MAPPING SOMATIC KNOWLEDGE ECOLOGIES CONFERENCE
University of Pretoria
School of the Arts: Drama
17-19 July 2025
Presentation By NOBONKE VAN TONDER

PART ONE ~ ALMA MATER

This university is my alma mater. It means “my nourishing mother” – the place where I first encountered the transformative potential of knowledge. I studied here from 1973 to 1978. I would like to tell you something about those years, for you to appreciate where you are right now.

In 1977, nearly half a century ago, I proposed a Master's thesis on a topic that felt entirely valid to me: the integration of dance as therapy. As a young dancer it made sense in my bones, for all the years before then, I became deeply attuned to the mental health and healing benefits of body movement. To me dance was not merely expressive – it was transformational. I felt called to explore this as a personal truth, as well as a legitimate scholarly field of inquiry: a bodymind integration rooted in lived experience and potentially aligned with everything calling for human adaptation.

But for my lecturers at the time, the idea was too abstract – perhaps even suspicious. Dance and healing, in tandem, seemed to lie outside the realm of accepted academic discourse in the Humanities. While the embodied wisdom of dance was seen as peripheral, indulgent and something that may cause too much trouble, on more levels than academically, my challenge was to articulate dance as a legitimate site of psychological inquiry, if not embodied ancestral transformational knowledge, and healing.

Today I know how much of that resistance reflected the broader cultural climate. Nearly all the staff were devoted rugby supporters—some even players. I have a vivid memory of the conversations on Monday mornings and how anxious I became because my interest in the curriculum was greater than the strategies and tactics of the rugby players over the past weekend.

But here is the other context. This was the late 1970s, deep in the Apartheid era. South Africa was under international cultural boycott. Books were censored. Global ideas trickled in slowly, if at all, mostly from Europe. There was no internet, and international correspondence took weeks. Under these conditions, scholarship in areas like embodied psychology or integrated somatic practice had little chance to take root. And yet, the seed was undoubtedly planted in me.

During the same period I often found myself in a particular bookstore in Hillbrow – regularly raided by the security police. They were mostly after censored or underground publications, and as I recall, they often focused on genres deemed pornographic. But for many of us, that shop was a haven of counter-culture – simply because it challenged the dominant politics, morality, and religious ideologies of the day.

It was called Exclusive Books, and became the first Exclusive Books in South Africa. It became a kind of Mecca for those of us starved for ideas. Your mouth watered just walking in there.

One day, tucked away on a bottom shelf, I found a single copy of Dance Magazine from the United States – the only one I ever saw there. It was a revelation. People were writing intelligent, rigorous articles about dance and dancers. In the back pages, I discovered that in other parts of the world, dance and psychology were being studied together—as dance therapy.

I was stunned. I had been called naïve or unserious for wanting to explore precisely this integration. Yet here it was, printed, practiced, and recognised. My Master's thesis—though dismissed at the time, perhaps by those more inclined toward rugby than research – felt utterly legitimate to me. I had based it on movement sessions I facilitated with psychiatric patients at Weskoppies Hospital. It did not earn me high marks, but I graduated in 1978. And the very next year, I was in America.

So to stand here today for this presentation is profoundly meaningful to me. It affirms that 47 years of movement research, performance, and embodied practice have led somewhere. The bodymind – its movement, imagination, intuitions, knowledge and ecologies – can now be witnessed academically, with seriousness and care.

The very existence of a conference titled Mapping Somatic Knowledge Ecologies is, to me, living proof that this university has evolved. Radically.

Now perhaps you understand why it matters so deeply for me to be here. Why I am genuinely grateful to have been invited. And why I hope what I offer today will meet your curiosity, and resonate with the inquiry we are all part of.

PART TWO ~ DUALISM

As a dancer and psychologist I always had this question: Why would mental health professionals and institutions seem unable – or unwilling – to recognise the body's vital role in the study and pursuit of mental well-being. It was as if the moving, feeling, sensing, intelligent bodymind had no place in the psychological landscape.

