Conclusion

Abstract

This study has traced the relationship between training, dissemination, and choreography within a small community that identified itself as concerned with experimentation in contemporary dance. Applying insights about the body gleaned from earlier in the twentieth century, this group of artists and teachers slowly consolidated around their mutual disapprobation of modern and classical training regimens and their eager interest in exploring new paradigms based in the body’s anatomical truths. Referring to this aggregate of overlapping practices as Somatics, I have argued that dancers worked to achieve an unencumbered individuality that contrasted markedly with the more authoritative imposition of aesthetics in classical and modern concert dance. By focusing on the experience of dancing, Somatics encouraged practitioners to connect with their “unique” embodiment of natural principles and to retrieve an authentic self that was thought to be integral to the physical body. This notion that the dancer embodies individual authenticity by accessing a natural body is probably the major contribution that Somatics has made to Western concert dance compared with, for example, the technical excellence in the idealized vocabulary of classical ballet or the codification of emotional expression in modern dance. Yet, despite the seemingly progressive thrust of Somatics, dancers, in their pursuit of individual authenticity, actually fulfilled postwar liberal ideals that were central to American expansionism and that permeate contemporary capitalism. The postwar American government justified military, economic, and cultural expansion by insisting they were protecting and propagating a universal right to individual freedom; dancers invested in the same idea by touting, as universally applicable, the notion that individual creative freedom can be accessed through functional imperatives of the body. This study consequently argues that Somatic authenticity embodies a late twentieth-century capitalist ideal of propagating universal individual freedom....