Somatics in Dance, Ecology, and Ethics

This book of highly original essays addresses the field of movement-based and dance somatics through lenses of ethics and ecology. It is based in methods of phenomenology.

A new collection of essays previously published with Intellect as journal articles, with the addition of new essays and editorial material. The text considers body-based somatic education relative to values, virtues, gender fluidity, lived experience, environmental awareness, fairness, and collective well-being. In delineating interdependent values of soma, ecology, and human movement that are newly in progress, the collection conceives links between personal development of subjective knowledge and cultural, critical, and environmental positionality.

The text raises questions about defining somatics and self, gender dynamics, movement preferences, normative body conceptions, attention to feelings, inclusiveness, ethics of touch, and emotional intelligence in somatics contexts. I include these crucial concerns of somatics and ethics as relational, globally complex, and ongoing.

Like much of Sondra Fraleigh’s writing, these essays utilize phenomenology as a method to investigate embodied relationships—often through lenses of ethics and aesthetics. In providing some examples, the text explores specific values of gratitude, listening, and emotional intelligence in somatic bodywork and learning environments.

Sondra Fraleigh is professor emeritus of dance at the State University of New York (SUNY Brockport), a Fulbright scholar and award-winning author of nine books, including Back to the Dance Itself: Phenomenologies of the Body in Performance (University of Illinois Press, 2019), Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations through Dance, Yoga, and Touch (University of Illinois Press, 2015) and BUTOH: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy (University of Illinois Press, 2010). Land to Water Yoga (iUniverse Press, 2008) is her book on somatic yoga and infant movement development. She also has numerous book chapters on culture, aesthetics and ecology. Fraleigh was chair of the Department of Dance at SUNY Brockport for nine years, later head of graduate dance studies and also selected by SUNY as a university-wide faculty exchange scholar. Her choreography has been seen internationally. She was a teaching fellow at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo and at the University of Baroda in India. Fraleigh is the founding director of Eastwest Somatics Institute for the study of dance, yoga and movement.