Andrea Olsen, a professor of dance at Middlebury, has taught anatomy and kinesiology since 1972 in workshops and colleges, and is the author of Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy, written in collaboration with Caryn McHose. As a dancer, Olsen has choreographed more than 80 works and toured internationally with Dance Gallery, The Dance Company of Middlebury, and as a solo artist.
Her interest in authentic movement is reflected in "Being Seen, Being Moved: Authentic Movement in Performance," published in The Contact Quarterly. Professor Olsen's book, Body and Earth, An Experiential Guide,explores the many ways in which our relationship to our bodies affects our attitudes toward the world around us. Body and Earth
Andrea Olsen, professor of Dance and faculty member in the Environmental Studies Program at Middlebury College, celebrates the release of her newest book: Body and Earth, An Experiential Guide. Olsen is also the author of Bodystories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy, and she performs, teaches yoga and creative writing, and offers workshops worldwide.
Body and Earth: An Experiential Guide
By Andrea Olsen
Foreword by John Elder
An inspired synthesis of scientific detail and creative perception offers new insights into the relationship between body and earth.
"Body is our first environment," writes Andrea Olsen. "It is the medium through which we know the earth." In a remarkable integration of environmental science, biology, meditation, and creative expression, Olsen, a dancer who teaches in the environmental studies program at Middlebury College, offers a guide to a holistic understanding of person and place. Part workbook, part exploration, Body and Earth considers the question of how we can best, most responsibly inhabit both our bodies and our planet.
Olsen displays an easy command of fields as diverse as geology, biochemistry, ecology, and anatomy as she explores the ways in which our bodies are derived from and connected to the natural world. But Body and Earth is not just a lesson, it is also an investigation. Arranged as a 31-day program, the book offers not only a wealth of scientific information, but also exercises for both exploring the body and connecting with place; illustrations and works of art that illuminate each chapter's themes; and Olsen's own meditations and reflections, connecting the topics to her personal history and experience.
Olsen insists that neither body nor landscape are separate from our fundamental selves, but in a culture which views the body as a mechanism to be trained and the landscape as a resource to be exploited, we need to learn to see again their fundamental wholeness and interconnection. Through hard data, reflection, exercises, and inspiration, Body and Earth offers a guide to responsible stewardship of both our planet and our persons.
Response to Body and Earth
"Body and Earth is for those of us who feel a longing to be in closer touch with ourselves and nature. We are of the earth, and we are of the body. The evocative quality of the writing fuels our passion for fuller contact and communication, providing a bridge to embodied experience."
—Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, author of Sensing, Feeling, and Action and Founder and Educational Director of the School for Body-Mind Centering
"Andrea's writing resonates a deep engagement with the earth and our potential for connection. Wondrously matter of fact, she negotiates an awareness built on sensing, movement and clear information. She gives us the tools to note those small epiphanies of science and existence, of the land and the heart, with detail, spirit and a humbling sense of place. Body and Earth is a practice, a reminder of the enormously simple act of conscious living. This is a book that will be rained on, danced with, left behind and found again, borrowed and used for life."
—Bebe Miller, Choreographer and Artistic Director of Bebe Miller Company, and Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University
"Andrea Olsen sees wide and deep, bringing us her vivid and remarkable experience of organic connection between body and earth, written in a language both poetic and practical. This timely offering is contemporary in its unique perspective and ancient in its apparent wisdom."
—Janet Adler, author of Arching Backward: The Mystical Initiation of a Contemporary Woman
"With the grace of the dancer she is, Andrea Olsen crosses those pesky disciplinary boundaries with ease, precision, and intelligence. She seamlessly weaves together physiology, story, practice, and performance--all in the interest of embodied and enlightened engagement with the world. Her words and wisdom constitute a call for conscious, intimate, and sensual relationship with the places we inhabit. More accurately, more personally, she teaches, guides, and offers us an invitation to know our full human-ness, to fully love ourselves, our bodies, our Earth."
—Laura Sewall, Sight and Sensibility: The Ecopsychology of Perception
"Body and Earth challenges us to connect body and earth with the creative spirit that animates them both. I felt moved--physically and spiritually and creatively--as I read a text packed full with hands-on, practical advice and solid scientific data and soaring meditations. Andrea Olsen has done her homework on so many levels. But the magic of this book is that it does not read like homework. The writing dances! This is a manual for the young writer as well as the dancer, the storyteller, all of us who want to enjoy the path through this physical and magical earth in this physical and magical body. I recommend Body and Earth for classes on writing as well as on dance and theater and environmental sciences. A gospel of good news!"
—Julia Alvarez, author of In the Name of Salome