Life as a Modern Dancer

Somatic Writing Series: Cynthia Oliver, Nina Haft, and Jill Randall

Design by Claire Calalo Berry of Flourish and Frost

I am thrilled to run this new series on the blog. Nine dancers share ideas around somatic themes
and how these themes play out in our lives right now - such as softening, allowing, activating, and
slowing down to feel.

Like "flash fiction writing," each writer took on the challenge of sharing their ideas in 100 words or less.
I hope you might get inspired to write on these themes as well, succinctly and poetically within this word limit!

Today we hear from Cynthia Oliver, Nina Haft, and yours truly. Cynthia and Nina have contributed numerous
posts to Life as a Modern Dancer over the years. Find some of those additional links below.

Be well,

Jill Randall
Blog Director, Life as a Modern Dancer

---------------
on Somatics

Regarding somatics and blackness

Aren’t we already somatic?
Don’t need to announce, defend or prove?
That key word so often wielded to ignite or indict.
Exclude or preclude
Just move your move.
You don’t have to name your body part to know its wield and weight
Don’t need to demonstrate, placate or soothe
to a new tune
somatic can be fierce
and fast
can attack
Can flip that quick twitch switch
be useful and necessary
Can also be black
and soft
and sensorial
and sensitive
Slow is a groove too
It don’t require no special tone or approach
No voice nor cadence
You can
just do you
And be somatic

 

Cynthia Oliver is an award winning choreographer/performer.
She is professor of dance and associate vice chancellor for humanities,
arts, and related fields at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

---------------
slow down to feel

astonishing what happens at the speed of mindfulness
superb dances of infinite possibility alive in
every choice
.
gradually shifting my weight
my muscles and bones
feel
departure and arrival all
at the same time
.
.
when i forget to see
you
i am also choosing
slow dance says here right here
start again
listen
to
.
her
.
i want to mend this
us
my relentless forgetting
and feel the spaces
i’ve rushed through
.
.


Nina Haft (she/her) is a choreographer, educator and community builder
living on unceded Chochenyo Ohlone land, aka Oakland, CA.
She is a Professor of Dance at Cal State East Bay, and a student of urban wilderness.
---------------
Variety

We catalog our movement preferences – the classes and choreographies and lesson plans.
So much in the body. So much felt, experienced, and made. 

Some days we keep on with the same.

A few questions, please. Is this habit, choice, or the only option?
Seeking stability? Savoring the past and prior?

Eleven months into shelter in place, I am crawling out of my skin and of this house.
Time for variety and variation. This will lead to enlivening, new pathways,
and welcoming in newness and change.
Slower, faster, broader, brighter. Longer; softer.

My next artistic challenge will be all about variety. 

Jill Randall is a dancer in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the artistic director of
Shawl-Anderson Dance Center and the creator of the Life as a Modern Dancer Blog.

---------------

Related posts:

Somatic Writing Series: Bhumi B. Patel, Andrea Olsen, and Elizebeth Randall Rains

Somatic Writing Series: Sima Belmar, Leah Cox, and Molly Rose-Williams

Artist Profile: Cynthia Oliver

Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time (with Nina Haft)

Invitations: 52 Movement Poems - by Jill Randall

Resource/Reading List: For a Somatics Course

Design by Claire Calalo Berry of Flourish and Frost

From Blog Director Jill Randall:

Each August, I love connecting with college professors as they prepare their syllabi and course material. Today I want to share resources from the blog for a Somatics Course.

 

Somatic Writing Series

In Spring 2021, nine dancers shared ideas around somatic themes and how these themes played out in their lives - such as softening, allowing, activating, and slowing down to feel.

Like "flash fiction writing," each writer took on the challenge of sharing their ideas in 100 words or less.
I hope you might get inspired to write on these themes as well, succinctly and poetically within this word limit.

Somatic Writing Series

52 Movement Poems

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in-place, in Spring 2020, I started sharing Movement Poems on the blog. The idea was to offer improvisation and composition prompts that we could easily do at home. I paired each poem with a piece of music by Michael Wall, easily accessed on his site soundformovement.com.

Here is the complete list of 52 poems. Somatic concepts and language are woven throughout the poems.

