ABSTRACT
Two years into my university teaching career, I was almost fired from my academic position for beginning my modern dance classes with 20 minutes of lying on the floor. Observing the class from behind a tiny porthole in the far door of the massive old wooden studio called Warner Main Space, my colleagues heard nothing of the somatic images I was verbalizing in order to draw my students’ attention to the weight of their skulls resting on the floor, for instance, or the expansion of their breath as their lower backs released into the support of gravity. Instead, they saw 25 beginning dance students just lounging around on the floor, occasionally rolling their heads from side to side or slowly shifting the positions of their torsos.
