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Somatic Meditations
Collection:CSM Museum & Study Collection
Date: 2020
Artist: Scott Castner
Dimensions:
Duration: 327 seconds
Medium: Digital Video
Object number: TH.2020.111.CC
DescriptionVideo work, edition number 2
“Somatic Meditations” is a video work which uses dance and performance to understand and challenge binary ideas about the mind and body, and explores how our cultural identities shape and relate to our physical selves. By attempting (and ultimately failing) to create somatic dance, the artist addresses the short comings of this school of movement theory, addressing somatics’ inability to consider how our bodies intersect with social experiences of race, gender, class, and ability. Ultimately the work expands past somatics into an exploration of embodiment, and physical learning. The work draws from a research based practice to record and stage these experiments with somatics, incorporating the artists voice in the form of a performance lecture, which stages this process of experimentation and learning, alongside a visual record of the dance produced by these experiments. In both content and form “Somatic Meditations” illustrates the expansive capability of physical and embodied learning to break down the incomplete assumptions we may hold around our own bodies, and the bodies of others.
“Somatic Meditations” is a video work which uses dance and performance to understand and challenge binary ideas about the mind and body, and explores how our cultural identities shape and relate to our physical selves. By attempting (and ultimately failing) to create somatic dance, the artist addresses the short comings of this school of movement theory, addressing somatics’ inability to consider how our bodies intersect with social experiences of race, gender, class, and ability. Ultimately the work expands past somatics into an exploration of embodiment, and physical learning. The work draws from a research based practice to record and stage these experiments with somatics, incorporating the artists voice in the form of a performance lecture, which stages this process of experimentation and learning, alongside a visual record of the dance produced by these experiments. In both content and form “Somatic Meditations” illustrates the expansive capability of physical and embodied learning to break down the incomplete assumptions we may hold around our own bodies, and the bodies of others.