ABSTRACT
Movement analysis, dance, and somatics are vast endeavors, as are the manifestations of refugee narratives. Movement practitioners live for movement, and interpret the world in terms of the body’s potentiality for traveling through space, time, and energy. Within mobility studies, stillness has emerged as an inevitable sub-specialty. As Tim Cresswell quips, “Usually, it does not take long for the academically inclined to start to explore the seeming opposite of what is currently fashionable”. In non-spiritual milieus, motion and stillness function as relative qualities and therefore depend on time, culture, and context. Freedom of movement would seem self-evident to a pre-agricultural nomadic tribe. Mystics would claim that stillness and motion emerge from within, a falsity whose vindication results in enlightenment. Modern-day unwilling wanderers must shoulder the weight of ten thousand years of opprobrium that the settled have laden onto nomadic peoples, in addition to the proximate horrors that propelled their flight.
