they need. Intrinsic, organismal intelligence goes to work to refresh and repair, resetting broken rhythms and healing the heart.

Orientation

Arriving at Heathrow Airport in London, Susanna Recchia from Italy greets me: I’m going to take you to the place where time and space were invented. As a dancer, I’m intrigued. We climb to the monument for the Prime Meridian of the World and stand along the illuminated stripe marking 0 degrees longitude. Turning, we face a clock displaying Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)—the global standard, delineating hour, minute, second. Here, in Meridian Park in England, where and how we stand creates our experience of the world.

≈

In Quito, Ecuador, one month later, our guide asks, Do you want to go to the equatorial monument? Not the fancy one in town, but the accurate one marking 0 degrees latitude? We pull into a parking lot next to an empty expanse of ground.

A woman at an outdoor table offers me a map of the world, with the equator running north to south. The map key states, The Equator is the line that unites the two hemispheres into one World. That is why Equator means ‘equalizer: the line of balance, of equilibrium, and of unity.’

This shift of perspective broadens our view. The grid of longitude and latitude delineates the outer world, but the body has its own compass. More ancient than clocks and maps, gravity tells our human perceptual system about down, locating us in time and place.

TO DO

Orientation—Where am I? (Caryn McHose)

Taking time to arrive and locate yourself invites embodied awareness.

Walking: Greet your oldest friend, gravity, telling you about DOWN. How do you notice the sensation of weight in your body?

•  Continue walking, exploring the floor with your feet. Enjoy active feet.

•  Then receive with your feet. Explore through sensing feet. Does that change how you move?

•  Now, let the soles of your feet meet the surface of the floor—tamping the Earth. Enjoy active and sensing feet simultaneously.

•  Continue moving, and stretch the palms of your hands. Feel the air, and receive the news of the universe from all that’s around you through the palms.

•  Extend the top of your head, reaching into space. Pull on the tops of your ears and feel the skin stretch upward (like Spock’s ears in Star Trek).

•  Visualize the little ear stones (otoliths, mostly calcium carbonate) in the labyrinths of your inner ears. This is your balance system, telling you where your head is in relation to gravity, as well as about acceleration and deceleration. Imagine long earrings dangling, amplifying your sense of DOWN.

•  Bring in peripheral vision, soft focus with awareness of self and what surrounds you. Now use your eyes to see something specific, drawing you out into space.

•  Grow a tail of your choice: poodle, salamander, or dinosaur. Move your tail and feel how it resonates throughout your spine. Enjoy! Shake out any tension from your spine, as you elongate head-to-tail.

•  Continue moving, dancing, exploring all the senses involved in orientation (tonic system): hands and feet, spine, otoliths, and eyes.

•  Now, yield down to the floor, lying on your back and releasing your weight into the ground.

•  Feel the sensations of being backed up, surface to surface, supported by the Earth.

•  Yield, and breathe deeply—full breath in and full breath out.

•  Before you roll to a seated position, notice the pre-movement in your body. Can you stay spacious as you prepare to bring yourself to vertical?

•  Stand, connecting to weight and space. Maintain a sense of back-space, supporting your depth as you look forward.

The pre-, pre-, pre-movement of dancing on the Earth is yield, connecting down toward gravity so you can push away and move through space.

TO DANCE

Familiar-Voice Dancing

10–20 minutes

Begin with what’s familiar: your idiosyncratic movement and heritage, your own dance vocabulary.

Start moving:

•  Enjoy what feels good as you’re dancing: your unique sense of time, space, and dynamics.

•  Notice your signature movements (those that show up in every dance).

•  Dance long enough that you have to dig deep for endurance. Stay close to your true self.

•  Find an ending or transition.

•  If working in a group, improvise your familiar-voice dance witnessed by others. Form a circle and alternate who enters to solo; watchers stay open and ready to enter (1–5 minutes each). Explore improvising this voice in different places—for example, the studio, outdoors, and in your kitchen. Does place change how you move, how you perceive yourself?

TO WRITE

Personal Orientation

20 minutes

What do you care about, and how is that reflected in your work?