Full Description
This book of highly original essays addresses the field of movement-based and dance somatics through lenses of ethics and ecology. It is based in methods of phenomenology.
A new collection of essays previously published with Intellect as journal articles, with the addition of new essays and editorial material. The text considers body-based somatic education relative to values, virtues, gender fluidity, lived experience, environmental awareness, fairness, and collective well-being. In delineating interdependent values of soma, ecology, and human movement that are newly in progress, the collection conceives links between personal development of subjective knowledge and cultural, critical, and environmental positionality.
The text raises questions about defining somatics and self, gender dynamics, movement preferences, normative body conceptions, attention to feelings, inclusiveness, ethics of touch, and emotional intelligence in somatics contexts. I include these crucial concerns of somatics and ethics as relational, globally complex, and ongoing.
Like much of Sondra Fraleigh's writing, these essays utilize phenomenology as a method to investigate embodied relationships—often through lenses of ethics and aesthetics. In providing some examples, the text explores specific values of gratitude, listening, and emotional intelligence in somatic bodywork and learning environments.
Contents
Introducing Scripts and Dances
Ethical World Gaze
Body and Nature: Quest for Somatic Values, East and West
Mind Matters: Portal and Precarity in Somatic Experience
A Future Worth Having: Somatic Ethics of Flow and Curiosity
Walking Well: A Play of Touch and Restoration in Three Acts
Everyone Needs to Breathe
Talking to Tremors: Somatics in Dance, Dialogics and Silence
Back to the Dance Itself: In Three Acts
Phenomenologies in the Flowing Live Present
On Dance and Phenomenology: An Essay Interview with Sondra Fraleigh
Enacting Embodiment and Blue Muffins
Attunement and Evanescence
Postscript Notes to Self
Bibliography
