The Body is in the Soul

Broadly accepted as a non-rational and emotional form of decision making, intuition is a sentient capacity we have to sense and feel our way through life. As a dancer, I have always been curious about the mechanics of intuitive, illogical, and paranormal ways of knowing. How does an individual learn to trust the sometimes subtle, swirly, and temporary impulses that circulate in the psychosomatic field of consciousness?

Through researching the neuroscience of intuition in improvisation for my terminal degree, I learned that intuition is not just a spontaneous response to circumstance or environment, it is actually an aspect of memory. Meaning that at all times we are being guided to some extent, by memory. This memory could be primordial, personal, biological, ancestral, or cultural; forming what we understand as our personal ontology (way of being) and epistemology (way of knowing).

Sift is the culmination and articulation of my process as a dance artist and choreographer working in ecological and healing-centered pedagogy and praxis. It is a poetic approach to somatic potential and phenomena that strips away all materials and attachments from my dance practice, including the studio and the mirror, in order to reveal what is most honest and essential.

There are ten principles that provide the soil for Sift:

1. The human body is a threshold, a place where the invisible becomes visible in some way. - John O’Donohue

2. Nothing exists outside of its relationship to everything else.

3. Consciousness is something we participate in.

4. We cannot be in control and relationship at the same time.

5. All creation manifests either through relationship or control.

6. Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything. - Gordon Hempten

7. Stillness is to movement as silence is to sound.

8. Healing is all-inclusive, welcome the exiled parts.

9. The body is the subconscious, the mind is the culture.

10. Simplicity is ripe immensity.

The healing purpose of Sifting is to build Insight from Intuition. As scholar and researcher Simon M McCrea writes in his study Intuition, insight, and the right hemisphere: Emergence of higher sociocognitive functions:

Intuition is the ability to understand immediately without conscious reasoning and is sometimes explained as a ‘gut feeling’ about the rightness or wrongness of a person, place, situation, temporal episode or object. In contrast, insight is the capacity to gain accurate and a deep understanding of a problem and it is often associated with movement beyond existing paradigms. Examples include Darwin, Einstein and Freud’s theories of natural selection, relativity, or the unconscious; respectively. Many cultures name these concepts and acknowledge their value, and insight is recognized as particularly characteristic of eminent achievements in the arts, sciences and politics. Considerable data suggests that these two concepts are more related than distinct, and that a more distributed intuitive network may feed into a predominately right hemispheric insight-based functional neuronal architecture. The preparation and incubation stages of insight may rely on the incorporation of domain-specific automatized expertise schema associated with intuition.