In most forms of dancing, performers carry out their steps with a distance that keeps them from colliding with each other. Dancer Steve Paxton in the 1970s considered this distance a territory for investigation. His study of intentional contact resulted in a public performance in 1972 in a Soho gallery, and the name "contact improvisation" was coined for the form of unrehearsed dance he introduced. Rather than copyrighting it, Paxton allowed it to evolve and spread. In this book the author draws upon her own experience and research to explain the art of contact improvisation, in which dance partners propel movement by physical contact. They roll, fall, spiral, leap, and slip along the contours and momentum of moving bodies. The text begins with a history, then describes the elements that define this form of dance. Subsequent chapters explore how contact improvisation relates to self and identity; how class, race, gender, culture and physiology influence dance; how dance promotes connection in a culture of isolation; and how it relates to the concept of community. The final chapter is a collection of exercises explained in the words of teachers from across the United States and abroad. Appendix A describes how to set up and maintain a weekly jam; Appendix B details recommended reading, videos and Web sites.

Contact Improvisation: An Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance Form

Arts & Photography

Pallant, Cheryl

Performing Arts

McFarland Company

Poetry. "The poetry of MORPHS features a committed conversation this reader experiences as occurring in layers, pricks, grace notes, simulated dance steps, and thick sliding scales. The authors' pleasure in inventing ways to communicate a deux across geographic distance is always in evidence. While formally inventive, the interpersonal world of these poems is rich in content and serious play"--Carla Harryman. "MORPHS is a poetics of 'Beginner's Mind'"--Christian Peet.

Morphs

Literature & Fiction

Jenkins, Grant

Poetry

Cracked Slab Books

Based upon the author's lifetime practices as a dancer, writer, healer, meditator, and teacher, this innovative approach to developing body awareness focuses on achieving self-discovery and well-being through movement, mindfulness and writing. Written from an integral perspective of mind-body-spirit, discussion and exercises draw on dance, psychology, neuroscience and meditation to guide personal exploration and creative expression.

Writing and the Body in Motion: Awakening Voice through Somatic Practice

Self-Help

Creativity

McFarland

How to develop the body's innate intelligence for individual and planetary transformation * Explains how healing ourselves and enacting inner change can also contribute to healing of the planet * Shows how ecosomatics--embodiment work for personal and planetary health--can help us shift our consciousness, heal individual and collective wounds, and uncover latent energetic, somatic, and psychic abilities * Shares ecosomatic and embodiment exercises to help you expand perception, develop somatic intelligence, let go of limiting beliefs, lessen fear and anxiety, and open to new levels of awareness The inner world of self and body is inextricably linked to the outer world of biosphere and biome. As experienced somatic and energy medicine practitioner Cheryl Pallant reveals in vivid depth, by expanding our sensory perceptions and becoming intimately in touch with the rhythms of the body, we can contribute not only to our own healing and transformation but also that of the planet. In this practical guide, Pallant explains how ecosomatics--embodiment work for personal and planetary health--can help us shift our consciousness through expanded listening with all our senses and embracing the interconnections between our inner and outer worlds. Blending research with personal experience in somatic and contemplative practices, the author explores how a broadened appreciation of conscious and unconscious bodily events and perceptions leads to vitally needed, improved stewardship with ourselves and the planet. She shows how the current health, social, and environmental crises are a chance for an evolution in consciousness, pushing us to heal the divisions within personal identity, between self and others, and with the environment. Throughout the book, the author offers ecosomatic and embodiment exercises to help you expand perception, develop somatic intelligence, let go of limiting beliefs, lessen fear, anxiety, and alienation, and open to levels of awareness that allow you to tune in to a greater vision of what is humanly possible. Revealing how to incorporate embodiment into everyday life, this guide shows how the body is a process that is part of nature, not separate from it, and that by embarking on the transformative inner journey, we can bring healing to the world around us.

Ecosomatics: Embodiment Practices for a World in Search of Healing

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Alternative Medicine

Bear & Company

The body. It’s not static, that’s for sure. It is a complex multiplicity of energies being produced through an interlocking movement of cells; a globular flowing of blood; an energetic spark of a nervous system. How to write the body? Pallant enters the ever changing mutability of the body with language that kinesthetically charges sentences, bleeds words into juxtapositions, and channels passions as vehicles to transcend and heal. This doesn’t happen through description; Pallant allows us to feel it through eros (the spark of imagination), channeled into a unique rhythmic pulse: “Faith in/paving ways and ripping out weeds. Gain in/breath easy rooted in wood, sky, and be./This is how/to thrive.” This is how Her Body Listening illumines the ecstatic plane—and reading this book will illumine yours. 
 —Kristin Prevallet 
 In this lovely volume, Pallant suffuses sentience with Vision. “She knows to unknow what’s been told”. Reminiscent of the reachingly brilliant works of Leonor Fini , these poems unite the oddity of occupying a body, miraculous yet nevertheless aware of one’s self-awareness, in a subtle “out of body” listening of great learning. It is the percipience of soul and its teaching body in return to float amongst opposing waves of beliefs, to welcome unnamable inversions exerting their age-old influence on beings, in what we finally can only call other. Questioning, then revitalizing her materials, Pallant variously, cannily blends the fine particulates of langue to resolutely induct her very own sense of causation. 
 —Lissa Wolsak 
 In this new poetry collection, Cheryl Pallant plays both with the harsh discordance of language and its soothing homophones “line by line, sharps by flats, horn by heard.” Ornette Coleman’s free jazz comes to mind. 
 —Brigitte Byrd 
 Her Body Listening shows us how reading itself can be a form of therapy, can remind us to breathe and to release the holds that hinder. Many titles of these poems read as directives: “Illumine the Ecstatic Plane,” “Expose Beauty,” “Dance Concentric Waves.” Or perhaps as spells, as an enchanted language in which Steinian wordplay abounds. We may be witnessing a return to full possession of the human faculties through unfailing trust in the female body in all its facts, mysteries, and potent verbs. We may find hope for a future in which “Bees swarm near hives, far from extinction, a honeying of days to come.” 
 —Linda Russo

Her Body Listening

BlazeVOX Books

Light at the End of the Word

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Books by Pallant, Cheryl