Big Strike

So, there is a movement in ballet called grande battement, in which one leg kicks as high as possible to the front, to the side, or backwards. Turned out and straight with the foot pointed, of course. The rest of the body, to the audience, looks entirely undisturbed. For the dancer this means a shitload of work in organizing the weight and supporting musculature over the standing leg. I am a big fan of grande battement.

Basically what is happening (when performed to the front or the side) is there are a lot muscles in and around the hip joint going into intense flexion. Dancers of the classical/modern tradition invariably have a lot of tension in this area (hip flexors and their compatriots). Abdominals, both straight and oblique, are somewhat tensed to maintain the length of the torso on both sides and to cushion the impact to the hip joint of the standing leg.

Now, the body is structured for efficiency. It knows that when one joint goes into flexion, probably there are more joints that need to go into flexion. Think squatting, or cowering, or shielding yourself from the rain, crouching, crawling, sitting, etc. So when you start learning grande battement, your body suggests to your shoulders, your hands, your other leg, elbow joints dot dot dot that they contract. This is contrary to the dancer's goals. This is also where I talk again about the surprising utility of imagery.

Whenever a teacher talks about movement related to grand battement, they focus on the muscles paired opposite the hip flexors, which necessarily become relaxed so the leg can stretch high. You talk about energy being sent downwards, instead of focusing on the upwards movement of the leg. You imagine length of the lower spine, weightlessness of the leg, and the shoulders falling downwards. It's like trying to forget that the iliapsoas is working like hell to pick the leg up, that the quadraceps are flexed to extend the knee joint, the calves to extend the ankle joint. All these things, your mind molds into the sensation of an airy arc extending out from your strongly grounded center so you can keep your port de bras (carriage of the arms) and neck relaxed, extended, and effortless-looking.

Dance training sometimes feels like one of those metal puzzles with lots of pieces linked together. You adjust one part and it prevents three other parts from moving, but then you adjust this other way and two parts are free and rotatable but still stuck to the whole. You learn to isolate and organize, when to be gentle and careful with a muscle group, when you need to throw force abruptly. And things are tangled up to an absolutely unbelievable extent, and everybody's different. Flexing my toes upwards, for example, tends to make me perform the analogous movement with my right hand, while my Polish friend can't swing his arms in backwards circles without pulling the muscles on the side of his nose up.

So, whether you're aware of it or not, every waking moment you are orchestrating a massively complicated operation with alarming connections and potentials. Yee-haw.

The Body's the Limit

"Be a tree!" is not an uncommon first reaction to the topic of contemporary dance, if you don't know any better. The joke, however, is on the dancers. Because it's true. Not funny, but true.

I was talking to a friend about stretching the other day, and it came up that he was reading while working on passive flexibility exercises. I was completely taken aback, because to me the act of stretching is one that uncompromisingly demands all faculties: musculature, breath, awareness, and imagination. Imaging is the tool a dancer uses to challenge physical limits and habits. I spent years playing sports, warming up, stretching out, but it wasn't until I was introduced to the concept of employing imagery of geometry, or imagining weights attached to certain points on my body, or breath making space between vertebra and so on and so forth that I began to discover areas of new potentiality in my body. The tangible result of all this imagined space being that I went from touching the top of my feet to touching the floor to laying my palms on the ground to putting my forehead to my shins. Reaching and pushing will only get you to the point at which the mind and body decide there's a risk for injury. Extending this limit, overcoming the mind's block to work places in your muscles you never imagined requires a much more deeply integrated framework, one with the power to coax and convince the mind to release its stops in the absence of adrenaline. Enter our creative agency.

To get back to the tree, imagining the standing leg rooted firmly into the ground below you during a balance entirely reconfigures your understanding of your weight, engaging muscles your body didn't intuitively know to utilize. Even on two legs it's a really useful image, and with practice you begin to recognize the body pushing/resting along a slightly different alignment, a connection from the center of your heels all the way through to the occipital joint. These are the awarenesses that are critical not only in performing challenging balances and creating the classical line in space, but also in constructing new, more complicated images which help you visually and kinaesthetically project the body through space. This is the ability we utilize when learning new movements, choreographing, and watching dance.

Any good dance class is absolutely stuffed with metaphors for movement and state. "Be a pile of bones rolling down a hill," "The leg circles and floats out of the hip joint," "It's like trying to wrap your spine around a pole," "Really press against something there," "Move like you're underwater," and so on and so forth. It's not only a mental exercise for improving the effectiveness of stretching or the ability to visualize the body, it also plays a role in defining details of movement, in specifying a choreographic aesthetic, in enacting certain dynamics. It's a huge part of what makes the act of performance so immersing, and our ability to perceive movement along the same imagistic lines is what makes viewing it so engaging.

My image for the day is my musculature wringing the post-alcohol fallout from my soft tissue so it can drip into my kidneys and leave my poor hung-over body to aching in peace.

Sometimes

This country is dumb and the people here are too foreign and there is nothing under my feet and the future is filled with worry and projected failures. Days like that can happen. Even in dance school.