Of course, we now understand that this deep disconnection was not accidental. It was philosophically sealed in the West—codified and legitimised in 1641, when René Descartes published his Meditations on First Philosophy. In it, he famously declared that the mind and body were two separate and distinct substances. This became known as mind-body dualism, or Cartesian dualism, a concept that has profoundly shaped Western science, medicine, and psychology ever since. We are still living under that glaringly institutionalised law: that the body should remain disconnected of the mind's workings, and the mind should distrust the body's spontaneous responses – especially those related to psychic survival. The two must not grow too familiar. In fact, they are expected to monitor each other for transgressions, 24/7.

Meanwhile, we dwell in the confusion by yet more perplexing laws. How close are we to come to another's body, especially if that person needs comfort, or education. And yet, certain sub-cultures may be given the right to invade the body's privacies, its silences, its thresholds. All of this is conveniently normalized and enacted – such as gender-based violence, often without a single word.

The effects of this body-mind divide have rippled across centuries – justified slavery, persecuted female healers called witches, fragmenting human experience, sidelining embodied knowledge, and reducing mental health to cognition and chemistry. And while the split originated in Europe, it has now spread globally, reinforced by colonial education, medical systems, and institutional norms.

In my case, dance has served – and continues to serve – as my most reliable companion through life's severest challenges. During my cross-race relationship under Apartheid with a freedom fighter, and later in the awakening of motherhood, I encountered forces within myself for which there was no societal home, effectual psychotherapy or sanctioned language. In my book A Political Love - The Body Speaks The Soul Knows you will read about the radical reimagining of love as political praxis. It speaks of my independently forged bodymind practices which effectively saved my life. It also reflects on my dancing body as a site of ancestral memory, decolonial knowledge, autonomous political reasoning, affective nationhood, an ecological personhood and spiritual testimony.

Dance, now at age 70, holds my independent philosophical entanglements – my way of being-with and thinking-through the crises that shape our time: climate collapse, economic injustice, political mayhem and mass extinction.

My central question remains: How might the moving bodymind offer a direct pathway into medicine, holistic and ecological health – and perhaps into forms of knowledge and connection we have yet to imagine, such as how will we survive in our world, or more profound, how will our world survive us?

The question that calls me – as long as we are still here – is: What are we for?

PART THREE ~ THE UNKNOWN

What map does the body offer us in answering the above questions?

Now, I turn to the other figure in the dance: the witness. The witness was unmistakably present when my professors made their decision about the validity of my field of study. But what exactly did they see? What did they imagine?

The ways we witness the moving body remain deeply perplexing – framed by rigid norms and sedimented assumptions. These perceptions are still shaped by racial, religious, gendered, and class-based optics, layered with unspoken codes and stereotypes.

And beneath those surface responses, judgments rise – often from what we used to call “the unconscious,” a term that once held depth and mystery, but now seems to stretch so wide it collapses into: everything-is-within-everything – an ecological statement.

A moving body is an evocative presence for the unattuned and uninitiated eye. I even call the moving body an event. A body moving with autonomy, as if led by something greater than the self, can appear disruptive. For certain witnesses it may even signify a threat.

Why? Because there is often no shared cultural or conceptual framework for the unknown. Even in a country with a flourishing dance culture, the dancer whose movement exceeds entertainment – who moves with a different purpose, inquiry, or invocation – can still be seen as suspect, because the dance enters the unknown.

Movement, enters a complex field when it becomes a statement of interiority, enhancing what the mind thinks, whether it be the dancer, or the witness. Yet, it is here that health may emerge; here that diverse relationality may be nurtured, in a practice such as Contact Improvisation; here that a person's understanding of themselves, in an increasingly fragmented world, might come to rest.

In this way, the moving body becomes more than expression – it becomes a map, a map of understanding the great unknown. Indeed, a living map of somatic knowledge ecologies.

It could answer the question: What am I here for? And its planetary extension: What am I for?

I would like to share with you a particular practice – one you may already be doing, in your own way, and not necessarily like anybody else.

It is a practice that does not seek the glare of public attention, nor the spotlight of social media. It is a practice I do at a time of the day when others may not have woken – before the world begins its relentless noise.

