Touch - the missing sense?
Can we focus holistically on the corporeal aspect of dance education without acknowledging touch?
How is the use of touch approached in your practice?
How does your country see 'touch'?
Is the taboo attached to touch in our society pushing us away from each other?
Is the disconnect in society based on too much fear?
How can the differing qualities embodied during the process of learning to dance connect people through touch? Is the idea of touch, imagined touch build into a teacher's descriptive narrative surrounding tactility to objects or nature, instead?
How is touch applied through the Somatic without people feeling threatened? How can touch offend certain cultures?
Respecting one's space and distancing each other accordingly is an expected professional and personal etiquette. Your intuition tells you how much space people require to feel comfortable. Physical space, emotional space and personal space.
Does creativity diminish as a child enters pubescent years? Can self-consciousness cause them to withdraw? In seeking greater Independence, is the act of growing-up linked to the act of distancing oneself from peers?
By referring to a 'form' based on a visual external perception set around a fixed 'look', could this make a dancer more self-conscious? How can words such as 'extend, lengthen, elongate' objectify the body? Could they be reworded to reach out, reach up or connect and assist in a mindset of connection to another rather than just the shaping of a single body? Extending beyond our kinesphere and outer space, pushing the boundaries can only be done with our connection to an 'other' whatever that may be?
What do you do to keep all the qualities and sensorialities alive in a dancer as they grow up while respecting their personal space?
Hi Jane, I think that touch plays a very important role in dance education, and in dance. I have learned a lot from teachers, that used tactile instructions and I am using it often in class, I also often let them do pair work, where they help each other tactile instructions. Unfortunately in our society it very often gets lost after childhood. Small children explore the world through touching, sensing with their whole bodies, not just the hands. I just encountered my daughter the other day lying on the kitchen floor and when I asked her, what she was doing, she said that the floor just felt so nice and cool to her cheek. I think maybe in a world, that is so focused on the visual aspects of the body, making it an object we are being disconnected from how it feels. And touching is banned to the bedroom, even though its such an important part of our experience.
ReplyDeleteThere was a (terrible!!!) study that they did in 1944 in the US. Twenty newborn infants were housed in a special facility where they had caregivers who would go in to feed them, bathe them and change their diapers, but they would do nothing else. The caregivers had been instructed not to look at or touch the babies more than what was necessary, never communicating with them. All their physical needs were attended to. The experiment was halted after four months, by which time, at least half of the babies had died at that point. There was no physiological cause for the babies' deaths; they were all physically very healthy. So touch is apparently very vital to us.
Thank you Agata. We speak about the love of dance. How it makes us feel. How can the Arts be dismissed and Sciences take front seat? Your reply was very interesting. Part of us does die when there is no love in our lives. The experiment was horrendous and upsetting. Ownership, property and seeing the body as a possession in a Capitalist system puts priorities in the wrong places. In medieval times, the mad were those who seemed to return to childhood and fictionalize their stories. Perhaps the mad then, were the most sensible ones!!
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