Lusty Juventus: 'Somatic Practice' by Ruth Way

www.lustyjuventus.co.uk

The M(other) Project

'Somatic Practice' by Ruth Way

My primary area of research is concerned with training performers and, specifically in Dance Theatre, how to create a dialogue between the experiential, linguistic and physical elements. I would not want to separate these research strands as they are intrinsically linked and inform each other. My aim is for performers to be able to create choreographic forms which are arrived at from their capacity to feel their world and others.

I reflect on my own contemporary dance training back in the late 70's where I would describe that the self was harnessed and the body instructed. There was no choice or in fact time or process to find or realise the form as the imperative to succeed, that is 'not to fail' and get 'it right' was so great it cancelled out any other route or way of reaching a particular form. On reflection I felt there were parts of myself through this training that were very underdeveloped in terms of supporting my creativity, developing who I was and my potential to learn and then exploring how I could stand in the world.

I have developed training programmes where the body can become articulate and expressive in the performance space through an anatomical and kinaesthetic awareness and where the performers learn to move seamlessly between their stories, words and gestures. However often these processes invite in and open up very particular and personal journeys for people and I feel there is a need to examine how to train and create humanly and what this means exactly, perhaps to move towards a training that can nurture and support each individual, their qualities and needs and on stage for them to manifest an interconnectedness between their history, the personal and universal content and the form. It also becomes an exploration of how to be authentic in our movement and how it is that when our audiences witness this authenticity, it has the potential to touch their being.

To do this I have been researching some of the writing of dance philosopher Sondra Horton Fraleigh and her Eastwest somatic movement practice. Fraleigh describes how the subject matter of somatics is the life of feeling. The practice aims to bring about personal growth, to impart an awareness of how we all learn differently because we are different and to realise that we can create and make choices for ourselves. I have completed three of Sondra's intensive somatic movement workshops and have started to apply aspects of the training and somatic principles in my teaching and collaborative performance practice. Through this practice I start to live these experiences and apply these perceptions and, as Fraleigh states, somatics is consciousness itself.

It is this consciousness that one can start to examine, giving the ability to identify very particular patterns of learning and responding, and ultimately to learn how to rid the body of fixing itself and its potential. Its means to do this is through the somatic tools, these being the use of expressive movement, sensory awareness, breath work and through touch. In Fraleigh's book Dancing Identity she writes, 'Through my study at the Wigman School, I understood that I could dance from my own place of power and need not replicate the body of another. The early modern dance as informed by exploratory and playful somaesthetics resisted biomedicines's mechanized views of the body, which separated the body as material substance from its expressive spirit'.

So could I apply these somatic principles to our collaborative framework and how would they influence the process and product? I find Fraleigh reassuring when she reminds us that the human body is what we have universally in common, there is more that unites us than separates. I raise this because in terms of this practice we brought all our other differences into this space. The physical training placed great emphasis on a mind/body unity and how we as performers could manifest presence and inhabit the space fully. Many of our gestures and ways of moving were inspired by the text and and by the imagery in the film that we began to create before entering into a rehearsal space. The film (which eventually developed into M(other)3) provided us with the sensory landscape to work in with its attention to colours, smells, textures and the rapid interference in the motion which spoke of the disintegration of a mind and also its capacity to remember and, at times, move towards stillness.

There is a resonance here for me in a programme note written by Eugenio Barba in which he states 'actors retain the energies that infuse life into their scenic presence, when they do not dance overtly, something dances within them'. As a choreographer these dances within became very significant throughout M(other)1; doing less achieved more in terms of sharing these languages on stage. I realised that the non-hierarchical structure and sense of vulnerability we had challenged ourselves with had enabled us to be part of this sensory world and for us to feel and begin to understand the sense of loss between this mother and daughter. I also realised that there was a close relationship between somatic principles and processes of decision making and close negotiation and how we began to understand through this practice what it actually means to work collaboratively and produce a product that we could stand by.