This practice carries a kind of knowledge that is not mainstream. It doesn't rely on clicks, likes, or digital affirmations to prove its worth. It unfolds in solitude, and its truth rests in the act of being witnessed – by one other, perhaps a fellow researcher, such as in my case.

PART FOUR ~ CREPUSCULAR GENRE

An animal that moves mostly during dawn or dusk – to drink or feed in the twilight – is known as a crepuscular animal. The Latin word crepusculum refers to this in-between time: twilight. A time, and also a state of being – between dark and light, the unknown and the known, the impossible and the possible.

It is from this threshold – this twilight zone – that a certain kind of knowledge arises. A liminal knowledge. The kind of knowing that doesn't live in fixed categories, but flickers in-between.

Genre – as we often use it – is a form, a category, a way of knowing. It can apply to dance, voice, performance, literature. Yet what I want to speak about today is something less stable, less defined:

This crepuscular genre lives in a practice I share early in the morning with a friend and fellow dancer, Nicola Visser. In the silence before sunrise, in the softness of bodies waking, in gestures that are barely performative yet no longer sleep – there, something stirs. Something dances us, and something makes us see the unknown.

I have known Nicky for over twenty years. For the last two years, despite the distance between Cape Town and Aarhus, Denmark, where she now lives, we have maintained a diligent practice. Three to four mornings each week, at six o'clock, we meet on Zoom for an hour.

Our hour together is carefully divided. I might begin by dancing for 10 to 20 minutes—sometimes with music, mostly in silence. Afterward, I return to the screen to speak about the dance: how I experienced it, what remains in memory, what story emerged as my bodymind. Then, I make a specific and intentional statement: I give Nicky permission to speak into my dance, to offer her view from the position of witness.

Nicky responds not only to what she has seen but also to the words I used to describe my own experience. While witnessing she creates drawings inspired by the dance, and these drawings become her language to speak back to me. She explains this practice beautifully:

“What feels most urgent in me is to create a graphic essay alongside a written reflection. I feel that the line – in a close, drawing way – can guide me to what I do not yet know.”

She also shares a common challenge in dance research:

“Dance is ephemeral; it occurs and then is gone, not easily captured or stored like a drawing. I often doubt if I truly experienced something, as the experience folds inside the next moment and the next.”

After my dance and reflection, we switch roles. Nicky dances for 30 minutes, with me witnessing and making written notes. Like me, she speaks about her movement and then invites me to speak back from my witnessing.

This is arts-based, process-oriented, crepuscular research. It embraces, quite literally, everything and the more-than realities in our human lives – the knowledge spaces between waking and becoming, the liminal time where dance, drawing, and dialogue converge uncannily, weirdly, anomalously, atypically, queerly and sometimes eerily.

Here are some of our words, all of what we record on Zoom and write down. I wish to warn you that these phrases may not make sense to you, and every phrase is unrelated to the next.

You have many arms and hundreds of heads
Pulling it all back into latices of fingers with tiny portals, each with a different message
What a hand can do!
I saw galactic orbits
Before your death, that was the last thing you were for
Old folds refolded the folds on your pants
The eyes have their own freedom
There is always the more-towards
Your kitchen waited, the sofa received you, the curtain disagreed
An intense concern in your arms
The in-between of your back
You did big things softly, with sudden detail, lots of it
I saw that we must read Brian Massumi's Affect Theory again.
You were so loyal to the light
There was a whole world there and your smallest movement shifted the horizon
Is immersion a form of asking?
The wall was calling you, and then was catching you

And so forth.

This practice sustains our all over health in ways that are intimate, inherently part of our bodyminds, mysterious, ancestral ecologies, with self-constructed senses – many of them – and, the meaning we make of this enigmatic genre.

Nicky writes: “I am surprised by an intricate fabric of possibility I could never have imagined. Afterwards what comes out my mouth is often first ‘thank you'... as though I have been given water in a dry place.” Throughout and beyond these sessions, we continuously express a deep gratitude for this shared work.

PART FIVE ~ WITNESS

We look at people all the time. All I have mentioned plays a role in what we see. But what does it mean to witness a dancer—and the dance?

