Somatics and Body Development Training of Dance:An Interview with American Dancer Jeremy Nelson on Dance Teaching

JCRD / [US] Jeremy Nelson

JCRD: Good morning, Mr. Nelson! The four-day class on “body development technique of contemporary dance” that you had for the “National Youth Dance Development” by Chinese Dancers Association in Beijing has ended. Though very short, it was quite an exciting class, bringing us brand new approaches and experiences. Your class not only showsyour scienti fi c and rigorous attitude toward teaching, and high teaching level, but also enables us to see the huge improvement of contemporary dance in terms of somatic research for the past years, and the modern and scienti fi c perspectives of the contemporary dance training; it also shows us that contemporary dance pursues the modern quality of body in body training and creativity, bringing the philosophical thinking of integrating body and mind into teaching, which enables the body and the mind of the dancer to move harmoniously, and enables the dancer to feel it. Especially the research on the harmonious movement and development of human body and mind re fl ects profound humane care, being inspiring and meaningful to modern education in terms of promoting the health and development of body and mind.

So, Mr. Nelson, when and in what situation did you start to be a professional dancer?What was your educational background in dance? What kind of relationship does it have with your teaching in later years?

Jeremy Nelson: I started my formal dance training late. When I arrived in England when I was nineteen years old, through variety of coincidences, I ended up doing mime classes. My mime teacher said to me, “You should take dance classes. ” So I took dance classes. From that moment on, I was hooked. I kind of just knew this is my life. So I went to the London School of Contemporary Dance, which was a primary contemporary school in England at that time. We did Graham and Ballet. Graham was extremely hard for me and for my body because I was very tight, not very fl exible, and a lot of those fl oor forms were very dif fi cult. But I was so happy to be intensely dancing in this environment of doing nothing but dancing, basically. So I fi nished that training.

But even during that time, there were in fl uences from the United States coming into London:Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane. We saw these performances and took classes with these people. And it was such a radically different way of thinking from what I had been used to in my training at the London School of Contemporary Dance. There was also a place at the south of England, called Dartington, which also started to bring in the experimental,what we know as the “post-modern” in fl uences, particularly in contact improvisations. So that really opened the door for me about thinking about alternative approaches to the body.I remember doing a couple of classes in London, of something called “Skinner releasing technique”, which was an improvisational technique developed by a woman called Joan Skinner,who had danced for the Graham Company and the Cunningham Company. And she wanted to fi nd out what was the more ef fi cient, more easeful and less stressful way for her to move. So she developed a series of improvisational structured processes, using anatomical imagery, particularly bone imagery, to fi nd more ease in space, “natural-ness”, if you like, in the body.

And then the company I was dancing for in England had a tour of the United States. And I ended up moving to New York. That’s when I fully started, really pursuing nothing but about somatic approaches. I danced for someone called Stephen Petronio, who had danced for the Trisha Brown Company. He was very involved with Alexander technique. He taught the kind of the very fi rst “technique classes”, if you like, that combined Alexander technique, which is a somatic technique. He referred me in a way, or let me know about “Klein technique”, which is a technique developed by Susan Klein, following along the line of Laban/Bartenieff, actually.

Then more recently, I have been doing Feldenkrais. For me, it was an approach to the body that focuses mostly on developing awareness.You mentioned about the integration of body and mind.I think that is the most important thing—at the beginning of my dance training, I was trying to dominate my body and trying to make it do things. And when I discovered these approaches, it was a kind of working with your body, with what you had. I actually found that, in technical terms but also in creative terms, it has just expanded everything for me.

JCRD: Indeed, if we can better understand our bodies and bones, adopt right ways of moving, and form a harmonious and cooperating relationship with our organs, we will be able to avoid injuries and pay more attention to the dancers’ health, which will really re fl ect the humane care in dance teaching.

Jeremy Nelson: It is true that a lot of people who have come to somatic approaches to the body,including people who developed somatic approaches, Susan Klein, for instance, Feldenkrais, I believe, Trager, they’ve come to the work because of injury. The same was true with me: I had a lot of pain in my sacrum for a long time, and I wanted a way to ease it, so that I could dance with less pain. Through the approach, we could also kind of learn that pain is an indicator of lack of movement maybe, lack of movement of energy. I feel this kind of work has helped move energy through the body and reduce stress. It works for me. I mean, for me, it reduces a lot of pain. I’m not like, “sour”, aching now…

JCRD: Because you learned Martha Graham’s technique and Merce Cunningham’s technique, and you also studied improvisational and releasing techniques—you have learned a great number of modern dance masters’ techniques. Having learned so many things, what are the most important in fl uences that they give to you to develop those techniques? What are the differences between the training methods developed by you and those by them?

