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Somatic Practices and Dance: Global Influences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Martha Eddy
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Extract

My main focus is to reveal the existence of global influences on the development and teaching of somatic principles and disciplines and to discuss why these influences are not in the forefront of somatic inquiry. I hypothesize that the search for “the universal” or “the humanistic” or “the biological” as a throughline of body-mind investigation has encouraged a monocultural approach to somatic pedagogy and the promotion of the field. Second, it is of interest that it has been through the work of those founders of somatic disciplines who are women that it has become possible to retrace more easily some of these global influences on twenty-first-century somatic studies. I also posit that through the lives and experiences of women leaders a more emotional voice enters the holistic paradigm. This paper aims to raise questions, not to be exhaustive in its pursuit of data regarding all the intercultural complications of somatic practices, including questions emerging from gender politics. It is a continuation of the inquiry, begun during the panel “Paradigms and Approaches: The Future of Somatics in Dance” at the Dancing in the Millennium conference in July 2000 (jointly sponsored by CORD, SDHS, DCA, NDEO. LIMS, NDA. among others) regarding the dissolution of any potentially monolithic views of the history and etiology of “somatics,” as well as somatic movement applications in dance (Green 2000; Fortin 2000), with a specific eye to examining how cultural and religious movement practices from diverse cultures have provided philosophical underpinnings and influential theories and practices to the field.

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Winter 2002 , pp. 46 - 62
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2002

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