November Asides
What is somatic communication? How does it make a difference?
I have been investigating somatic communication through a lifetime of dancing contact improvisation. I also recognized that the implications of how we speak across bodies in very fast time durations was not understood, so I returned to get a PhD specifically to investigate and find language to describe how we do that particular bit of magic. When I say somatic communication, I mean that which we do, that speaks with far greater refinement than “body language” which I might define as the gestural organization of physical actions, positionings, and “posturings” that indicate feeling and thought. These physical practices determine our response to social aspects of our relationships with other humans and sometimes animals, and they are very slow, chunky and clunky as communication.
Conversely, somatic communication is the interiority of our embodiment (within actions, positions or postures) that determines the web of organization of our physical mental attention as a continuum from our mental physicality to our correspondent with whom we are in communication within the human and non-human spheres. It follows a notion that while we can form boundaries that are determinative of our selfhood, in communicating to others or the world, we can inter-be (to use Thich Nhat Hanh’s term), we can co-compose our beings through physical mental actions in which we identify as the one we are present to. This is a form of embodied physical practice that requires an ability to move somatic practice beyond the skin-sac and into a larger field of being. This allows for us to recognize the immensely subtle information that flows between bodies. We begin to hold our “selves” lightly, being easily moved by peripheral forces of communication. We co-organize and discover we now are in a realm in which correspondence, coincidence, synchronicity, and other forms of simultaneity appear.
Somatic communication is a practice that we are all already engaged in.
Some of us better than others. Thinking in terms of bounded bodies, as separate skins, as irreconcilably different, creates a world of easy manipulation and power stances. Communication is across boundaries not within them. Ethics are significant in this world because everything takes place outside of our “selves” and if we wish to engage in actions of care, we need to think carefully. Unfortunately, this also means that we function carelessly and care itself becomes implicated in actions of interpersonal, inter-being violence. Somatic communication supersedes these issues in that, as a practice, it is interested in soft boundaries that come and go with attentional availability. Where my attention goes, I also go. If I am there, then the ethics involved are the same ethics that are involved within me. I wonder how my liver and my gut engage in ethics? I wonder how a stem cell chooses to give its life into the creation of one organ or another?
A human being is an emergent phenomenon, not just a system of agreements or negotiations. When one engages in somatic communication, especially while dancing, one starts to experience the emergent phenomenon of complex systems co-organizing to form unanticipated outcomes. What is exquisite is to be part of the ride from within the experience, not from outside of it – to feel a logic in action that one could never have determined as one’s bound self.
Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter