Dance Spotlight: Movement Matters

I look around me and so much of what I see is divided into separate categories like academic and extracurricular, useful and useless, justice and injustice, natural and artificial, rational and irrational, mind and body. These kinds of binaries can be useful as a way of understanding what is or is not, but I have found they often lead to a narrow view of our experience as something that can be subdivided and neatly delineated.

Take the example of physical education — for many of us, physical education classes are tacked onto our academic schedule or relegated to an extracurricular activity that we view as lesser importance than schoolwork. I often hear people talk about the relief that comes with engaging in physical activity, since so much of our time at the College is in the cerebral, academic realm, but this comment raises an important question. Isn’t every activity in some way physical? We experience the world through our bodies from necessity, walking from place to place, sitting in chairs, speaking and reading. At every moment we are taking in the world around us through our physical perception of sensory information in sight, smell, taste, touch and sound. And yet, conscious attention to our physicality is often limited to designated spaces. We set aside time here and there to go to the gym, for a walk or to a PE class, but otherwise I wonder if we don’t often walk around imagining that our bodies are just shells for our mental existences.

It struck me recently that many advancements in technology seem oriented towards mechanically replacing physical work. From the mechanization of industry to automobiles to electronic communication and commerce, it seems that the amount of physical engagement we have with our world is decreasing. So the question arises: Does movement matter?

The Dance Department is currently engaging in a project that answers with a resounding yes, and is aptly named Movement Matters. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Movement Matters is a multi-year project that intends to challenge separations and seek out collaboration and creative integration of movement and embodiment across disciplines and academic departments. Dance Department Chair Christal Brown expressed her enthusiasm for the project, which she will direct as it expands to engage the campus as a whole.

“Movement Matters is an exploration of how human bodies literally and metaphorically shape our physical and political worlds,” Brown said. “Regardless of academic discipline, dance and movement offer deep insight into how we think about ourselves, both individually and as part of the larger human community.”

By blending the boundaries that typically separate disciplines, Movement Matters is exemplifying the liberal arts at its best, constantly questioning and innovating what it means to learn and engage in education. Embodied scholarship is the epitome of the study of dance as an art form and an academic discipline, and this project aims to explore how embodiment and attention to the physical experience can enrich any field of study. Most fundamentally, it aims to grapple with the way we experience our bodies in relation to the world. What if physical education wasn’t treated separately, but instead integrated holistically into our educational experience, because body and mind are not separate?

The project has brought Kate Speer, Makeda Thomas and Maree ReMalia to campus for J-term, and the three dancers will work to create cross-disciplinary links and new avenues for connecting movement and academic scholarship. After this month of research and exploration, one of the artists will be selected for a two-year residency as Middlebury’s Mellon Interdisciplinary Choreographer, who will deepen the explorations they begin this month and develop connections and innovations of movement and embodiment across disciplines.

After public master classes this week, including one on Jan. 15 with Speer from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts (CFA) Dance Theatre, the artists will give a culminating presentation on their work during J-term on Jan. 26  at 10:30 a.m. in the CFA Dance Theatre. For more information about the project and the artists, visit go/movementmatters.