Summary of Morning Topic Presentation by Pamela Geber

Dance Kinesiology Special Interest Group Meeting
International Association for Dance Medicine and Science Annual Meeting
Stockholm, Sweden
November 2005

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My background

• Dancer, performer, studio-based teacher initially
• Became fascinated with anatomy post undergrad in NYC. Included classes with Irene Dowd, experiential anatomy with Sara Rudner in the context of improvisation/choreography, teaching young children – interested in how they learn movt patterns in early years, grad school courses with medical students & PTs, studied Pilates, Alexander Tech & Yoga seriously, had courses & workshops in Ideokinesis, Feldenkrais, Body-Mind Centering. I have been on an ongoing quest to expose myself to many somatic forms.
• I fell in love with higher ed & found a place to combine teaching, performance, research (both quantitative and qualitative) and work with college-aged dance students as they experiment and learn how to develop more fully as thinking, sensing and feeling artists.
• Currently - Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Dance, University of Utah (USA). I stepped into Sally Fitt’s kinesiology shoes at Utah--worked with her during her last year before her retirement--then began teaching the year-long dance kinesiology course & related graduate seminars, working with graduate students on theses in the kinesiology arena. I also teach studio classes (mostly modern, some ballet technique, improvisation, contemporary partnering/contact, choreography), I choreograph, direct the student company, and continue to perform. Dance science info & somatic study inform and affect all of my work in the studio.

In preparation for today’s presentation, I looked back at many earlier publications talking about Somatics.

• Its initial introduction as a term by Thomas Hanna in the 1970s as editor of Somatics Magazine: Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences.
• Its development as an idea & development of discreet practices with Mabel Todd, Lulu Sweigard, Feldenkrais, Laban, Bartenieff, Alexander, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, and many others.
• Its merging with dance training programs, particularly in the collegiate dance world and larger dance festivals (like American Dance Festival in Durham, NC when Martha Myers became Dean in 1969).
• Its strong effect on choreographic styles in the last 15-20 years.
• Its cross fertilization, its merging of discreet practices.

For the dance communities-- Jill Green (in her Somatics: A Growing and Changing Field published in 2002) says that over the last 25 years, “the use of somatics has increased, become more integrated into (dancers’ classes…such as) technique, improvisation and anatomy/kinesiology for dancers.”

• Somatics has meant different things to different people in the dance world.
• According to Thomas Hanna:
  1. Somatics - a field of study that views the body from a 1st person perspective.
  2. Somatics - is a matter of looking at oneself from the inside-out, where one is aware of feelings, movts, and intentions, rather than looking objectively from the outside-in.
  3. “Soma” = a Greek word meaning “living body.” This living, self-sensing, internalized perception of oneself is radically different from the externalized perception of what we call “a body” (which could imply a statue or a dummy). This challenges Descartes separation of body & mind in which the mind was thought of as being of a higher order than the body. (Just by calling the body “our instrument,” in a way separates body from the whole self.)
• Montreal-based Sylvie Fortin, in her article “Living In Movement: Development of Somatics Practices in Different Cultures” says: “Somatics inside and outside academia, I always believed, answers the needs of dancers who have, unfortunately, too often been disembodied from their experience. Through mechanical repetitions of movts, dancers often cultivate attitudes and habits that later impede their capacity for sensing, perceiving and changing….Somatics is part of a larger paradigm characterized by emphasis on a whole system perspective, ecology, decentralization of decision-making and a shift from outside authority to self responsibility.”

Martha Myers, in her seminal articles in the 1980s and 90s, spoke of the early stigma around the hard-sciences vs. somatics. She said (in Dance Science & Somatics: A Perspective published in 1991) that “…dancers and doctors are of different worlds, separated by language, professional focus and even temperament. For some dance participants (at ADF taking kinesiology/anatomy courses), the terminology was daunting and the format off-putting. Teachers were sometimes frustrated by presentations such as “The Development of the Impingement Syndrome” even when enlivened with color slides. There were also subdued but real conflicts of gender and power politics. Doctors are predominantly male; the dance and somatics profession predominantly female. We tend to think of medicine as a hard science with some clinically soft edges, whereas somatics as historically focused on and evolved from the intuitive, which some might call non- or even anti-science. (With its focus on the individual, it’s not reproducible.) However, the “soft” nature of somatics is changing rapidly as somatics concepts and practitioners enter the medical sciences and high-technology resources become available to quantify elements of motion and physical phenomena.”
-In essence, this crossover between hard and soft science was beginning to happen and the lines of definition were beginning to blur. Dancers would most definitely benefit.
-In essence, many people were beginning to approach the teaching of dance kinesiology, technique, improv & comp, from a somatic orientation.

I’ve compiled a list of somatically-oriented approaches to teaching.

