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Somatics Bodies on the Concert Stage

This chapter looks at the relationship between Somatics training and the concert stage where its influence on dancers was increasingly evident. Focusing on New York City specifically, the chapter identifies three phases where Somatics impacted performance differently: first, as signaling the dancer’s real-time efforts to construct the dance in performance; second, as providing novel sources of movement; and third, as displaying a new standard of virtuosity. The chapter shows how in each of these phases the relationship of the choreographer to the performer shifted. In the first phase the choreographer and dancer were one and the same, processing the dance in real time, and this was seen as a radical alternative to midcentury modernist approaches in which the dancers showcased the choreographer’s vision. In the second phase, dancers deployed Somatics to demonstrate new vocabularies of movement and new ways of moving, not so much as a way to focus on dance making as to establish their unique artistic voices. In the third phase, the role of the choreographer was restored as the author of the dance, separate from the dancers, who then displayed the choreographer’s vision.