Training Bodies to Matter

This essay traces three different pedagogical situations in which I try to shift what I see as the negative corporeal dynamics of our contemporary moment, one body at a time. Drawing examples from my experiences with the body-to-body interactions of Contact Improvisation, the dance form that first brought me into dance thirty years ago; Bridging the Body/Mind Divide, a first-year seminar taught to a general range of students at Oberlin College in Ohio, USA; and Girls in Motion, the after-school programme I run for adolescent girls at a local school, I present examples of skills that I believe create an important somatic foundation for a more mindful being-in-the-world. In these examples of corporeal rhetorics, I consciously harness the persuasive force of movement experiences to convince my students there is a better way to dwell in their bodies and in this twenty-first-century world