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What is somatic practice?

It’s creating some kind of language in our thought process.  It’s a way of organizing the thought process that the body has, which underlies thought.  For me it has a big relation to the work that I’ve done with body-mind centering and contact improvisation.  It’s really about devolving to early states.  We can play with different patterns that are more reflexive.  What I’ve been feeling lately in teaching and using language is that it can be very poetic, it can be very clinical, it can be about looking at pictures of the body, it can be about bringing in landscapes, seasons, and how we go to our senses.  A baby develops all of that towards thought, but as adults to go back to that, we really need to engage with our imagination.  To me, that’s really the key of somatic training.  How do we open up our imagination to use images to go to these places that we just naturally move through? The developmental pattern doesn’t happen in a straight line.  There are overlapping patterns that happen.  Somatic can be looked at as a way to tune the body to learn to create support for movement that is efficient, fluid, structural, ties in to a deep support, but it’s also a way to drop into the unknown and use it as a source for creativity.



Is the somatic practice applicable to other art forms?

Definitely.  This reminds me of an experience I had in early 2000.  I was teaching at this school of arts and crafts in North Carolina.  It’s a camp and people sign up and go for two weeks at a time.  There are different studios for welders, for glass blowers, for jewelry makers.  The man who started it is an artist, but his wife, I believe, was an Alexander teacher.  So they would always bring in a movement artist to work with the visual artists as a way to get them in touch with their bodies.  And it was about how do you get them to release in their art making.  So one thing that I did when I was there was that I taught a movement class in the morning and an evening class.  But the big thing, that was so interesting, was going into studios, while people were working and doing hands-on.  Across the board what was so surprising and amazing was that as I worked, with a weaver for example, touching her head and her neck as she continued to work, there would be a memory.  The glass blower all of a sudden has a memory from their past that they’ve forgotten.  And all of a sudden the work they are doing with their hands is relaying something they are holding in their spine.  But I think it speaks to that as we get more in touch with these qualities, that we are just releasing held memory. 



How do you make sure you are listening attentively and productively to your body when you are in this practice of observation?

When you start to focus on one place, problems occur when you stay in that place.  Let’s say you focus on a joint or your lungs, the more you can focus on that and see where you go, the body is like a constellation. You can separate and find a quality of what’s held in an area.  But we separate to integrate, to see what are the tangents that you can follow.  Some disciplines are opening up to your senses, but other times it’s about practicing very specific rolls, or puzzles, relationships and staying within them and finding the fluidity that stays within it. 



For you, is there a struggle where your attention lies inside of this work? And what are the positives and negatives of that struggle?

I love struggle.  My last piece that I made, in 2011,was called: This is Where We Are or (Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles).  This is Where We Are was about being in the present moment, trying to find transitions.  Everyone who was in the piece had a certain limitation in what they could actually say and there was kind of a range of what they could actually be inside of. I think, as a director, as a choreographer, I’m trying to find out how to provoke struggle.  Conflict is so positive.  Thinking about evolution, vibration is our first pattern.  Vibration creates friction and it’s through the friction of things rubbing up against each other that space appears between things and then things start to separate. Struggle is an essential moment for a baby when it’s learning to be on the earth. That it can actually push into something more solid is when it can feel itself and then it can move away from it. Bonnie Cohen talks about the necessity of struggle in work.  This is on a social, political, geographical level.  We have to welcome struggle as communication. I do think it’s tricky.  It’s really hard to look at the empowerment of struggle rather than a power struggle. Even for performers, we have this unwritten agreement that we are going to go into places that are going to be difficult.  That is part of the struggle.

I love a good argument, probably because my family was very quiet and held back a lot.  You can kind of trace the history of it.  I want to, like, throw myself out of trees, which is probably why I love the physicality of contact and improvising and doing things outdoors where at times you are smaller and at times you are so much bigger.

We’ve been improvising around forms. For you what’s the exciting thing about improv that highly choreographed work doesn’t have? How do you balance those two things in your own work?

