Yielding: Scores for ‘Doing Less’ and Sometimes Doing More

Used in Somatics, ‘yielding’ usually refers to a quality in the body that allows for the experience of gravity. Not heaviness – but a sense of giving way to the sensation of weight and using this as the foundation for movement. However, the word is also used as a way to talk about agreement. It is the idea of giving way (traffic signs ask cars to yield to pedestrians) to something or being agreeable. In engineering it is also used to refer to the response of material to stress, when the point of movement or maximum elasticity is reached is termed the ‘yielding point.’

Using the idea of yielding, we will explore the joy of gravity and physical sensations of yielding into the gravity, momentum or rolling point, while also expanding our range of approaches to what it means to ‘say yes’, or to ‘yield’ to a score, intention, or state. Yielding can be a pathway into moving from sensation and flow, or also expanding the improvisational role of the dance giving us a an approach to choice making. Questions we might explore would be: How can I do less and follow more? What am I including in the dance, and what am I filtering?