Jeremy Nelson: I think that the techniques like Martha Graham, Cunningham, and Trisha Brown—although she doesn’t have a formalized, recognizable technique—they were in service of the choreography. They were developed to serve the choreographical vision of Martha Graham, or Merce Cunningham, or Limón, or Doris Humphrey. But now the spectrums are so vast, every choreographer has their own distinct style in a way, in a way we are kind of post-style. The kind of education that I feel we need to give is that young dancers go beneath style to information and access to their own bodies and intelligence that can be applied in any context. I feel my biggest in fl uence is discovery, wanting to fi nd out new ways of moving, new coordinations through my body. Yes, it is self-discovery, that’s really… and of course the people I’m dancing around and dancing with, my long time collaborator and partner, Luis Lara Malvacías, and we work a lot, so our physicality affects each other. I think that’s the answer really. In a lot of cases now, there is so much more improvisation as a form of performance, not necessarily associated with any style. I think we can look to those techniques now, Cunningham, or Graham, not for how they serve the choreography originally, but what kind of universal things are contained, what can be applied to any context that is in those techniques.

JCRD: Ms. Xiaolan Wang said in one of her classes, “God gave Baryshnikov to the ballet area, and Jeremy to the contemporary dance area. ” According to her,you were an excellent dancer in the past, and jumped as lightly as a cat. So here is the question, how did you achieve that through your training? Do you have any experience that you would share with the dancers nowadays?

Jeremy Nelson: I’m incredibly fl attered by LanLan’s comparison of course. The only thing that I feel I could identify myself with Baryshnikov is that I once saw him perform with American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and I saw him fall over. He fell over because he went so extremely into his movement, just took that a little bit too far. And he fell fl at on his bottom. I kind of always identify with that passion to move and the willingness, I guess, to take things to the extremes. It’s been interesting over the years that I’ve learned that I love that range of movement. In my classes, I tried to bring out from studentsa willingness to take risks,to move with abandon and to go for things fully. But over the years, I’ve also known the value of subtlety, detail and quietness. The performers who engageme most are those whom I sense fully committed to what they are doing, instead of demonstrating something to me, they allow me to become involved with their involvement in what they are doing, their joy and their passion.That would be my biggest advice to young dancers, is to stay truly committed to what it is they are doing on stage. There is no hierarchy of importance of things. Everything is important: every detail, every gesture is as important as something else, whether is just standing there being, or lifting a hand, or doing a huge jump with triple turns. As an audience, we sense that in someone.You can’t articulate verbally; but you just have this visceralsense that this is someone who is truly,truly invested in what they are doing physically. That’s my biggest advice.

And I just add a little bit more. One thing about the approaches of the somatic techniques is the recognition of the individuality of each of us. Our structure is different from anybody else’s.Experiences and movement of experiences, everybody is different. Embracing and recognizing that … and I think that is true in performing as well. Even if we are doing things together, in unison, or moving individually, we fully embrace the fact that we are not trying to be anybody else but ourselves. I mean even if you are inhabited in a character on stage of someone else,it is still based and rooted in you are being you. It is quite interesting actually this idea—it is not a subjective idea. We always thought that, especially in terms of ballet, unison being about uniformity—everybody looking the same. And now one of the uses in unison in contemporary work is actually to highlight the differences between the people—all doing the same activity; then you start to notice the micro-differences— that’s very beautiful. I think this is to connect deeply with ourselves and then be available to connect with other people who arein the space around us.Ah, one more thing. I just have a thought: If we started with talking about bringing a new approach to Chinese dances, a new approach to the body, but how much somatic techniques of the West had been in fl uenced by approaches to the body of the East of places like China, Taichi,Qigong, and Japan, Aikido. So in a sense, we are not bringing anything new.

JCRD: Earlier you said you agreed with what I said about the philosophy that emphasized the integration of body and mind—it is the body guiding the mind in dancing movement, not body controlling the mind. How did you look for the integration in your teaching? How can we focus on the inner aspect of body in dance training? What is the relationship between your experience as a dancer and your teaching?