I think when I discovered improvisation, it was kind of a religious experience.  In a way that maybe religion helps you find something that you can hold onto.  From doing dance and musical theatre growing up, and being a singer…I started in ballet studio when I was young and then said no to it, because I felt like I was always wearing the dance, I could never find myself in it. And even as a teenager going into dance, I was like, where am I? Finding improvisational forms that were about finding my body in relationship to this world and then in relationship to somebody else, I felt like OH! Here I am.  And I keep feeling that improvisation is such a beautiful discipline of watching somebody access the ability to deal with the unknown.  And to create through composing in a sense of history, future, past.  I think there’s a false notion that improv is like “hey, we are just going to do whatever we feel”, but feel is a big word. It is coming from thousands of parts of me.  What I feel in my work now is that I do want to craft more.  I want to touch into something that is a form, that we can fall into and see what else lives in there.  There’s something now that I want about form and technique.  I studied Meisner at Esper, and going into the acting world was about trying to bring that into my dancing.  I love getting the language of somebody else.  Being given words by an amazing writer, and having to find myself in this gives me something to be inside of and then to open it. 

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How do you find your work of the past and now in relation to the older generation of downtown movers (ie Steve Paxton)? Is it an extension, a continuation, a development, a total redirection?

Steve still has waves of influence.  He is having a renaissance.  He was the one who started the form, but he is democratic and doesn’t want “the Steve Paxton technique”.  Working with him for many years, he still continues to be an inspiration and mentor, especially because he encouraged this idea of going with where your work takes you.  I think of someone like Lisa Nelson, an incredible improviser of movement, and how she teaches that our perceptions lead us into composition and tuning ourselves to the singlest amount of time that an image lasts, editing our movement sensation, continues to inspire me to create theatre from that.



Where do you think your work today lies?  In performance, practice, improv halls?

Some people don’t know that I actually make performance.  They think I’m just a teacher.  But, I’ve been making performance for thirty years.  Sometimes it’s more contained out of New York.  I think there was an era not so long ago when it was simpler to approach a space to make work. I am really interested in the visibility of my work as something for theatres.  I have always seen my work in whatever the venue I make the work for.  This new piece that I’m working on, I really want to try to do it at the Invisible Dog in Cobble Hill.  Based on that building.  But I also, want it to be able to be put up somewhere else. 



Does your role of teacher exist within your role of performer? And vice versa?

There is a separation, but I think there’s a fine line.  I learn a lot through my teaching about what I’m interested in.  It used to be more that I was totally physically engaged with my teaching.  I was always in it.  I’m more objective now.  I can kind of direct through language than actually physicality. The first time I taught at ETW was right after 9/11 and it was a survival place. For us all.  We just moved together.  And something shifted with that.  Teaching, though, is not making performance.  And I try to keep it separate.  It’s another relationship.  I love both.

When I teach sometimes, everyone is in their own state.  But we are all here together.  Somatic training is also called experiential anatomy.  Soma is body, but also soul.  Soma is kind of like the nectar that the nerve system experiences.  The idea is that the body is the soma, but also the elixir in the body.



What is your role in Movement Research? Where is it heading today?

I’m very involved. I’m a current artist in residence.  We meet every two months to show work.  It’s a great container for developing work.  I was invited to be part of it, which was great.  I’ve been teaching with them since…I don’t know when I started.  I learned how to be a teacher through them.  My teachers of contact improvisation started doing other things, so I kept my own ball going.  I have been one of their main contact improv teachers, but now I’m not so interested in teaching that just by itself.  I like contact improv as a phase of a class.  My class on Saturdays, the athletics of intimacy, is kind of how I am organizing material that I’m pushing through me.  The brilliant thing about steve, is that this is an evolving form.  In many ways, you are evolving as an artist with the form.  Your experience of the practice allows you to transform it.  I have another year as an artist in residence of Movement Research, I’m part of the gala committee.  I’m very engaged.  Movement Research was one of the first organizations to sponsor indepent artists and artist in residence programs.  They are still the forerunners of contemporary mind.  And they offer really good classes from technique to exploratory forms.  It’s more than just how do we make our work accessible.  It’s harkening back to the 60s when people understood that we are art and we make the spaces.  The organization is thriving.