The Common Body Horses, Movement, and Awakening Our Essential Humanity

Between 60 and 80 percent of human communication is nonverbal, spoken in the physical languages of movement and touch. But while we are “talking” all the time, we lack a clear vocabulary and syntax of the body. In this fascinating book, dancer, choreographer, and visual artist Paula Josa-Jones combines her two greatest passions—movement and horses—in order to help us develop somatic awareness: Consciousness of breath, integrated and coherent motion, and development of movements and touch into sensitive channels of communication. Through stories and exercises, Josa-Jones demonstrates how connecting with the horse can develop this awareness. The body and mind of the horse and the human, she writes, are connected at the deepest levels—anatomically, energetically, psychically, spiritually, and emotionally. And because horses are authentic beings—their inside feelings and intentions match the outside expression and behavior—our interactions with them can help us become more aware of our inner emotional landscape and its relationship to what we are expressing outwardly. Horses offer us the opportunity to become more trustworthy and more comfortable in our own skin. By listening inwardly, feeling the connections between our mind states and our expression, we become more attuned to the currents passing among us, more able to blend, empathize, and act with balance, sensitivity, and kindness.

Paula Josa-Jones is a dancer, choreographer, writer, visual artist and movement educator known for her visually rich, emotionally charged dance theater. Her work includes choreography for humans, inter-species work with horses, dancers and riders, film and video. Josa-Jones has been called "one of the country's leading choreographic conceptualists" by the Boston Globe and the Village Voice describes her work as "powerful, eccentric, and surreal". Her dances have been produced in Russia, Europe, Mexico and throughout the United States. She has taught in the dance programs at Tufts University, Boston University and at universities, colleges and dance festivals nationally and internationally. She is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst and a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (RSMT) accredited by the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA.)

She is also a Guild-Certified TTEAM (Tellington Touch Equine Awareness Method) practitioner. Her writings on movement and dance have been published in Contact Quarterly. She is currently writing a book on her work with horses called The Common Body: Horses and humans sharing the language of movement and the body.

Josa-Jones is a 2013 recipient of a Connecticut Artist's Fellowship, and a 2014 Bogliasco Fellow. She has received two Choreography Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an NEA US/Mexico Cultural Exchange Fellowship and an Artist's Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is the recipient of two New Forms grants from the New England Foundation for the Arts, an Artist's Foundation Fellowship in Interarts for her video dance collaborations with Vin Grabill, and two finalist awards in choreography from the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. She has been in residence at Yaddo (1995, 1996, 2015) and the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, California. Paula Josa-Jones/Performance Works has received support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Arts Lottery, Creative Time, the Dakota Foundation, LEF Foundation, the Claneil Foundation and the Polaroid Foundation. The company's work in Mexico was supported by the US/Mexico Fund for Culture, and they received two grants from the Trust for Mutual Understanding for choreographic projects in Russia. Josa-Jones has received commissions from the Joyce Theater, Jacob's Pillow, Dance Umbrella, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, and nuArts at Northeastern University, among others.

In 1998 Paula created an inter-species company with horses, dancers and riders. She is an avid student of dressage, Clicker Training and a Guild-Certified Tellington TTEAM Practitioner. In 2001 she premiered RIDE, a groundbreaking work of equestrian dance theater. Her work with dance and horses includes live performance, film and humanitarian work with rescued and abused horses. As the creator of Embodied Horsemanship, she teaches an intuitive, improvisational approach to the human-horse bond through movement and touch, as well as riding and performing with her horses Sanne and Capprichio.