Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language

This book situates itself where theory meets practice-the zone where ideas arise to be tested. It draws on embodied research in practices within the lineages of American postmodern dance and Japanese butoh, set in dialog with affect-based philosophies and somatics. It makes the original claim that choreography is passed on less through its formal elements than through the ways sensation circulates through and beyond moving bodies. Following the perspectives of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this study aligns sensation with thinking and proceeds from the premise that thinking is how dance bodies bring ideas into consciousness. Conceived this way, this book makes the broader claim that choreographic systems are not solutions to problems that human bodies then understand through movement. Instead, they are invitations for bodies to think with events as they unfold toward more-than-human kinds of survival.