On Somatic Intelligence, or Learning to Dance
In college, I audited a class called “Readings in Taoism”. The premise was that students would study philosophical Taoist texts, then apply what they learned once a week through a dance component. I copied the curriculum, bought the required reading, and showed up to the dance studio to experience what people told me was “the most life changing class at the school.”
Though I did not complete the course, the idea of developing visceral understanding of concepts, like Taoism, was extremely interesting to me. In high school I balanced heavy academic coursework with many performing arts extracurriculars: marching band, musical theater, freestyle rap, and more. I often found myself considering the friction between book-smarts and street-smarts, as I noticed that the smartest people I knew seemed to lack in common sense. The best example being the stereotype of the frazzled professor, who can solve a complex math equation but cannot find a reason to comb their hair or hold small talk with a stranger.
Of course, this can be attributed to neurodiversity, but for myself I felt aware enough of this problem that I wanted to take steps to make sure I was never only booksmart. I wanted to make sure I invested time in different kinds of intelligence, ones that were applicable beyond the scope of academia. Most notably, I spent a long time investing in my social intelligence. As a generally nerdy kid, I believed that socializing was a muscle that you needed to exercise in order to keep, so I consciously put myself in situations that would expand my ability to develop meaningful, comfortable relationships with people.
“Readings is Taoism” opened up the idea of developing physical intelligence of my body, or somatic intelligence as I like to call it.
so·mat·ic (adj) - relating to the body, especially as distinct from the mind.
As a performer, I already understood the importance of practice to develop muscle memory. As a drummer, you practice your drills so that you can improvise rhythms effortlessly. As a dancer, you learn the steps of choreography until you know it well enough in your body that is no longer steps but instead a whole performance, or a dialogue with music. Once the fundamentals of these arts become second nature, a new world of problems open up. Instead of worrying about playing scales properly on a piano, a practiced musician is worried about tone, phrasing, and feeling.
In middle school, I remember going to our Valentine’s Day dance and partnering up with a girl and feeling completely and utterly awkward. The slow songs came on, and my poor thirteen year old self did not know how to hold her, nor how to move. I had only “fast danced” by that point in my life, and so I tried snapping my fingers and swaying from side to side, like I did with most other music I listened to. I humiliated myself. Did anyone really care? Of course not, I was in middle school. But I cared - I saw this as a skill I wanted to know, something that would help me out on future Valentine’s Days.
Once I turned eighteen, I started going to swing dancing meetups. Most of these events started with a lesson, then the dance floor opened up after an hour and people applied what they learned. I found this really helpful, since I could learn three to five moves and then immediately see how they applied in their natural context. I don’t think I was a great swing dancer, but I showed up and I cared and I danced. I built up my repertoire of “moves” and was able to cobble together sequences of semi-competent movement with partners.
In college, I had the luxury of studying movement with more depth. I remember a professor teaching me how to stand firmly on the ground, with my feet planted like trees, so that I could draw strength and energy from the earth. In the Taoism class’s dance component, we stood still and only moved when the world pushed us to do so, like blades of tall grass. Echoed sounds from outside of the dance studio affected my movement. The people around me and their breathing affected my movement. Sometimes I hoped to feel the spirit of the world guiding my chest, hands, and feet. To me, this was ultimate somatic intelligence, what I understood to be the Way that I read about in the assigned texts.
Through my twenties, I developed a habit of checking in with my body through yoga and dance. I knew that the mind and the body were more connected that we typically acknowledge. Before every important job interview, I made it a point to strike a power pose for a minute as it was proven to increase confidence, giving you a competitive advantage in securing the job.
I learned that movement can also be a tool of misdirection, which is particularly useful in performance but also in customer service. If I trace my finger in an arc, the human eye is naturally drawn to its trajectory, allowing me to switch a deck of cards, or to clean up a spill without a customer noticing. I remember hearing an episode of This American Life about a dance instructor who had such command over her body and its perception that many of her students never noticed that she only had one arm. How incredible, I thought, to have such strong physical intelligence that you could control how you were perceived.
My most intimate application of somatic intelligence is through private dance, in my own room, alone. When I am processing an emotion (often sadness), I will dim the lights, put on my headphones, and play slow songs. I stand firmly on the earth, and I soften my posture. I do my best to let my body naturally respond to my feelings and the music. It is clumsy at times. I acknowledge that a lot of the time I feel silly doing this, but this is part of the educational process. I dance for an hour or so, usually, and feel like it deepens my understanding of myself.
Last October, I attended my sister’s wedding. After a couple glasses of wine, I was on the dance floor, having fun and being silly. There were songs I love that immediately pull me out of my seat (usually hip hop), but there were many other songs and opportunities to dance with partners. Salsa, jazz standards, swing… there was a little bit of everything. I took my mom out for a whirl, and I found that my swing dance components had melted into something different, something more intuitive, and a lot more fun. Brimming with confidence, at the next music break I caught eyes with a cute girl I had spoken to earlier in the night, extended my hand, and pulled her in. Finally, I felt like I was applying what I had learned. This was the moment I had prepared for.
I twirled her, sashayed around, and boogied. For the first time, I felt in control of my movement (and my partner’s movement!). Holding her, I could intuitively guide our steps, our spins. I could feel the trajectory of our bodies and could use the tension of our hands to communicate, to let her know where we were headed next. As the song ended, we laughed, talked, and exchanged numbers. I saw myself in the back of my brain, thirteen years old at the Valentine’s Day dance, beaming at me and all the progress I had made.
I call it somatic intelligence because I’m an academic, but at times it feels like intelligence of spirit. I feel whole when my knowledge isn’t just a collection data points and remembered facts, but instead lived experience. I want to invest cognitive effort to arrive at the effortless, to have visceral knowledge, not just in my brain, but in my bones, my blood, and the rhythms of my life.
Appendix
- Wandering on The Way, Zhuang Zhou. https://books.google.com/books/about/Wandering_on_the_Way.html
- Conversation with choreographer Karole Armitage. http://podcast.ito.com/conversation-with-karole-armitage
- Aidan MacAllan Dancing Shirtless - Data Science - House of Cards S04E08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWFJw5TnQgs
- Bad Dancer - Yoko Ono https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3mvEfON2CI
