6. Develop aesthetic standards. This is achieved when a balance is struck between life experience and art expression.
Expressing your experience while experiencing your expression, moving your senses while sensing your movement—that is what makes any life movement a dance. That is living your life “art”-fully.
ORDINARY MOVEMENT
A fundamental tenet of the Life/Art Process is that we begin with the common language of movement. Everyone has a body and every body moves. None of us has to be taught how to move because we are all already moving. The language of movement is our most fluent tongue and a language all human beings hold in common. This is the key to its power to communicate, create relationships, evoke emotion, and influence our experience. For many cultural, religious, and moralistic reasons, many people today, especially in white Western culture, have shut down the full range of sensation, motion, and emotion. We emphasize sight and hearing almost to the exclusion of our other senses, especially the kinesthetic sense, but the totality of what we know comes to us through all of our senses, not just our eyes and ears. As we devalue our senses, we diminish what we know and can possibly know about one another, the world, and ourselves. We abandon our capacity to fully experience ourselves and the world in which we live.
Because many of us live at such a distance from our bodies, the use of ordinary, intrinsic movement is at the core of my approach to dance. I am committed to reconnecting people to their dancing bodies, even if they have no identification with being a dancer. I want a dance that any body can do—young or old, able-bodied or disabled, trained or untrained. This means the most efficient language for dance is pedestrian, common, quotidian movement. Despite how we have been culturally conditioned to ignore the signals of our bodily wisdom, we nonetheless live in our bodies every day and rely on them to participate in every aspect of our lives. So in referring to “ordinary movement,” I literally mean the movements that make up the tasks we do every day: the way we walk, sit, stand, and run. The way we pick things up and put them down, the way we hold a child, the way we relax, the way we lift and drop, the way we wash the dishes. The ways we encounter one another—our voices, our songs, and our simple caresses—also are included in my dance vocabulary. We often move without thinking, yet everything we know and have experienced is reflected in the movement of our bodies. Ordinary movements of the body structure our experiences and our expression. And this kind of movement belongs to all of us, regardless of our political beliefs, our racial or religious heritage, even our individual lived experiences. This commonality is perhaps the most open-ended opportunity for us to meet across the social barriers that so often constrain our human interactions.
When we open ourselves up to all of our senses and learn to listen to what our bodies are telling us, we often find ourselves at odds with dominant cultural injunctions against feeling and responding authentically. Reclaiming ordinary movement as something important and meaningful is a resistance to routine disregard of the body. Working with people using dance to express issues that are central to us brings us quickly to a place of commonality, empowerment, and the possibility of transformation. Activating the kinesthetic sense and experiencing our bodies as resources, rather than liabilities, can help move us across outdated social boundaries that limit our compassion and our love. We can reinhabit the whole body, and in so doing, gain a dimension of understanding, creativity, and connection to the mystery of the universe that is unavailable to us when we try to understand our lives only through mental analysis.
AWARENESS OF YOUR EMBODIED SELF
I think of “the body” as a multilayered energetic form, comprised of the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies. The patterns of the body reflect and influence all the patterns of our lives. The physical body is the material aspect of the form—muscles, bones, tendons, blood. It is the site of sensation, and an awareness of this body gives us a continual experience of intrinsic motion. We can experience the physical body in the pulse of our blood and the wave of our breath, in our locomotor movements, and in the physical tasks we do. An awareness that we are constantly in motion is available to all of us and is at the root of what I call “dance.” As we explore and work with task-oriented, natural movements to create a common language for the physical body, we are deepening our capacity to feel what our bodies naturally do: breathe, pulse, flow, stop, start, and so on.
The emotional body is that part of us which responds with anger, happiness, sadness, concern, empathy, or any other emotion. There is a feedback process between physical movement and emotion that both illuminates and motivates our bodies. The emotional body is not separate from the physical body, but its responses are different. Emotions form a particularly human language and need to be understood on their own terms. This can often be read on the surface of our bodies. For example, a tightly contracted, pounding fist might give rise to anger, while a softly contracted chest might generate sadness. If you change the movement to a tensely contracted chest, your emotion might change to fear. Try throwing your arms into the air with an expanded and open chest and say, “I am so depressed.” It’s incongruent. There is a profound relationship between how we move and the emotions we feel. This indivisible relationship forms the common language of the emotional body. I have found that working with simple instructions that direct dancers to the connection between movement and emotions helps deepen our capacity to feel our emotional versatility and range.
I draw a distinction between feelings and emotions. The word “feeling” refers to a physical sensation and our awareness of it. The word “emotion” refers to our reactions to our experience and our mental associations with it. So the “feeling” of a particular movement might be of contraction while the emotion might be “scared.” Or the sensation of a gentle touch may give rise to the emotion of being loved and cared for. Being able to distinguish between feelings and emotions increases our somatic literacy and helps us know ourselves that much better.
When we work with movement and emotions, associations and images inevitably arise. These images, associations, and thoughts arise through the actions of the mental body. In my workshops, we take time to draw these images and create stories from them. The content—the meaning—of our movement surfaces in these drawings and provides us with an externalized reflection of our subjective experience. This is one way we turn our experience into something we might commonly call “art.” Visualizations form a common language of the mental body. We reflect, write, and share the meaning of our drawings with one another, and this level of communication makes us more visible to one another and to ourselves. This method, called the Psychokinetic Visualization Process, is one way to articulate the mental body without losing connection to the nonverbal nature of movement. (See “The Psychokinetic Visualization Process and Healing Through Dance” later in this chapter.)
The spiritual body is the most mysterious body of all, and it may be that the spiritual body always exists beyond the reach of words to describe it. It is the body that is endowed with the capacity to experience our connections to each other and the natural world. It is the body that is not only aware of the mystery of existence, but is most completely part of it. The spiritual body is, in one profound sense, our constant, fluctuating relationship to the life force. My deep commitment to dance stems from its ability to place me more consciously in touch with feelings of love, compassion, and the timelessness of being—the spiritual aspects of my self.
WHEN ORDINARY MOVEMENT BECOMES DANCE
What is the connection between ordinary, everyday movement and “dance”? How do we make the shift from one to the other? I believe this shift happens when we choose our movement for reasons other than the purely functional. When our awareness is focused on the expressive qualities of movement, we begin to experience it as dance. This awareness is available to anyone, regardless of any specific movement training. Dance, in these terms, is about intention, and not about the specific movements or actions themselves. Deep breathing can be a dance if we come to it with a quality of awareness and curiosity. Setting the table or sweeping the floor can be a dance. Imagine the possibilities for invigorating our lives when we bring this kind of awareness to movements we do every day.
The “techniques” I want to impart are ones that cultivate the whole person as a