The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making

Day 26

Dancing and dance making create agency over situations by allowing creative response. They help us develop skills for meeting emotions, so we can stay present in challenging situations. When we are in dialogue with our body’s timing—learning and growing—development and creativity are instinctive. Emotions are natural participants in the journey: we cry, laugh, and keep dancing. Significantly, we recognize the distinction between what’s emerging from the body for personal healing and what’s ready to be shared through art. Choices are to be made. There’s a skill to knowing what we need and engaging body intelligence, and there are effective practices to assist in the process. Various forms of dance movement therapy, bodywork, massage, body-mind integration, and somatic movement awareness techniques serve artistic clarity. Increased sensory awareness can enhance dynamic range in dancing, partnering rigorous physicality and subtlety of gesture. The goal is to combine heightened sensitivity with clarity of expression. One of the signposts of creating ease in the body is that we can inhabit ourselves more fully, welcoming ourselves home. Understanding self offers a protocol for working with others. As choreographers and teachers, we acquire skills to support the physical and emotional development of the dancers we work with. Choreography itself can repattern the brain, opening new pathways through repetition and investment . Working within specific choreographers’ styles and visions, we engage other nervous systems and muscularities, expanding and perhaps rehabilitating self-image. Trusting the inherent wisdom of the body allows new pathways to open. Moving beyond stereotypes, dancing does not have to be painful—ease is inherent. We are born to dance, to run, and to be physical; recovery involves waking up. The Autonomic Nervous System The Autonomic Nervous System The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is part of the peripheral nervous system. It is composed of nerves and ganglia located along the front of the spine, anterior to the vertebral bodies, and it also lines the digestive tract. Governing the vital organs and glands, the ANS affects heart rate, breath rate, and digestive and sexual functions; messages go back and forth between body and brain. The ANS can function rapidly and continuously without conscious effort, regulating the visceral activities that maintain the body. The ANS has three interconnected divisions: the sympathetic, parasympathetic , and enteric nervous systems. The sympathetic division of the ANS Healing Dancing The inquiries of art-making and therapy overlap. —Liz Lerman, Hiking the Horizontal Day 26 Day 26: Healing Dancing • 203 Who Dances? “Our society tells us again and again that there are people who can dance and there’s everybody else, who shouldn’t even try. And that’s such a tragedy,” says David Leventhal, who works with the Mark Morris Dance Group and directs a project with the Brooklyn Parkinson Group. Choreographer Tamar Rogoff creates Diagnosis of a Faun drawing on Gregg Mozgala’s firsthand experience with cerebral palsy and her own lifetime investment in studying the body through dance. Improvisers Karen Nelson and Alito Alessi form Joint Forces Dance Company, which works with contact improvisation and mixed abilities, and offers DanceAbility workshops internationally. All have films and articles documenting their work—and opening possibilities for others. 204 • living stimulates the body toward activity and engagement; the parasympathetic toward cycles of rest and digestion; and the enteric, the most primitive aspect of the nervous system, is the local nervous system of the digestive tract. The sympathetic, parasympathetic, and enteric nerves work together, not antagonistically, to coordinate body functioning for optimal vitality and health. In dance and martial arts, the ANS is considered the location for “centered ” energy, called the hara in aikido and the dan tien in tai chi. ANS innervation engages endocrine secretions and automatic responses for integrated movement, underlying a sense of integrity. Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) During normal situations of alertness, the sympathetic nerves (thoracolumbar nerves) support clarity and directness of action. But during what is perceived as a stressful situation, the sympathetic nerves trigger the fight, flight, freeze, or friendly response: dilation of pupils for increased vision; dilation of capillaries of the lungs for more oxygen; decrease in digestion and salivary gland secretions; increase in blood to skeletal muscles; decrease of blood to the digestive organs; increase in blood glucose concentration in preparation for activity; as well as release of bladder muscles to reduce energy expended.1 For dancers, it is through the sympathetic nervous system that we track and direct our internal movement and energetic processes.2 The edge of sympathetic activation...