Dance & Embodied Art
topic
Dance and embodied art practices — including movement improvisation, somatic practices, martial arts, contact improvisation, and performance art — develop the specific intelligence of the moving body as a creative instrument: the relationship between physical sensation and expressive intention, the proprioceptive awareness of spatial and kinesthetic relationship, the rhythmic intelligence of movement in time, and the direct non-verbal communication of experience through bodily form.
Role
Embodied art practices develop the somatic intelligence that purely cognitive creative work neglects — the understanding of rhythm, weight, balance, tension, and release that the body knows before the mind conceptualizes it, and that transfers to creative work in every domain as a different kind of knowing than the conceptual-verbal knowing that most creative education develops. The graphic designer who has studied dance thinks about visual rhythm differently; the architect who practices martial arts approaches structural balance differently; the musician who has explored somatic movement understands the physical dimension of temporal experience differently.