Hetty King

I was born in NYC in 1964 and have spent most of my personal and professional life living there. I graduated from the High School of the Performing Arts – the FAME school where I studied ballet, Graham, and Folk dance. I have a BFA in Dance from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, an MA in Performance Studies from NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science, and an MFA in Dance from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. In addition, I am a CMA, certified RYT200 in Yoga, registered through ISMETA as a Somatic Dance Educator, and am a current Doctoral Candidate in Dance Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1990 I found Nancy Topf through an advertisement in the Movement Research Journal. Nancy had created her technique developed from her years of study with Barbara Clark, a student of Mabel Todd.

My interest in Ideokinesis was born during my eight years of studies with Nancy (she died in 1998.) I worked privately with Nancy, took her group classes, attended workshops and retreats, and wrote my final project for my CMA on her work examining the Topf Technique through the lens of LMA and Bartenieff Fundamentals. After Nancy’s passing, I taught Improvisation/Topf Technique® for a semester at Sarah Lawrence College and taught classes in private studios in NYC. While living briefly in Montreal, I taught TT® at Studio 303 and offered private sessions.

As a dancer, my study and practice with Nancy Topf and Topf Technique®/Dynamic Anatomy was revelatory; it engaged me in a phenomenological shift personally and professionally. My ontology had been to perceive movement as the substance of dance. Through TT®, my ontology shifted to include perceiving the body as the substance of dance. My investigation into this shift led me to understand this work as an opening to train my body as a dancer and to understand myself – body, mind, and psyche.

After my career as a professional dancer, I entered the field of Prek-12 dance education situated in public and private educational institutions in New York City and have worked as an educator for almost twenty years. My pedagogy as a PreK-12 educator was informed by an application of Laban Movement Analysis through the Dance Education Laboratory model, the NYC Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts – Dance, my experience as a dancer, and my brief training as a teaching artist with Lincoln Center Institute. My teaching positions have all been within elementary schools serving grades K-5. In 2014 – under the de Blasio administration – Universal PreK and later in 2017, 3K were instituted in NYC public schools. With these changes, these grades were added to my schedule of classes.

Teaching very young children is challenging. I began to question my pedagogy and think about what I had learned as a dancer through my studies with Topf, my training as a CMA, and the many workshops, classes, and texts I had immersed myself in as a student of somatics. Apart from considering LMA as a conceptual dance language applied mainly to dance-making, I critiqued my pedagogy as driven by the values of production, skill development, assessments, and goals. I saw little evidence in my teaching methods or practice of a somatically informed pedagogy or one that specifically addressed my youngest students, ages 2.5-5.

Along with questioning what a somatic pedagogy in ECE would look like, I wondered how it could address the gaps in movement education, I perceived as an educator from what I had learned through my experiences as a somatic practitioner. For example, how could I include the study of one’s lived somatic experience – body, mind, and spirit that Hanna (1970) described or the experiential anatomy and ideokinesis I learned through Topf Technique/Dynamic Anatomy® that guided movement exploration from objective information informed by subjective experience? In an interview with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Nancy Stark Smith expresses this learning as the realization that the skeleton she was feeling, the one she had thought of as an image on the page, was her body.

“…there’s the femur, and I have one in my leg. But to go directly to the one in my leg and realize that it is an alive thing and… accessible in some experiential way is so different. Having this kind of personal relationship to the inside of your body is, I think, very new and quite extraordinary (Stark Smith, 1984, p.11).”

Topf expresses this learning in the description of her first meeting with her teacher Barbara Clark.

“Barbara placed a heel bone in my hand. I had been a student of dance since I was four years old. Barbara asked me how did I think this bone went in my body? I realized I had no idea. This made me aware of the deep sense of ignorance I was working with as I was struggling to become a dancer. It felt like a real injury to my psyche and my educational process, which I was destined to improve and heal in my work (Corfield,1999, as cited in Topf with King, 2022).”

I saw my dance and movement education class as a perfect place to explore this pedagogical possibility, introducing young children to the concept that their soma – their living body-mind- as a site of learning, joyful expression, and ‘personal literacy.’ This exploration has become the subject of my doctoral dissertation – the investigation of the pedagogical possibility of a somatic movement education pedagogy in early childhood and my counter to the dominant focus on ‘dance literacy’ in PreK3-12 dance education with the term ‘personal literacy’ to name my experience of the intersection of dance and somatic movement education to teach about the whole self. Topf described this when she wrote,

“This book can help you enter your body with kindness, curiosity, and understanding. It can help you find logic where chaos existed and illuminate what was dark by turning on an internal light, a way toward seeing and thus a way toward changing your habits. (Topf with (King, 2022, p. 25).”

This is the gap I aim to illuminate in my research, the omission of early childhood in explicitly considering somatic practices and principles in dance education pedagogy. What educational potential does this omission leave undiscovered? Addressing this gap will offer dance educators working in early childhood education empirical data to support a somatic dance and movement education pedagogy that addresses how to counter mind-body dualism, honor the embodied experiences of young children, and include self-knowledge as an explicit outcome of dance education introducing ‘personal literacy’ as an intended outcome of early childhood dance and movement education.

Websites:
My written work, teaching philosophy, archival photographs, more biographical information and videos of me practicing and teaching Topf Technique®, can be found on my website – hettyking.com. In collaboration with Nancy Topf’s son Jeremy, I also created a website/author page for Nancy Topf, nancytopf.com.

– Hetty King (2023)

A Guide to a Somatic Movement Practice: The Anatomy of Center is available from the University Press of Florida

Bibliography for Hetty King

King, H. “When Your Arms Are Free, You Can Fly – A Laban Movement Analysis of the Topf Technique®.” Unpublished paper written as a final project in the CMA Program through LIMS at the University of Quebec. 1996. The paper can be viewed at hettyking.com. 1996.

————- “The Intervention of Topf Technique – The Anatomy of Center.” Contact Quarterly Unbound. 2019 https://contactquarterly.com/cq/unbound/index.php#view=the-intervention-of-topf-technique

————- and Nancy Topf. A Guide To A Somatic Movement Practice The Anatomy Of Center. Gainsville, Florida: University Press of Florida 2022.

Nancy Lyons

Lyons, N. “Afterword” for Ideokinese: Ein kreativer Weg zu Bewegung und Kőrperhaltung. by A. Bernard, U. Stricker and W. Steinmüller. Bern, Switzerland: Verlag Hans Huber, 2003: 173-175.

Lyons N. and R. Rosen. “Interview with André Bernard,” Contact Quarterly, Reprint #3 Ideokinesis and Creative Body Alignment. Summer/Fall 1997: 26-38. http://www.contactquarterly.com

Lyons, N. and R. Fuller. The Moving Box. Cotati, California: The Footprint Press, 1977.

———Openings and Inner Workings. Cotati, California: The Footprint Press, 1978

———The Moving Book, K-3. Cotati, California: The Footprint Press, 2003.

———The Moving Book, 2-6. Cotati, California: The Footprint Press, 2005

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