These projects incoporate somatics. Somatics is a term which refers to practices based in the first-person expereince of the living body (soma). The term refers to an aggregate of practices, and was first defined by Thomas Hanna in the mid-70's, who was trained as a Feldenkrais Practitioner and developed the field from there. As the field of somatics expands, it is used as a therapeutic practice, for social justice, as well as an educational framework. The thing that is so complex about somatics is that this grouping was developed by white / experimental movement people, oft drawing from indigenous and culturally diverse forms, and there are complex concerns with the appropriation and domination then that is inherent in this kind of a collection. What is so exciting is that in the past decades there have been movements often led by Black and Brown people to share culturally conscious somatics, to critique the dominance of somatic practices, and to make space and raise up forms of movement that would not have been considered included. Groups such as Moving on Center, Resmaa Mekenam, Strossi, Generative Somatics, and others have incorporated many different movement forms and modalities into syncretic trainings that address the social and cultural aspects of embodiment explicitly. This need for recovery, integration, and embodiment is drawn from the same societal forces that produces the splits, so therefore conscious cultural somatics offers one tool in a larger possibility for collective liberation.
