Somatophobia

As I walk down the street, I see people looking at me--I feel my body tightening to the glance, my breath caught and my mind frozen.  As I prepare for a difficult meeting, my body responds with a heightened heart rate, sweat and a tight throat.  And often this happens without my noticing outright what my body is telling me.  Somatophobia is the fear of this knowledge - the knowledge of the body's sensation and what it can teach us if we are willing to pay attention.

I continue daily to not pay attention to subtle clues about my body.  My wife continually has to remind me that my bad mood is most likely connected to my being hungry.  But most days it's worse and I misunderstand the clues.  If I feel an ache in my belly, I think I'm hungry instead of nervous.  Or I don't realize that my back is hurting because I've been tense all day dealing with situations that make me uncomfortable.  At that point, I think a stretch might help it instead of dealing with the anger.  I either do not pay attention to my body, as an annoying malfunctioning older car, or I misread and readapt the cues to fit my situation.  In the past, I have thought that I was deeply in love when in fact I was just feeling lonely. It would have been much easier and simpler to just feel the loneliness and its subsequent fear than to involve other people.

Somatophobia relates to us all.  We do not like this body... in the Sunday comics this morning, the teenaged boy is dreaming of a different body that would allow him to continue texting while eating and drinking.  Different cultures like women hard or soft, their men direct or indirect, and all this relates to the vocabulary attached to the body.

In particular, I'm interested in this relationship between technology, the body and our discontent with the body.  We would love to be freed from these "bags of mostly water," continually thirsting, somewhat fragile and easily diseased and that come with an unknown and inevitable expiration date.  What could be scarier than that?  We want to refuse the body, ignore it, overfeed it, overstimulate it because there is nothing that reminds us more of our upcoming demise than its soft, fragile flesh and a delicate mushy brain that allows us to think and feel.  Unfortunately, the brain is the body.  The nervous system can only see and feel through this body.  Avoiding our bodily sensations doesn't make them any less real. In absentia of our acknowledgment, our bodies will still react to our environment, people, and situations as our brains continue to try blocking floods of emotions, sensations and feelings continually coming from this ephemeral input device - our body.

Fearing the body is not new.  Our present policies reflect this all around us.  Letting my body feel fear is new for me.  As a teacher said to me, we can open to these sensations "gently, gently, gently..." and dance is a perfect medium to do this.  Somatophobia is a dance / multi-media experience looking to reconnect the audience and the movers to the subtle physical energies associated with ego, character, presence and embodiment.  This new collaborative work looks to integrate psychology, meditation, theater and music with dance to create an intimate experience about the fear of embodiement.