• Valuing and nurturing each student’s individual perspective and sense of themselves as thinking and feeling movers. Valuing and nurturing each student’s ability to look at themselves from the inside-out, where one is aware of feelings, movts and intentions, rather than looking objectively from the outside-in. Honoring and working from multiple styles of learning in class.
• A non-heirarchical model of education. The teacher is more of a guide than the expert on the topic. Even hard scientific fact can be considered more of a guide to students’ experience than memorization alone as the end-goal. Application and integration of hard-science is where class material is geared.
• Providing students with ways of working rather than end-goals. Students are less “consumers’ and less “passive participants” in education and instead, are asked to be more directly responsible for their own learning. They are empowered with clearer information, freed of any perceived hampering limitations and thus, given a greater range of choice-making.

Challenges I’ve experienced as a teacher working from the above:

1) Bigger classes. So many perspectives. How to keep everyone focused
collectively while honoring individual experiences & the time it takes for each student to absorb new info. As students learn more about their individual bodies, my hope is that they’ll get so excited about their investigations, that they’ll have lots of questions. How to keep each individual on target, without taking the entire class on their personal tangent and without getting too ahead of themselves (when they don’t have enough hard-science to back up what they’re experiencing proprioceptively).

2) Continuing to present info in different learning modalities - takes time, but ultimately, I believe that I reach more students and that they understand the info more personally, deeply because they’ve seen it (with pictures, images, graphs, words), heard it (in my words, in the TA’s words, in their fellow students’ words), moved it (improvised on a concept, developed their own or learned someone else’s exercise on a theme), touched it (on their own body, on someone else’s body, on the skeleton, at the cadaver lab), spoken it (in small group or partner discussions on a theme) and journaled about it (creative brainstorming on a theme).

3) Challenges re: ambiguity (differences between different texts), or image/sensation that doesn’t necessarily agree with hard science. I value their individual proprioceptive sense just as much, if not more, than scientific fact. I try to find a way to meet them in the middle, where one speaks to and/or supports the other. Every year, I “clean-out” the cobwebs (per se) of scientific evidence that seems less and less relevant to the most recent group of students. Sometimes, I add an “older” theme back in when it seems relevant again. Perhaps I just needed to present it in a different way.

4) Kinesiological freeze! Somatic approaches tend to lean towards whole-body/whole-self integration rather than dancing in parts. The challenge is to help students fine tune some specific parts (sometimes) but immediately putting them back into the whole.

5) Movement efficiency has been a hot term in the choreographic circles informed greatly by somatics. (“Release technique,” a hot term in the downtown NYC dance scene of the 90s, is one example of a somatic offshoot.) If “efficiency” in this definition is considered a central theme of somatics, then aesthetic range will immediately decrease. I’ve started referring to “efficiency” as “movt effectiveness” = using the amount of force desired for a specific aesthetic. When training in technique class (or another body-training system), you’d benefit greatly if you investigate your range in muscular effort and since so many young dancers (in Western Culture) tend to overwork their musculature, reducing the force to practice what’s needed minimally might offer a greater range of choices. A young dancer may realize that the muscular tension he/she was holding on to, was really a habit rather than a choice. I believe that resiliency and vitality come from constantly renewed challenge and change.

6) Grading challenges the less quantitative you get. (This is true for almost any studio class as well.)

Questions for the Group:

• What challenges arise for you when teaching from a somatically-oriented perspective?
• What strategies have you used to deal with those challenges?
• What successes have you seen when teaching from this perspective?
• In the further melding of hard science with somatics, quantitative with qualitative, cognitive with imagistic, what have you experienced as a teacher?

I’d like to close with a pedagogical design as proposed by author Parker Palmer in his book “The Courage to Teach.”

1. The space should be bounded and open.
2. The space should be hospitable and “charged.”
3. The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice of the group.
4. The space should honor the “little’ stories of the students and the “big” stories of the disciplines and tradition.
5. The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community.
6. The space should welcome both silence and speech.

References

Eddy M: An Overview of the Science and Somatics of Dance. Kinesiology and Medicine for Dance 14 (1): 1991/92.

Eddy M: Dance and Somatic Inquiry in Studios and Community Dance Programs. Journal of Dance Education 2(4), 2002.

Fortin S: Living In Movement: Development of Somatic Practices in Different Cultures. Journal of Dance Education 2(4), 2002.

Fortin S: When Dance Science and Somatics Enter the Dance Technique Class. Kinesiology and Medicine for Dance 15 (2): 1993.

Green J: Somatic Knowledge: The Body as Content and Methodology in Dance Education. Journal of Dance Education 2(4), 2002.

Green J: Somatics: A Growing and Changing Field. Journal of Dance Education 2(4), 2002.

Hanna T: Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1988.

Myers M: Dance Science and Somatics: A Perspective. Kinesiology and Medicine for Dance 14 (1): 1991/92.

Myers M: Dance Science and Somatic Education In Dance Training. Keynote address for
The Australian Association for Dance Education biennial meeting, Sydney, Australia, 1989.

Palmer P: The Courage To Teach. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 1998.

Salk J: Teaching Modern Technique through Experiential Anatomy. Journal of Dance Education 5 (3), 2005.

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