Jeremy Nelson: My teaching is a re fl ection of the process that I myself am going through as a dancer in a way. So they are intimately connected. In preparation for this interview, I was reading about some of the de fi nitions of the somatic techniques. One of the things that they have in common is creating a novel learning environment. And most somatic techniques do that by creating a space in which discovery can happen. That usually involves time—giving time for each thing to happen; giving time for each activity to occur, and to be re fl ected on, not necessarily consciously, but in terms of the body’s re fl ection. Being sensate, being feeling and sensing, being aware. Through these processes, it just becomes inevitable that your body, thinking body and your thinking mind are involved and connected, equally involved whatever activity you are doing.It’s not like a moment of “discovery”. It just becomes obvious, and natural. How could it be in the other way?

One more thing. The work is directed not so much on the mind-mind level, but the body-mind level, the mind of the body. There is a technique called “body-mind centering” as well, which is absolutely about mindfulness, “awareness” of every part of your body—not just the skeleton that itdeals with, with other systems too, organ system, lymph nodes system, and sub-blood system.Just one more thing. A lot of these techniques refer to developmental patterns that babies go through. Babies and young children, are an absolute example of the integration of body and mind where they develop physical skills because of their desire to do this, or their interest in the world,or their desire to eat something, or stand up and look. Many somatic techniques refer to these stages of development that babies go through that we are asking ourselves to reconnect to.

JCRD: I have a further question. You are now a faculty member of Movement

Research in New York, so could you please introduce the structure and function of this center, and what your job is in this center?

Jeremy Nelson: Movement Research is an independent organization in New York, a little bit like Chinese Dancers Association maybe. I actually work for New York University, Tisch School of the Arts—that’s my full time job. Since about 1990, I’ve been teaching at Movement Research, which doesn’t have a fi xed faculty. It has invited teachers who offer various classes and workshops.From its very beginning in 1980s, it’s been involved in investigating movement and approaches to movement and performance. I’m just one of many, many teachers and artists who are involved in that organization.

JCRD: In your introduction to your class, you mentioned that you continued to take class with Barbara Mahler. So how did you use the information from her classes,combined with contemporary dance training, to develop your own technique system,and realize the innovation?

Jeremy Nelson: Well, Barbara Mahler is a very important contributor to the development of Klein technique. She worked with Susan Klein for many many years. When I went to New York in 1984,I started taking class with Barbara and Susan—they both taught at the Klein studios in New York.Over time, they kind of went their separate ways. And I have continued to study with Barbara Mahler amongst other things, as well as studying Feldenkrais. One of the things that attracted meas a young dancer about Klein technique, was that it is one of the somatic practices that has speci fi c forms that you practice. Some of these forms come from Bartenieff, from Irmgard Bartenieff, but they felt like tools that Icould use outside of the classroom—I could use these forms to work with myself. So in that way, it has been a really important part of my development.I continued to take class with Barbara, and I brought her to work with students in Denmark many times as well. She is also a regular teacher at the Movement Research.

JCRD: For Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein, what are the most important aspects that you have focused on?

The most important aspect is that it is one of several somatic techniques that you work with your body—you work from the inside out,you are working with your own body, not the image of what your body should be. It recognizes that everybody is individual. They have developed work that spec ifi cally is about the relationships of the pelvis to the legs. There is a lot of emphasis on deep postural muscles around the pelvis and legs, while something like Alexander technique is much more interested in the relationship of the head to the neck, for instance. So they have certain emphasis in their work. That’s about ground-ness, if you like, about being grounded and allowing the lightness and freedom of the upper body as a result of that. So they have a very speci fi c focus in their approach. I have found over the years that in conjunction with other sources of information, itreally served my body to keep it healthy and dancing still.

In the early days of my teaching, when I was studying Klein technique, it was quite a strong

in fl uence to my teaching. I would refer to the forms. I was involved in the teachers, training project within the technique. Over the years, I’ve just used it more as one of the several elements that I have drawn for my teaching. I think that is the way that this should work—when you receive information, it is processed to your own body and then you passed along for someone else,for new generation of dancers to process in their own way and add to their own “bank” of information, if you like.

JCRD: Then please tell us the connection between your methods of teaching and Feldenkrais’.

Jeremy Nelson: As I studied more Feldenkrais, it is becoming more of an in fl uence. Luis

incorporates a lot of Feldenkraisinformation in his class, and it also started to affect my teaching as well. I more use that in fl uence about Alexander simply as an experience that I have in my own body.

