Set Design: Robert Ferris for “Dancing on the Land”Photograph: Bob HandelmanDancer: Paul Matteson
PREFACE
TO NEW EDITION
Since BodyStories was published in 1991, I have received many letters from around the world. These writings reflect a global network of people attending to the body as subject, not as object, in their lives. People share their stories: a teacher in Sweden, students in Moscow, directors of a massage school in California. We are each part of a much larger framework of understanding, each adding our view.
BodyStories has also been printed in German and Italian. Teaching in these countries through a translator, I hear the ideas of the text in another language and notice the way words shape experience. At Middlebury College in the U.S. where I regularly teach, a Japanese dance student says, “In my country, there are so many words for ‘sensation,’ I don’t know which you mean.” A Norwegian student asks, “What is this word ‘sensation?’” As my understanding of the body deepens, I acknowledge the distance between experience and the words used to convey it.
In the seven years since BodyStories was published, I have remained fascinated by the body attitudes expressed in my classes and workshops. Ambivalence about our physical home remains disturbingly pervasive. Students creating body tracings in an art education course filled their life-sized outlines with expressive symbols of injury, abuse, and fear: scars for surgeries, a black ribbon around the throat, words such as “don’t touch.” One student summed up her experience this way: “It is odd to focus on my body, I’ve been abusing it all of my life.”
There are also cultural shifts affecting