Training Bodies to Matter

Abstract

This essay traces three different pedagogical situations in which I try to shift what I see as the negative corporeal dynamics of our contemporary moment, one body at a time. Drawing examples from my experiences with the body-to-body interactions of Contact Improvisation, the dance form that first brought me into dance thirty years ago; Bridging the Body/Mind Divide, a first-year seminar taught to a general range of students at Oberlin College in Ohio, USA; and Girls in Motion, the after-school programme I run for adolescent girls at a local school, I present examples of skills that I believe create an important somatic foundation for a more mindful being-in-the-world. In these examples of corporeal rhetorics, I consciously harness the persuasive force of movement experiences to convince my students there is a better way to dwell in their bodies and in this twenty-first-century world.

Publisher

University Of Coventry

Publication Date

1-1-2009

Publication Title

Journal of Dance And Somatic Studies

Department

Theater and Dance

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jdsp.1.2.143_1

Keywords

Teenage girls, Body-mind, Contact Improvisation, Pedagogy, Somatics, Phenomenology

Language

English

Format

text

Link to Full Text

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