My experience with Feldenkrais is much more recent in the last four to fi ve years. Feldenkrais,I believe he was a physical therapist. And also, he was a martial artist and he had black belt in Judo. He decided that one of the most equalizing therapeutic tools was to connect to our bodies. In a sense, it is not so much the activities themselves, which are very simple, had built in the professional class, but how your approach, the activities are the focus of the technique. It is quite interesting in that way. It is not speci fi cally a movement technique. But as a dancer now,especially a dancer at my age, I found it is really opening up a huge door, in the way that I think about movement, and also in a very real way, in opening up a range of movement of my torso and spine that I didn’t know I had actually.

It is an interesting technique. Like all somatic techniques that deal with the reordering the nerve system, part of the process of the Feldenkrais class is to do the activity and then to rest. And it is in the rest, stay, that the real “work”, if you like, is done because that is the space that your nervous system has to absorb and integrate this new experience. So in a way, it is the technique that integrates the idea of the rest period in one of the most speci fi c ways. I don’t usually introduce this idea … Sometimes you can do a Feldenkrais class and imagine the activities,which it is interesting, because now they have discovered that when you imagine an activity,neurologically, the same neurons are fi ring as if we are doing the activity.

There is one more thing, that is, he has written a lot. Feldenkrais is one of the practitioners who have written articles extensively, so there are a lot of possibilities to source his thinking. Talking about philosophy… It is very philosophical. His writing is really inspiring in that way.

And another very interesting point of Feldenkrais is the idea that “effort” creates an obstacle to sensing and awareness. Of course, the idea in Feldenkrais is to minimize the “effort”, so that you can re-sense. And you can imagine how to a dancer that is so counter-intuitive the idea of “not doing”—when dancers are talked to “Do! Do! Do!” , the only way you can learn is by doing, doing again and doing more. So it is a very interesting and challenging approach for dancers.

JCRD: We have a strong feeling that you have emphasized a lot on the positions of the pelvis and the sitting bones in your training, so do you believe that the pelvis and the sitting bones are the most important force points of human body movement?

Jeremy Nelson: The reason … in four days, you have to pick a focus, in order not to be a bit of this and a bit of that. I chose the pelvis and sitting bones as a focus for the four days, just so that we could concentrate around experiencing that. On the last day, we worked on the spine, bringing in another obvious awareness of the body. The pelvis, the sitting bones and the connection of the sitting bones through the heels and then to the fl oor, is a principle that appears in a lot of somatic techniques, including Klein technique. It is the center of the body. The idea of fi nding a weighted relationship to the fl oor is pretty fundamental. So I chose it as a focus for the workshop.

It is also an area where dancers can get very locked, especially in the hip sockets. With the work we were doing over the four days, a lot of it involved being able to bend the knees, movement in and out of the fl oor, a freedom of movement between the legs and pelvis, and as well as the stability of the pelvis through the legs. Also, there was a reason to make it the focus to suggest that there could be more freedom of movement with as much power, if not more power.

JCRD: We see this in your training class obviously. With regards to the training of the spine, the ballet training in the past emphasized the control of the spine and the contemporary dance training emphasizes the freedom and use of the spine.It gives us a great impression that you dealt with the locked pelvis and took it as the center of stability in your class. So do you think that pelvis is the driving force and the sitting bones are the key elements of the center balancing? Is it a correct understanding of your training? If so, what principle is it based on?

Jeremy Nelson: I’m not quite sure that I understand this question entirely. You see, I think the kind of freedom that we are looking for in the spine is a source of support. That is equally applicable to a ballet dancer as it is to a modern dancer. It is equally supportive and important to daily life. You see old people who get short like this—because the spine collapses. If there is more movement through the spine, they would be less collapsed. So it is not even a thing that is necessarily just about contemporary dance or ballet. I think that over time, if you try to straighten the curve of the spine that it creates stress… But one of the things we emphasize too is freedom in the head and neck. I think if you are a ballet dancer, doing multiple pirouettes, to have more freedom in your head and neck is an advantage. So the sitting bones, because they attach muscularly through the hamstrings and the muscles of the lower legs through to the heel and continue underneath the heel towards the toes. You can see them as the roots, plants roots. But the difference between the plants is that these roots can move. What we want through the spine, is the freedom of the movement up through the spine and the freedom of energetic movement through to the tailbone.

So the spine becomes integrated. Or you can say, the spine integrates also. Because at the end,there is movement everywhere in the body at all times. And we are looking to coordinate it. These principles, are in a way, about coordination, coordinating all these connections and movement through the body. I don’t see this is being related to one technique or another. I think in the best ballet dancers, you kind of see principles of freedom of movement and ground-ness.

