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.