Somatics

Women In The Arts on KALX interviewed a somatics educator, Susan Bauer, today. She teaches a class called Experiential Anatomy and has written a couple books, including one titled A Body-Mind Approach to Movement Education for Adolescents. She led the audience through a couple simple exercises and I could tell right away there was something to it. It's supposed to especially benefit movement artists (a new term to me, but we were fast friends), which I officially became at age 14 while perfecting the Freewheelin' Franklin strut - center Freak Brothers magazine cover at lambiek. The next time I visited my ex-stepfather Mike he picked up on it right away and asked me why the hell I was walking so differently. I let him know that repression had got the best of him, but not of me, which brings us right back to somatics, body-mind relations, etc. At this point I should probably thank my mother for having a sit-down with me after I told her at the age of six that I only wanted blue or brown pants from then on, you know, like most all the other kids. She went off for a quite awhile about how rock stars wore orange pants, red pants with purple paisley vests, and how conformity was for fearful, bitter people leading cardboard flavored lives. Thanks Ma; true today as it was then. For a basic somatics diagnostic one often draws their own skeleton, which apparently can say a lot about one's psyche and culture. Anyone out there tried this stuff?

http://www.ciis.edu/publicprograms/fall05/bauer.html

This site has some cool exercises:

www.somatics.com