Abstract:
Dance, as a practice of coupling the sensate moving being with the environmental context, is a form of embodied meaning-making. Somatics, the field of mind-body integration, offers pedagogical frameworks that can deepen the benefits of dance education in relation to bodily attention and perception, individual autonomy, and intersubjective mutuality. This chapter introduces contemporary theories of cognition that support an understanding of the types of meaning-making inherent in dance and Somatics and examines Somatics’ grounding in feminism and existential phenomenology. I suggest that the subjective and intersubjective benefits of Somatic Movement Dance Education (SMDE) have relevance to cognitive psychological theories of creativity, proposing that SMDE can afford dancers with more creative movement generation and choreographic output in dance.
