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.