In this talk Caryn McHose combines poetic and experiential language with anatomical and scientific knowledge based on her practice as a mover, somatic movement therapist and teacher. Caryn speaks about orientation and somatic imagination and invites participants to join her with questions and observations. She shares short scores (instructions for movement explorations) to invite people to experience location, the “where am I?” question that helps to orientate us . She speaks about native body intelligence, the body as the basis of imagination, and how our relational practices – being in dialogue with gravity, space and others – can help us establish what she calls body security, which she posits as the basis of psychological security.
Caryn shares more about her work and this talk:
“Artists are the ones to offer ways of opening the inquiry about who we are in relationship to each other, to nature, to culture, and to the matters of mortality and so on. Working with body security by making the orientation process conscious and explicit as a resource to the challenges of being alive in a body on a planet is totally about our collective shared dilemma and the manner in which we feel each other sharing this journey.”
This talk was part of Crossing Borders 2015, presented in partnership with London Contemporary Dance School.
Caryn McHose has taught perception-based movement for over forty-five years. She is the co-author, with Kevin Frank, of How Life Moves, Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness and collaborator for the books, Bodystories and The Place of Dance with Andrea Olsen. She has a private practice in somatic movement therapy and teaches somatic work and structural integration in the US and internationally. She is a Rolf Movement®Practitioner, Certified Rolfer™, Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, Registered Biodynamic Cranial Therapist, and Registered Somatic Movement Therapist.
Her work concerns the biology of resonance and the biology of how we find body security. “Body security is a more substantive and reliable security and source of regulation than psychological security based on thought. And we are able to find an embodied sense of sustainability in this way. So I see the work of orientation to ground and space to omnidirectionality, and to the balance of interoceptive awareness and exteroceptive awareness as the ingredients to meeting our final frontier as human beings–the frontier of relationship which is really never solved of course; however, the capacity to share the dilemma with another is itself a fresh beginning.”