I am often approached by a parent, exasperated by the uncontainable vitality of a child who must dance. They ask me: “What should I do with this child?” I respond with a question of my own: “Who do you think the child is dancing for?” There is usually a pause. Then, somewhat surprised, the parent says: “For me, I guess.” So when the child is seen, what was perceived as a problem, becomes a potential. The parent shifts – from parental manager to witness.

And with that shift, the child's dancing begins to transform: becoming more creative, more relational, more autonomous. Self-regulating.

Self-fulfilled.

A child thrives when met by the loving, witnessing eye of a parent. The child no longer has to carry the burden of being invisible. The child feels in themselves when their depth is witnessed. Their nervous system settles. Suddenly, mathematics is possible. Reading becomes interesting. For here onwards they shape and experience themselves: physically, psychologically, spiritually and ecologically.

Here is something to think about: A child is on the screen not to see, but to be seen. The screen on the child's device does not, cannot, will not see the child's depth as the child wants to, and must be seen.

Crepuscular Genre honours this subtle dynamic inherent between child and parent, dancer and witness, student and teacher – where movement is not a problem, but a possibility of becoming.

But something also changes in the witness. This is the bedrock of ethics, response-ability, self-knowledge, healing, and justices-to-come, or unusual actions that may arise from receiving this relationally sensitive transmission, dances that are always already anyway original, evocative and intellectually generous ... unfolding all the time – mapping new somatic knowledge ecologies.

PART SIX ~ PATRIARCHY

When we speak ecologically, we are also speaking politically. Ecology is never neutral – it is embedded in systems of power, belonging, exclusion, and survival.

And so, as in our practice, any idea of ecological politics must always consider one persistent presence: it is a force that infiltrates and influences not only our dancing, but also our witnessing. This presence – sometimes blatantly evident, often subtle – must be accounted for, even studied, as part of how we engage with and understand the moving body.

We are accountable for the knowledge of an entity called: the patriarchy. This is a system we can no longer claim not to see.

What is meant by the term Patriarchy? The generic term “patriarchy” refers to a deeply entrenched human phenomenon that has shaped our lives on this planet for the past 6,000 to 10,000 years. It took root with the rise of agriculture, the control of territory, and the rigidification of gendered roles. Over time, it solidified through the institutional powers of the state, the military, religion, and even academia – organizing not only human relations but also our relationship to the environment.

Patriarchy is not just an abstract system; it is an embodied construct, shaped by economic, political, and ideological forces. Its power is an integral part of being human. Today, it intertwines with colonialism, capitalism, and increasingly, technological domination.

In the Middle East, patriarchy manifests as structural violence, engineered starvation, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.

In South Africa, it takes the form of neoliberal structures of control, far-left and far-right fascism, oppressive slogans of racial entitlement, ecological imperialism, and devastating corruption and state capture.

Worldwide patriarchal ideologies now destroy our oceans, rivers, and forests through industrial exploitation. It pollutes our airspaces and digital commons, infiltrate public consciousness via social media, and wage a global war – a war capable of erasing all life as we know it.

As a dancer and performer, I have lived and moved the knowledge that this system is ancient – but not irreversible. It is widespread – but locally transformable. It is old – but increasingly questioned, resisted and transgressed.

Patriarchy is present, studied, and actively questioned within our crepuscular genre – in both our dancing and our witnessing, to the fullest extent we can hold. We can detect the patriarch in our feeling, seeing, imagining, interpreting, and generating of knowledge. We find the patriarch in movement of different intensities, repetitions, different concentrations, directions, timing, and affective content. These are the subtle and overt manifestations of the patriarchy in movement and in language. This knowledge is cultivated by the intelligibility and trust in everything – and in the relationality of the dancer and witness.

You probably detected that I speak here of the internalised patriarch – the judge within – who murmurs that our movement, our thought, our sensing, our very bodies ... are not good enough. Not yet. Not ever. This is the language of a logic that oppresses. It is a language that represses, denies, shames or demonises, pathologises and judges.

