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Amerta Movement
Joged Amerta or Amerta Movement was developed by Suprapto Suryodarmo (Prapto), a Javanese movement artist who practised perceiving the world through movement rather than from stasis, or, as he initially described it in 1988, “from the Buddha walking, rather than from the Buddha sitting”. (For a series of recordings of Prapto talking, see Cosmos as the Garden.) Alongside Buddhist practice, the development of Amerta Movement was influenced by the practice of Sumarah, a traditional Javanese meditation practice of ‘letting go’ or surrender. Suryodarmo developed his approach to movement as a life-practice in dialogue with both of these traditions. Amerta is a Javanese word which Suryodarmo translated as the nectar or elixir of life. This practice is based on the basic movements of daily life: walking, sitting, standing, crawling and lying down and the transitions between them, beginning with the observation of children playing. It is also based on moving in many different contexts: natural environments, temples, the market-place, museums and galleries. Amerta Movement practitioners study movement:
Both as a psychophysical practice and as a cultural attitude, equal attention is given to the environment and to the body-in-movement. “In Javanese traditional thinking there is no sharp division between organic and inorganic matter, for everything is sustained by the same invisible power”. The changing environment and being-in-movement are manifestly interdependent in Suryodarmo’s view and students are guided to develop an awareness of how the changing moment is constantly re-creating itself and the influence of one’s position/transition in that flux. Further information
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Sharing the Floor: Somatic Pedagogies and Amerta Movement
The Sharing the Floor blog, edited by C-DaRE’s Emma Meehan, Eugenia Kim and Greta Gauhe, gathers a growing archive of writing by practitioners who treat movement as a way of thinking, relating and making culture. Posts on sounding-and-moving practices, hybrid dance pedagogies, developmental movement with infants, chronic pain, and decolonising curricula all start from lived experience of moving bodies rather than from abstract theory. Unsurprisingly, this approach sits (or moves) comfortably alongside Triarchy’s Amerta Movement books, where movement is explored both as a life practice and as an expressive art form.
Lise Lavelle’s account of the early years of Suprapto Suryodarmo’s (Prapto’s) work in The Roots of Amerta Movement traces the way it emerged from specific sites, lineages and encounters, emphasising movement as “body in environment” and as a relational, improvisatory meeting with the more-than-human world. Sharing the Floor offers contemporary echoes of this in posts that ask how somatic work can respond to plural corporealities, resilience, and questions of place and culture in Brazil, India and Europe. Together, the book and the blog show how Amerta-informed practices continue to take root in many, diverse contexts.
Nine Ways of Seeing a Body and Embodied Lives both foreground the multiplicity of bodily perspectives – anatomical, experiential, social, ecological, spiritual – and invite readers to inhabit these perspectives through practice. On the Sharing the Floor blog, Don Hanlon Johnson’s reflection on Body, Spirit and Democracy thirty years on, and other contributions on somatic pedagogy and chronic pain, ask what kinds of bodies are being imagined and cultivated in our classrooms, studios and clinics. Don, who pertinently asks of the spread of somatic practices, “Is this working for the benefit of human evolution?”, told us that he used Nine Ways of Seeing a Body regularly in his own teaching.
Body and Awareness brings many of these threads into focus in relation to attention: how awareness is directed, shared, and politically shaped in movement work. Sharing the Floor takes up related questions in pieces on “uncentring” as an alternative to decolonisation and on collaborative somatic research. Read together, the book and the blog suggest that awareness is not just an inner state but a social and ethical practice: something co-created as people quite literally share the floor.
For readers of Triarchy’s Amerta Movement books, the blog offers a living laboratory where many of our authors’ concerns are being tested and reworked in new settings. For followers of Sharing the Floor, these titles provide background and depth on themes that surface across the archive: embodied pedagogy, somatic research, the politics of touch, and the entanglement of body, environment and democracy.
The Sharing the Floor blog, edited by C-DaRE’s Emma Meehan, Eugenia Kim and Greta Gauhe, gathers a growing archive of writing by practitioners who treat movement as a way of thinking, relating and making culture. Posts on sounding-and-moving practices, hybrid dance pedagogies, developmental movement with infants, chronic pain, and decolonising curricula all start from lived experience of moving bodies rather than from abstract theory. Unsurprisingly, this approach sits (or moves) comfortably alongside Triarchy’s Amerta Movement books, where movement is explored both as a life practice and as an expressive art form.
Lise Lavelle’s account of the early years of Suprapto Suryodarmo’s (Prapto’s) work in The Roots of Amerta Movement traces the way it emerged from specific sites, lineages and encounters, emphasising movement as “body in environment” and as a relational, improvisatory meeting with the more-than-human world. Sharing the Floor offers contemporary echoes of this in posts that ask how somatic work can respond to plural corporealities, resilience, and questions of place and culture in Brazil, India and Europe. Together, the book and the blog show how Amerta-informed practices continue to take root in many, diverse contexts.
Nine Ways of Seeing a Body and Embodied Lives both foreground the multiplicity of bodily perspectives – anatomical, experiential, social, ecological, spiritual – and invite readers to inhabit these perspectives through practice. On the Sharing the Floor blog, Don Hanlon Johnson’s reflection on Body, Spirit and Democracy thirty years on, and other contributions on somatic pedagogy and chronic pain, ask what kinds of bodies are being imagined and cultivated in our classrooms, studios and clinics. Don, who pertinently asks of the spread of somatic practices, “Is this working for the benefit of human evolution?”, told us that he used Nine Ways of Seeing a Body regularly in his own teaching.
Body and Awareness brings many of these threads into focus in relation to attention: how awareness is directed, shared, and politically shaped in movement work. Sharing the Floor takes up related questions in pieces on “uncentring” as an alternative to decolonisation and on collaborative somatic research. Read together, the book and the blog suggest that awareness is not just an inner state but a social and ethical practice: something co-created as people quite literally share the floor.
For readers of Triarchy’s Amerta Movement books, the blog offers a living laboratory where many of our authors’ concerns are being tested and reworked in new settings. For followers of Sharing the Floor, these titles provide background and depth on themes that surface across the archive: embodied pedagogy, somatic research, the politics of touch, and the entanglement of body, environment and democracy.