Bound Flow

Bodies have tendencies. A lot of contemporary dance training is preoccupied with making the body a neutral palette, and you're constantly urged to work outside your habits, or to change the lines and tensions in your body to make it more, well, neutral. The indirectly proposed "ideal" body is possessed of the ability to access the entirety of human movement potential and all the forces, rhythms, and dynamics contained therein. Lifted shoulders, a tilted pelvis, tense fingers -- these are all viewed as ironable wrinkles on the smartly starched shirt of true virtuosity. Which means being a movement chameleon. Maximize potential to be the ultimate vehicle for any and all art.

Funny thing is the amount of work and focus needed to achieve an anatomically correct, natural, aligned, and physically efficient body. What do these words even mean when time, gravity, and use twist joints and grow eccentric musculature into a comfortable, specific vessel for moving through life? I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't acknowledge my fondness for this space-eating, potential-infused ideal body, and if I didn't say that I utilize imagery of this sort daily as a means for deepening movement or for strength exercises. But there's a lot of body to get through, and even the littlest parts can take years, and everything's connected in ways you never anticipated when you started. A lifetime of re-imaging and rebuilding the body along guidelines proposed by anatomy and physics.

You learn how to move past it. It's art because you make your body according to the dictates of your own imagination. Interesting art, that is with you every second of every day. Want to make your feet into pointing ornaments? Get to training, get to understanding the mechanisms of your lower leg. Marry sensation to thought. Dance training is as hardcore as any tattooing or piercing.

So, repeated feedback on my movement from people I trust labels me a "bound flow" sort of dancer. Which is not in and of itself a bad thing. Looking back on choreography I've done, it all incorporates bound flow unabashedly and with a modicum of success. What bound flow usually means is that, no matter how big I may be in space, there's a sense that I'm taking some part of the movement back into me. Holding onto it. This happens VERY frequently with tension in my face, and also at times in the region of my thoracic spine.

Much like astrology, people like to take body tendencies and use them as a way into personality or behavior. Last night one of my friends and fellow dancers said that watching me dance, even if I just move one arm, feels like there are a million things going on inside my body but only one of them comes out. She proceeded to tell me that's like how I am in real life. A minimal front plus a riotous inner life that, when it does come out, remains bound. She's Hungarian, which is why she says things like that. Also it means I had to paraphrase. I'm up and down with introspection these days, but it was definitely a fun insight to toy with. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like this whole process of immersing myself in dance has been, at least personally, about finding honest, integrated, and immediate channels for me to be focused and effective in expressing myself. There was always a problem for me, being present and aware, and dancing insome sense is like an anchor, disciplining my mind to bear on my immediate environment. She also said that this wasn't the case when I was improvising, but when we were working with proscribed technique or phrasing.

So here's to unbinding my flow, letting the noise and impulse in and out like I'm squawking and trying to hop on my shoulders.

Improvising Perspective

The unstructured dance-theater improvisation involving more than 2 people.

There are times I just can't help but look at it as a microcosm of the big wide world. It has everything. It roils, it breathes, it is brilliant and full of shit and boring. Not to mention unending, repetitious, deceiving in its proclivity for patterns and structure. The bottom line is everything eventually falls apart. When it happens that a group (very rarely more than a quartet in my experience, and usually a duet) starts mashing infinite variations over a uniting theme, really going at it without showing any signs of EVER making a big change, you know that eventually the performers would die and that too would fall apart. It is broad, expansive, and unremarkable because I witness breathtaking, truly beautiful futility in practice everywhere I go every day of my life. In a sense, it is a base form of artistic expression because it is pure mimicry -- taking a blank slate, dropping some chemical compounds on that guy, maybe a spark of divinity if you're so inclined, and watching it evolve, baby. Yow! It can be really thrilling to participate in, maybe because it is alternate and fresh, albeit parallel, to our familiarities. You're really conscious of this being living, of these kinaesthetic, emotional, and impulsive sensations all being part of a process of enacting what it means to, well, exist.

For me, as an improviser, it makes me feel like I know things. It makes me feel like I can stare futility in the face and say, I laughed at you the other day and then threw Boglarka over my shoulder and ran around with her in random directions until my legs gave out. Or, I watched someone stand up and fall to the floor for eight minutes straight; I inscribed imaginary words in the air with varying parts of my body, nearly in tears, because it seemed like the most important thing in the world to do at the moment, while ignoring the people rolling and gurgling on the floor next to me. So, yeah, I've been there, is the sensation. I have developed a sensitivity to this sort of tragedy, and this sort of joy, and this sort of disappointment. It steels me with an incredible calm at the same time I feel like it makes me softer, more receptive to humor.

Then there is specificity, or choreography. Pouring performance into structures and forms, exposing specific elements of the madness in an attempt to precipitate understanding or joy or something magical in the minds of a viewer. To refresh the pathways of perception and empathy. Not that busted-wide-open improvisation doesn't have this power, simply that choreography is more insistent, using any number of methods to coerce or seduce a viewer to notice it and to consider it; to represent itself as trustworthy, consistent, good (or bad), and worthwhile.

And I am out of gas.

I love it here, and... the bear.