In this field, language frequently falls into a semantic swamp of essentialisms. We work with and against concepts simultaneously, generating and deconstructing binaries. One such binary – the human/nature split – is a core compulsion of patriarchy, fragmenting our experience and obscuring the full texture of being. We become aware of the ways we may collude – subtly or overtly – with the patriarchal impulse. But we also begin to recover our will: to choose action, reading its interpretation, following its expression. As such we trace the performativities and intelligibilities of our transgressions.

Now, we know better what we are for. This devotion too, is ancient. I hope you can now see that this genre is also a twilight practice of courage. A slow revolution. A justice still on the way. A becoming of life itself.

For this reason we study power.

PART SEVEN ~ POWER

If there's ever been a time to understand power in all its complexity, it's now. Patriarchal powers dominate headlines, systems, media and minds.

But we are interested in another power. Something older, timeless, more enduring.

Through Crepuscular Genre, we encounter the true forces that shape existence: gravity, motion, breath, seasons, time, water, light, spirals, mycelia, mist, dew, the sun that sustain entire worlds, photosynthesis – where light makes our food – decay and composting – where nothing is ever wasted, and seed germinate. From industrial spills to barren sands, the quiet work of brainless and blind earthworms reveals a deeper truth that restores and regenerates our soils, for us to live.

These aren't abstract, they're the subtle powers that move through and as us. They are the powers that root, nourish, and sustain life. And in our practice, we embody the truths of these powers, generatively. That, right now, may be the most radical act of all.

It answers “what am I for.”

These powers are quiet, but they are everywhere. This is radical. They live in tone, texture, nuance – the breath before the movement, the pause before the breath, before the word. From the tiniest seed to the galaxies spinning through 94 billion light-years, there is a power that cracks stone and germinates life. It doesn't dominate – it becomes. In the posthuman philosophy we call this power: justices-to-come. In our dance, our witnessing, our silence and movement we remember what true power feels like. Not the brittle scream of empire, but the return of the tide. Not spectacle, but seeding. Not control, but resonance. Not conquest, but continuity. And our research: mapping somatic knowledge ecologies. We dance the ecology out there, but, here.

PART EIGHT ~ GRAVITY

Amongst the many discoveries such as the integrity of connectivity, rhythm, ecology, I would like to bring you one of the most radical powers that we work with. The power of gravity.

This planet exists because of its particular configuration of gravity, the force that keeps us here. Gravity is not a metaphor – it is a teacher. Movement radically gifted me with gravity. It deserves my most grounded gratitude. I earnestly call upon a renewed witnessing of gravity as the source of decolonised psychology and education, if not academia in its entirety.

Gravity is an embodied, ecological knowledge that Nicky and I have practiced to sustain the powers we need, to understand what we are for. We recognise those who have earned the knowledge of gravity through time, care, embodiment. We can see this. It lies in the sustained practice of the intelligibility of our genre. We also recognise gravity as our inheritance, our ancestor, which we accept daily, with humility, in the sustained practice of Crespuscular Genre.

As artists who practice gravity body-deep, we say: “no matter our circumstances, we can make something out of nothing”. Another value of the gravity of alma mater, the nourishing mother within all of us and in everything through and as us, is our enormous gratitude to each other. This is power. From now on, look at every dance, every educational gesture, every healing act, as a statement of radical gratitude to gravity. This is why we are here.

PART NINE ~ SPIRIT

I am of the view that the act of learning to move for a witness, and to learn how to witness another, as a gesture towards gravity, especially in the presence of the patriarchy, is a spiritual phenomenon.

The soul that dances before you embodies a precise moment in their life's unfolding, primordially, victoriously – just as the dancing child does. And the soul of the witness is always, in a process of spiritual initiation – into learning how to see that depth that tells us what we are for. This deep spiritual readiness is cultivated through our art and embodied practice, essential to our soul's becoming.

In the quiet of twilight knowing, of wisdom that roams in-between everything, we see each other as a spiritual depth embodied, already, always, automatically.

How might we transform if we continue to create spaces like this where the body is not pathologized, but respected as a profound host of complex feeling, memory, intuition, knowledge and spirit? Let us begin to map our somatic depth along with everything-that-is-everything that is what-we-are-for.

Thank you.

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