Invitations: 52 Movement Poems (the complete list)

Books Recommendations

A short list of books to browse and consider for your courses:

The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training (Doran George, edited by Susan Leigh Foster)

Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action (Martha Eddy)

My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Resmaa Menakem)

Diverse Bodies, Diverse Practices: Towards an Inclusive Somatics (Don Hanlon Johnson)

The Place of Dance: A Somatic Guide to Dancing and Dance Making (Andrea Olsen)

The Embodied Teen: A Somatic Curriculum for Teaching Body-Mind Awareness, Kinesthetic Intelligence, and Social and Emotional Skills--50 Activities in Somatic Movement Education (Susan Bauer)

Other Resources, Podcasts, and Connections

I also want to mention the incredible work of Prentis Hemphill, The Embodiment Institute, and The Nap Ministry. I encourage you to explore these links as well as you prepare your classes.

Plus, this is a short journal to print out:

Intro Spective Wellness: 10 Writing Prompts to Examine Your Beliefs around Intersectional Wellness by Chanel Durley

Lastly, I do want to give a shameless little pitch for this deck of dancer wellness cards Claire Calalo Berry and I made in 2020. There are 31 cards, many with somatically based words on them (receive, soften, listen, etc). Consider pulling a card for each day of class. Purchase the cards through Etsy here.

---------------

Somatic Writing Series: Sima Belmar, Leah Cox, and Molly Rose-Williams

Design by Claire Calalo Berry of Flourish and Frost

I am thrilled to run this new series over the next month. Nine dancers will share ideas around somatic themes and how these themes play out in our lives right now - such as softening, allowing, activating, and slowing down to feel.

Like "flash fiction writing," each writer took on the challenge of sharing their ideas in 100 words or less. I hope you might get inspired to write on these themes as well, succinctly and poetically within this word limit!

Today we hear from Sima Belmar, Leah Cox, and Molly Rose-Williams about collapsing, yielding, and recuperating. All three dancers have contributed numerous posts to Life as a Modern Dancer over the years. Find some of those additional links below.

Be well,

Jill Randall
Blog Director, Life as a Modern Dancer

---

1930   D. H. Lawrence Assorted Articles 19   If I could dance all day as well, I might keep going. It's this leaving off that does me in.—And she lapsed out. –from definition I.1.a. of “lapse” in the OED

Collapse:
The failure of a system

Collapse:
To fall together

How could I have missed that meaning
As dancers we fall together all the time
perhaps because collapse sounds lonely
the second syllable accentuating the landing
rather than the falling

Collapse:
A contraction

Not yours, Martha
My prayer?
That from collapse another system emerges
As the rivers lapse along

 

Sima Belmar, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in the Department of Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the ODC Writer in Residence. To keep up with Sima’s writing please subscribe to tinyletter.com/simabelmar.

------

Yield

I’m just starting my run when I see my friend Yield. She’s rounding the bend.

We wave.

“Hey! Can’t stop now,” she says. 
Radiant smile.

“I’m hanging with Surrender—
(that’s her cousin)
—and then I’m gonna bounce to Push’s.”
(that’s her twin brother)

“Oh!” she says, pausing to reach for some new leaves budding on the willow tree. “Did you see? First ones of the season, I think.”

I look.

“Until soon!” Yield calls, and she’s already across the intersection.  
I smile, vaguely registering the overgrown grass shimmering against my ankles.

That’s what I love about Yield.

 

Leah Cox is Dean of the American Dance Festival and an Associate Professor of dance at the University of Texas at Austin.

------

Recuperation

 

Waiting by the river, my abdominal wall; water flows around my serratus, external obliques, the bumpy plains of my rectus abdominus to my groin, pubic bone, adductors. I am pooling at my knees.

A year ago my grandmother died and I found myself staring at a sky split open with light. Dancing is like remembering to breathe, remembering the skin on the back of my body. I feel the air on my scalp, hairs singing as I move in the morning, afternoon, evening light. My bones bloom like sponges, muscles like rubber or coiled springs, or snakes in waiting—a gentle squeeze. I am dancing again.