In fact, in Copenhagen, I had a ballet teacher who was a Feldenkrais practitioner and would bring Feldenkrais into the ballet class. I think the difference between some ballet teaching and our approach is that the former is related to what things look like from the outside, rather than being an expression of what is going on inside. I think that is the biggest difference, more so in the style.

JCRD: Why do you emphasize the bones fi rstly in your training, instead of muscles or ligaments?

Jeremy Nelson: The reason is because that the muscles and ligaments, they are to move the bones, not the other way round. If you don’t have a clear idea about what the bones are doing,then the muscles and ligaments kind of don’t know clearly what to do. There is one thing too—the skeleton I put that is being the structure that we look at in my classes. There are techniques, such as body-mind centering that sees the organ structure as even more supportive and paramount than the bony structure. Just one other thing about muscles is that the muscular system is so complex that by referring to bones, we simplify things. And it is much easier to be clear about what the bone is doing—I have no idea how many muscles were in my arm, probably hundreds of muscles were involved in that activity. And how could I possibly keep tracking them all?

JCRD: I have a question. Since the bones play an important role, their movements are driven by nerves and muscles, how shall we see their relationships?

Jeremy Nelson: Yes. I just talked about that “thinking about bones simpli fi es things”. Besides that,one thing they have discovered is that before you move, your nervous system has imagined the movement before you do it. In your imagination, you’ve done it before you do it. Obviously it is unconscious. But you are not imagining that this muscle is going to contract, that one is going to do this and this one is going to do … You are imaging “ fi ngers reach towards the camera”,“pick up cup”. And then what your nervous system does is to organize all the muscles to do that activity. So what we are trying to do is to introduce that idea to training in dance, to a dance movement—what is it? What is a tendu? What is a brush trying to do?—It is trying to extend the toes into the space. Very often, we are taught these movements without knowing what the intention is. And bones provide us with the way to connect to the intention of the movement.

JCRD: Here come the fi nal four questions. 1) Did the four-day training follow your plan and meet your expectation? 2) In your opinion, what are the advantages of Chinese dancers? 3) What about the disadvantages? 4) What are the improvements in training that Chinese dancers need?

Jeremy Nelson: If I have a plan for the class, I had only an idea. But of course, I don’t know the students and I don’t know what their experience is, so I have to be prepared to let that plan,be just very broad framework, and adjust to the situation. My goal, I guess, as you said at the beginning, is to offer a possibility of thinking about our bodies in what might be for some of the students, a different way. And I feel like the students were so open and generous in receiving.Most of them were able to be open to this possibility, went along for the ride and trusted that there was something in the four days that might be enlightening possibly, or change them in some way. In that sense, I think the goal we came with is realized.

You know, I can’t tell you what an amazing experience is being to work with Chinese dancers. It’s been super inspiring and exciting. For both Luis and me, it feels like something is really happening here, and it is such a privilege to feel that we are, in some small way, a part of that. I think what Chinese dancers need is just more experiences. More Chinese dancers who go out and come back bringing in the information and experiences that they have had. There is incredible physical talent here, generosity, energy, and commitment. And those are what you need. I think trusting their own bodies more, trusting their experiences more, not necessarily needing to be told this way or that, trusting what they feel is right, what is the direction that they want to go in. I think the thing that somatics and creative approachescan also offer, which is also kind of what we try to bring to the workshop, is the possibility to question what has beenand what is, to look at what has been done and say “ok, it’s been done. Now we fi nd new ways to do things, new ways of looking at things”, so that the art form moves on.

I just say one more thing. What was really fantastic about the workshop too is just the variety of experiences, some people from folklore dancing, others from Chinese classical dancing, from ballet, from contemporary. The different body types—some tall, some short, some … you know,I think that is the richest source of talent. The more inclusive we are about who can dance and who can contribute to the art form, the more exciting, the more development of that art. The idea of excluding some people on the basis of what their body type is, or what their movement background is, is really wasting this incredible potential. And the other thing I was going to say was that western dance has been developing for over one hundred years now … I don’t know Chinese dance so well. But I know that the history of modern dance here is relatively short. And look how far that Chinese dance and Chinese dancers have come in such a short time! So the possibility is endless.

JCRD: We believe the important experience that you have brought to Chinese dancers will inspire, bene fi t and help our future dance teaching and choreography.Thank you again!