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.