 

 

Molly Rose-Williams is a dancer, dance-maker, writer, educator, and community arts organizer from Berkeley, CA. www.mollyrosewilliams.com

 

------

Related posts and articles:

Somatic Writing Series: Bhumi B. Patel, Andrea Olsen, and Elizebeth Randall Rains

Dancing in Quarantine: Gaga with James Graham - By Sima Belmar (on medium.com)

Redefining Solo - By Sima Belmar

Blog Series: Studio Practice/Studio Time (Leah Cox)

Improvising in Practice: reflections from my workshop with Jesse Zaritt in a time of COVID-19 - By Molly Rose-Williams

---------------

Somatic Writing Series: Bhumi B. Patel, Andrea Olsen, and Elizebeth Randall Rains

Design by Claire Calalo Berry of Flourish and Frost

I am thrilled to run this new series over the next month. Nine dancers will share ideas around somatic themes and how these themes play out in our lives right now - such as softening, allowing, activating, and slowing down to feel.

Like "flash fiction writing," each writer took on the challenge of sharing their ideas in 100 words or less. I hope you might get inspired to write on these themes as well, succinctly and poetically within this word limit!

Today we hear from Bhumi B. Patel, Andrea Olsen, and Elizebeth Randall Rains. All three dancers have contributed numerous posts to Life as a Modern Dancer over the years. Find some of those additional links below.

Be well,

Jill Randall
Blog Director, Life as a Modern Dancer

---------------
soften
by Bhumi B. Patel

one thing i know is that in dance spaces there is frequently a tightening, a hardness in my chest. a bracing. a response to years and decades of being dismissed, invalidated, microaggressed, harmed. so i go in, cordial, polite, friendly even, but at the ready.

lately, i’ve been spending time with people who fill my rest line-item and in that i’ve been finding the softening.

remembering that there are places where i can lay my soft heart bare.

remembering that it is not wrong to feel that constricting.

cultivating the spaces where softness can bloom. 
where will you sow your softening today?

 

 

Bhumi B Patel is the queer, desi Artistic Director of pateldanceworks (she/they, please) creating work at the intersection of embodied research and activism.

 

-----

Activate 
By Andrea Olsen, February 5, 2021

 

Walking, walking, walking. I have been finishing a book on embodied communication in isolation in Downeast Maine. One year in one place as of March 15—very likely the first ever in my life as my parents were travelers. Since November, my daily excursions have featured a thirty-minute walk with qigong by a stream. I stretched that today by dancing on the frozen surface of a 14,000-acre lake. My body was happy! And writing these words to you in the frosty air is part of activating dancing--connecting through movement wherever and whenever we can. 

 

 

Andrea Olsen is a dance artist, author, and educator. See andrea-olsen.com/ and www.body-earth.org.

 

-----
Sensation
By Elizebeth Randall Rains

 

I am remembering performing. That sublime, electrifying experience. Feeling everything. Offering everything. Being seen. 

I close my eyes. The stage light shines on my skin. 

Now, I collect sensations like treasures. The anticipation and heat of the first sip of morning tea. My kids’ hands tenderly squeezing mine as we meander on our daily pathways. The coarse sand at Alameda Beach caressing my feet. Every cell yielding to gravity when I collapse right here on the wool rug.

No one is watching me but I am a wilderness of sensation. 

The sunlight shines on my skin. I open my eyes.

 

Elizebeth Randall Rains is a mama, dancer, student and teacher living in the Bay Area. She enjoys sharing movement and community at Saint Mary's College and Shawl-Anderson Dance Center.

 

----------

Related posts:

 

Somatic Writing Series: With Sima Belmar, Leah Cox, and Molly Rose-Williams

Compassionate Labor Deserves Intentional Rest - By Bhumi B. Patel, David Herrera, Gerald Casel, Sammay Dizon, Raissa Simpson, and Yayoi Kambara

Let us eat cake, consensually, that is: A Reflection on TALK.DANCE.CAKE - By Bhumi B. Patel

 

Quote for Today: From Andrea Olsen

Writing Dancing: With Andrea Olsen

Two Views on Collaborating to Create a Dance & Digital Media Film Series (Andrea Olsen and Scotty Hardwig)

 

My Dance Week: Elizebeth Randall Rains

Artist Profile: Elizebeth Randall Rains