My Body: A Vehicle for Language

• In Event: Dance, Body, and Presences

Abstract

The proposed performance is rooted in improvisation and somatic dance techniques. The piece is not fixed and it is meant to change and be changed: it is a place for reflecting, feeling, sensing, and thinking with my whole being. In my research, I use dance as a way to deeply inquire into my lived experience as a dance artist and educator, then offer my findings to others. I define dance as the act of dancing rather than the final product; a state of being that involves sensing the movement and feeling the life in it (Henry 1975; Henry 1990/2008; Henry 2000/2015). Dance is the feeling of dancing.
This dance is an act of patience, a deep investigation of perceiving the “body data” (Author 2 2002) that occur in the moment and how this data changes me from the inside out. Dance taught me to get in touch with my whole being and to reclaim my body as a place of inquiry. Movement is intrinsic “to whom we are as human beings, and dance is movement made conscious” (Haplrin 2014, p. 93). The body is our teacher: it is the tool that allows us to create the connections we need to develop an understanding of our bodies, its movement, its wisdom, and to knowledge itself. The knowledge of the body is already in us: it is us.
My desire as an educator is to transmit my passion for bodily knowing and for my students to reclaim their bodies as a place of listening and learning, not a site of shame. I aim to push students, teachers, and scholars to develop a language that will open new territories to rethink the perception of dance.
I perceive my body as a vehicle for language to arise. I ask, how language shapes the way we talk about us, our body, and others. How do I translate the knowledge of my body to other bodies? This language that dances allows us to explore new ways of inquiry and to challenge the idea of what bodies, difference, and dance look like. In order to do this, we need a language that changes the dance from within; a language that is full of nuances and meanings that are not imposed from outside, but rather developed within each body and each dance. When we change our language, we are confronted with ideas that are “both ‘inside’ and ‘out there’ that are deeply rooted in dance worlds (and words) and in the surrounding society” (Østern 2017, p. 13). Words create worlds, they have an impact on the way we teach, communicate, educate, and dance. To redefine dance literacy means to change the way we – as scholars, dancer artists, educators, audience members – read bodies and movement, as well as the way we create meaning. To achieve the goal of conceiving difference as a pedagogical and aesthetic tool is important to work collaboratively: learning from the community, within the community, and in dialogue with it.

Author

• Carolina Bergonzoni, Simon Fraser University