A Conceit Of The Natural Body

Under the influence of regimens broadly known as "Somatics," late 20th century contemporary dancers revolutionized their training. They instituted biological and mechanical constructs of the body as the logic for dance classes, claiming to uncover a "natural" way of moving. By doing so these dancers saw themselves as rejecting preceding models such as Graham technique and ballet, which they felt treated the body as an instrument trained to meet the ideals of an aesthetic tradition. Convinced of the importance of their intervention, practitioners of Somatics initially worked with meager resources forging transnational alliances of pedagogies and aesthetics. Yet by the end of the 20th century, the training had found its way in the worlds most venerable dance education programs. A handful of choreographers, who initially experimented with Somatics in a small community, ultimately ascended within a transnational circuit of large concert houses. Educational institutions consequently saw value in Somatics, and implemented its pedagogy based on the conceit that focusing on the natural body provides dancers with the greatest facility for performance, while fueling broad creative possibility in choreographic processes. In contrast with Somatic rhetoric, this dissertation traces how dancers used the idea the idea of nature to tackle changing social circumstances. A conceit of the natural body endured throughout the last 4 decades of the 20th century even while its ideological underpinnings underwent change, visible in shifts seen in studio procedures, the look and aptitudes of the dancing body, and the modalities of concerts. Dancers constructed what they saw as essential bodily truths by combining scientific metaphors, with non-Western practices that they represented as ancient and mystical. Through this combination they felt they retrieved lost corporeal capacities that they believed were still evident in children, animals and supposedly primitive societies. By the 1970s, a community of practitioners had synthesized what they felt was a comprehensively inclusive body that engendered an anti-hierarchical collective dance culture. Somatics therefore lined up with other subcultures of the era that turned to nature in search of personal authenticity as a source for liberation. Bodily "truth" purported to resist outdated gender ideals and authoritarian training, an idea that fueled the rapid transnational uptake of Somatics. As the approach established itself in Britain, Holland and Australia, it disseminated and naturalized key principles of American post-war liberalism; dancers across the network believed they were reclaiming an inherent right to individual creative freedom by displacing modern and classical aesthetics with dance based on the natural functioning of anatomical structure. In the 1980s, artists largely jettisoned the emphasis on collectivism; yet as they became entrepreneurs in line with the new economic culture of staunch individualism, the rhetoric about nature endured. Using signature choreography, and emphasizing the uniqueness of different Somatic-informed pedagogies, they pursued careerism, even as they often contested rampant conservative cultural agendas. Despite the political critique launched in the 1980s, by the close of the 20th century, Somatics had achieved institutional status, embodying new corporate ethics. The creative autonomy that dancers had won in previous decades now recalibrated itself through demands made upon artists in education and the professional field to prove capitalism is constituted by boundless innovation despite diminishing arts resources in an age of austerity. Throughout all these changes Somatics continued to cultivate a canonical body as an invisible category of nature, which purportedly accounted for ontology, yet marked difference and enacted exclusion from its supposedly universal purview.

From its beginnings as an alternative and dissident form of dance training in the 1960s, somatics emerged at the end of the 20th century as one of the most popular and widespread regimens used to educate dancers. It is now found in dance curricula worldwide, helping to shape the look and sensibilities of both dancers and choreographers and thereby influencing much of the dance we see onstage worldwide. Examining somatics in detail and analysing how and what it teaches in the dance studio, this text considers how dancers discover and assimilate new ways of moving and also larger cultural values associated with those movements.

From its beginnings as an alternative and dissident form of dance training in the 1960s, Somatics emerged at the end of the twentieth century as one of the most popular and widespread regimens used to educate dancers. It is now found in dance curricula worldwide, helping to shape the look and sensibilities of both dancers and choreographers and thereby influencing much of the dance we see onstage worldwide. One of the first books to examine Somatics in detail and to analyse how and what it teaches in the dance studio, The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training considers how dancers discover and assimilate new ways of moving and also larger cultural values associated with those movements. The book traces the history of Somatics, and it also details how Somatics developed in different locales, engaging with local politics and dance histories so as to develop a distinctive pedagogy that nonetheless shared fundamental concepts with other national and regional contexts. In so doing it shows how dance training can inculcate an embodied politics by guiding and shaping the experience of bodily sensation, constructing forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summoning bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, the author focuses on the concept of the natural body and the importance of a natural way of moving as central to the claims that Somatics makes concerning its efficacy and legitimacy.

Queer Dance challenges social norms and enacts queer coalition across the LGBTQ community. The book joins forces with feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial work to consider how bodies are forces of social change.

The papers in this volume were presented at a conference held at the Roehampton Institute London, in February 1995, and are concerned with either theological or literary issues related to the nature of religious language. The papers offer different interpretations of a range of issues and suggest further issues that are still unresolved about the nature of religious language, from its early usage in the biblical texts to its recent use in contemporary writing and religious discourse, as well as many points in between.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1856.