The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training by Doran George (review)

Somatics in its evolution in the dance field as a discipline of practice, study, education, and published research is a relatively young field. Existential and bodymind philosopher Thomas Hanna is credited with coining the term "somatics" in 1970. Hanna identified an emerging group of holistic bodymind disciplines as the "somatics field" in 1976. Much of the research in somatics in the dance field (from the 1990s to the present) has focused on articulating what constitutes somatics and its practices and how it is applied to dance education, choreography, dance sciences, and health and injury prevention (with a few exceptions; for example, the research of Jill Green and Sylvie Fortin).

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training by Doran George and edited by Susan Leigh Foster delivers a history of somatics in dance that uniquely expands on current discourse by focusing on how dancers and somatic innovators acquired and applied the rhetoric of nature (the natural) and physical sciences to alter and reconstruct dance training, choreography, and performance from the 1960s through the '90s. Through Leigh Foster's work as editor, the extensive dissertation research of her former PhD student Doran George, whose untimely death prevented completion of the dissertation manuscript for publication as a book, provides a much-needed rigorous examination of ways that dance training practices can instill an embodied politics in alignment with historical, social, and political changes.

Most significantly, as a provocative core thesis, George exposes often practiced, generally unspoken, and rarely challenged underlying values and contradictions that continue to frame and trouble somatics in dance training. The first is the promise to liberate dancers from oppressive dance training through honoring and caring for the body and nurturing autonomous creativity, while simultaneously employing somatics pedagogy and practices where conservative and exclusionary values are often practiced, generally unspoken, and rarely challenged (4). Second, George creates a convincing and well-documented argument suggesting that rhetoric based in the body's "natural capacity" (which is justified by science) is at once an inclusive perspective focused on an individual's ability to move naturally and yet assumes universality—an every "body" can move naturally within every context perspective that disregards or dismisses sociocultural and historical influences (20–27).

George's ethnographic and semiotic analysis of diverse perspectives of carefully selected examples of historical, social, and cultural figures, events, experiences, and somatics practices connects complex viewpoints about how practitioners, educators, and artists interpreted and applied somatics ideas. The book is dense with pertinent theoretical and practice-based examples. George astutely relates these examples to specific social and historical experiences and developments in dance education, performance, choreography, and aesthetics. The copious, significant endnotes challenge the reader. George's synergistic perspective constructs an account of the broader social meaning and underlying valued tropes through which, according to George, corporeality is created (7).

The book is structured with a clear introduction that provides a convincing rational and well-documented theoretical and methodological underpinning. It has three chapters, where George creates a different portrait of conflicting values and practices and simultaneously identifies the benefits of somatics and the somatics rhetoric that demonstrate an idealization of universal individual freedom evident in both postwar US foreign policy and late twentieth-century economic cultures. A concluding chapter calls for further consideration of the political, social, and educational implications of using somatics in dance training and choreography.

Chapter 1 outlays a history of "hidden" somatics values focusing on selected examples from 1960s to '90s artists, dance educators, and somatic practitioners who used somatics to construct pedagogy, practices, vocabulary, and codified techniques. This creates the lens for arguments and analyses through out the book. George's examples are often exactingly significant to problems prevalent in somatics today.

For instance, the rejection of institutionalized or codified pedagogies in modern dance and ballet established justification for the value and need for somatics. The rejected twentieth-century pedagogic lineages include those that emphasize mimicking the teacher/artist; perfecting specific movement patterns; and traditional...