Dance school is a beautiful, beautiful place. We sweat together for endless hours everyday. Our gathering is a daily homage to the temple of the body, its potentials, its mysteries. We endure the same hardships, see one another develop, falter, fail, and succeed. We are all working towards the same end, that of expanding, extending, specifying, and living with movements in order to build a body of knowledge that will one day make us virtuosic dancers in our own rights. It's consuming, good hard work. It feels wholesome. Coming home exhausted, bone-tired; returning the next day to subject the body and mind to the same rigors and keeping careful track of how we change: the length of our hamstrings, the angle of our point, the extent of the spiral in our spines. How quickly we learn new choreography, how we deconstruct our physical habits, our awareness of other bodies in space. I am hungry every day for more. Writing it down like this, it is all I can do to restrain myself from getting up to continue working on my spot and turning pirouettes.

Being a student, in my case specifically of dance, feeds the soul. It can not, however, satiate time's appetite for the contents of my bank account. I do everything within my power to minimalize, to consume and live amongst only the things I need, and I do an admirable job of it at that. I like living this way, I want to understand everything in my surroundings and its role. But it always ends up coming down to the same conflict. Stone broke. It's my bear to wrestle, and I just don't know where to get a foothold. I've done such a good job in placing myself in a position where I'm surrounded with people, things, and activities that I love, but when it comes to actually making a living I'm always backing off, hedging, refusing to engage and suffering for it. I can't help but think back to that oft-encountered character of literature, the bachelor who almost inadvertently creates esteem and mystique by going into the world and Making his Fortune. I certainly think I'm worth speculating about, as the cast does of these mysterious moneyed men of novelry. Just missing the dollops of cash that let the world know. And god fucking dammit, sometimes it's all I can think about.

I really need to go to sleep now, but I'm sure I'll end up talking more about the green later. At least until I have more than $1000 in my bank account.

A Penny for Your Body Sensations

Sometimes I wonder what my friends and loved ones would say, were they to see me chirruping and spasming, rolling and shaking, whooping, grinding, and kicking away in that magical realm known as improvisational space.

I like to think they would say, "Awesome."

Today we were instructed to make the worst half hour of improvisation ever. Martin, the teacher, also suggested that since we were all tired and lolling around the floor, this would be a good place to start. So, 15 people in a good sized studio, the glorious light of the first real sun in weeks dripping tantalizingly through the windows and reminding us we would not be leaving school until it was dark outside, improvising the worst dance ever. He said you have until 20 past, go.

I decided that, since this was the worst improvisation ever, I should ignore everyone else and make annoying sounds and lay on the ground. I was not the only person to succumb to this or similar impulses. And I'll be damned if something absolutely embracing and rife with potential didn't titillate all the sensitive spots of my kinaesphere. It was so specific, fifteen people being just grossly indulgent and pointedly unremarkable, that the space came alive with it. And it grew and changed, as these things will, into a bunch of duets and trios and solos, a mess of greens sprouting under the first real sun in weeks.

I ended up in a duet with this girl, let's call her Claire for the purpose of no one from my school ever being able to google or otherwise locate this blog, and that shit just blew up. I recently buzzed my head, which was a big deal to me because I've never done in all 23 years of my life, and all that hair was holding me back, man, but the loss of my virile locks still warrants proper mourning. Claire, playing with her absurdly thick and long braid across the room, cracked open the repressed well of loss. So, one thing leads to the next, and we are dancing, lifting, and swinging about essentially attached at the head, so I have a braid and lots of hair again. And she had a donkey to chase her carrot, I suppose. By the end we were no longer attached, and began vocally articulating our movements, using voice and movement as cues to bring our actions into relation with one another.

After the half hour was up, groups that had stumbled together performed short improvs for the class based on what had happened. I was enraptured by the performative compatibility that arose in a mere half hour (discounting the five months we've spent together...) In me and Claire's case it was the melding of a familiar dramatic relationship, sexual tension, with a madness of ridiculous sounds and unpredictable movement. Dancing will not save the world. But there seems to be something so damned worthwhile in what happens when people find this performative compatibility. That, however, is a topic for another day. Or for the rest of my life, really.

Love in the Time of Rolling Around on the Floor

Dance school has a way of taking the innocuously comfortable out of the "straight and unattached male" demographic. Jury's still out as to how I feel about that.

The funny thing is, contrary to popular opinion, dance class is not sexy. Rolling around on the floor with a partner is hard work, and it tends to transform any sensual potential into weight, joints, and spatial impulses. When you're focusing on phrasing and nuances of movement you're not seeing what an audience would see, you're operating from a dance student's perspective in which the body is an expressive medium to be trained and manipulated. Growing deeper into your body and developing your sensitivity to touch is by no means analogous to delving into sensuality. If it were, a trained dancer would be driven mad with lust.

That said, there is a certain pleasure to be had when your body is full to the brim of pumping blood and awareness, your eyes full of significant focus, meeting the pale blues of agirl across the room and knowing that she is in the same enlivened physical state as you are. Then the port de bras with cambre ends, and it's back to fondue, shoulders square with pelvis, extend through the toes, support from your iliapsoas...