Somatic Processes: Convergence of Theory and Practice.

In Claire Chafee’s play Why We Have a Body, the character Renee reflects on her lover’s body and observes, “The body holds grudges. The body is old. Maybe that’s why we have one: it’s the only thing we take everywhere” (49). Renee’s observations concerning the potential narratives hidden within and beneath the surface of her lover’s skin point to the complex relationship between mind and body—muscles and memory. Elizabeth Grosz states in Volatile Bodies, the body is the “site of the intermingling of mind and culture” (116). While each of us has had a singular set of life experiences, we are all sites for this intermingling. Specialists in movement training for actors are not only “sites for intermingling,” but also translators of body knowledge who must integrate information from a variety of fields in their work with actors. Movement specialists constantly blend their personal studies of distinct mind/body techniques—from body therapies to different physical techniques such as dance or combat—to create methods to help actors embody a text. In pursuit of this goal, their bodies become a site for exploration, deconstruction, and recombination of distinct and separate “bodies of knowledge” with a particular cultural and philosophic base.

In 1990 I was hired as a movement specialist for the MFA in Acting program at the University of California, Davis. Although I had not yet developed a coherent method of training actors in the area of movement, I had extensive background in various forms of acting, somatic therapies, and dance—the latter a unique combination of Western, Japanese, and African forms studied in the US and abroad. My experience at Davis provided an opportunity to integrate my background in Western movement and dance with the dance forms of Japan and Africa in the establishment of a movement training program for American actors. In the following article, I discuss potential links between methods of dance training, perception, and the imagination in the hope of furthering a conversation among movement teachers concerned with developing a training method. Drawing attention to my body as a historically specific site of investigation is necessary given the experiential method of investigation involved. To illustrate my own process of trial and error, success and failure, as I looked for a means to blend practice, theory, and method, I have divided the article into four sections, each related to a different kind of personal discovery.

Discovering the Potential of Somatic Learning

Twentieth-century body therapists from Moshe Feldenkrais to Ida Rolf have pointed out the individualized relationship between body image or awareness and personal history. In The Potent Self, for example, Feldendkrais offers an extensive discussion of how training in physical forms, sports, and dance can influence our self-image. My own education included a conservative religious upbringing that taught me to distrust the “sinful” body; a school system that focused on aural and visual learning; and a physical and dance education that divided the body into discrete parts. In dance classes, I was one of twenty or thirty students who stood behind the teacher, watched her in a mirror, and attempted to imitate her movements. The class structure was divided into a warm-up period followed by a series of dance phrases. The warm-up concentrated on separate body parts: the lower body learned to bend and balance, the upper body to remain stable but supple. In dance phrases, the separate movements of the upper and lower body were combined in more complex sequences. Trying to become the image in the mirror, I found that this education led me to distrust my own body, to experience it as a set of disparate parts—the image was not myself, but rather someone else.

This self-image did not change until 1986 when I began intensive study of Nihon Buyo, a classical Japanese dance form related to the theatrical traditions of noh and Kabuki, from Kanriye Fujima, a Japanese woman who came from Hiroshima to the United States in 1957 specifically to teach American students. ¹ Kanriye Fujima’s method of instruction relies on an individualized and...