Contradictory Dissidence

This chapter examines the dissemination of Somatics pedagogy globally, focusing on five key sites where it developed: New York City, New England, England, the Netherlands, and Australia. Each site developed Somatics in different ways, adapting it to fit the aesthetics and politics of the locale. At the same time, teachers and performers frequently traveled from one site to another, thereby maintaining a network of distinctive yet mutually reinforcing hubs of practice. The chapter shows how Somatics met different kinds of needs for dancers in the distinct locales as they worked to establish experimental approaches to technique and performance and to connect with their sociopolitical surround. Even as Somatics was adapted differently in each location, it also carried with it an ideology of American expansionism that validated freedom and individuality.

Introduction

The Introduction provides an overview of the theoretical approach taken in the book, namely to consider movement in general and training regimens for dancers in particular as forms of cultural production that disseminate both an aesthetics and a politics. It discusses methodologies, including ethnographic and choreographic analysis, oral history, and critical contemplation of the author’s own extensive experience with Somatics regimens. The author argues, in part based on their personal experience, that through the invocation of metaphors such as the “natural body,” Somatics had the effect of both excluding and repressing some aspects of identity while liberating others.

Conclusion

This study has traced the relationship between training, dissemination, and choreography within a small community that identified itself as concerned with experimentation in contemporary dance. Applying insights about the body gleaned from earlier in the twentieth century, this group of artists and teachers slowly consolidated around their mutual disapprobation of modern and classical training regimens and their eager interest in exploring new paradigms based in the body’s anatomical truths. Referring to this aggregate of overlapping practices as Somatics, I have argued that dancers worked to achieve an unencumbered individuality that contrasted markedly with the more authoritative imposition of aesthetics in classical and modern concert dance. By focusing on the experience of dancing, Somatics encouraged practitioners to connect with their “unique” embodiment of natural principles and to retrieve an authentic self that was thought to be integral to the physical body. This notion that the dancer embodies individual authenticity by accessing a natural body is probably the major contribution that Somatics has made to Western concert dance compared with, for example, the technical excellence in the idealized vocabulary of classical ballet or the codification of emotional expression in modern dance. Yet, despite the seemingly progressive thrust of Somatics, dancers, in their pursuit of individual authenticity, actually fulfilled postwar liberal ideals that were central to American expansionism and that permeate contemporary capitalism. The postwar American government justified military, economic, and cultural expansion by insisting they were protecting and propagating a universal right to individual freedom; dancers invested in the same idea by touting, as universally applicable, the notion that individual creative freedom can be accessed through functional imperatives of the body. This study consequently argues that Somatic authenticity embodies a late twentieth-century capitalist ideal of propagating universal individual freedom....

Somatics Bodies on the Concert Stage

This chapter looks at the relationship between Somatics training and the concert stage where its influence on dancers was increasingly evident. Focusing on New York City specifically, the chapter identifies three phases where Somatics impacted performance differently: first, as signaling the dancer’s real-time efforts to construct the dance in performance; second, as providing novel sources of movement; and third, as displaying a new standard of virtuosity. The chapter shows how in each of these phases the relationship of the choreographer to the performer shifted. In the first phase the choreographer and dancer were one and the same, processing the dance in real time, and this was seen as a radical alternative to midcentury modernist approaches in which the dancers showcased the choreographer’s vision. In the second phase, dancers deployed Somatics to demonstrate new vocabularies of movement and new ways of moving, not so much as a way to focus on dance making as to establish their unique artistic voices. In the third phase, the role of the choreographer was restored as the author of the dance, separate from the dancers, who then displayed the choreographer’s vision.

Renewable Originality

This chapter traces the history of the development of Somatics training from its early twentieth-century pioneers through to its contemporary use globally as a system for training dancers. Throughout it pays special attention to the ways that Somatics pedagogy made the case for its efficacy through appeal to the natural body. Pioneering teachers developed Somatics by studying the musculoskeletal functioning of the body, and they argued that this structure was universal, lying beneath any cultural and social influences. At the same time, they incorporated references to mystical Eastern practices and primitive peoples, and in so doing established the Somatics body as white and heterosexual. The chapter considers how Somatics opened dance training to many new bodies and how it excluded other bodies. It also exposes the way that Somatics continually reinvented itself through appeal to a universal naturalness.