Once upon a time in dance school, there was the most wonderful teacher a person could imagine. She had the strange habit of sweeping into the university for a whirlwind week of intensive physical exercises and soul-rending dramatic exploration, only to vanish at the end of five days, abruptly, into thin air, leaving behind a shimmering cloud of tearfully stalwart decisions, bravery, and disorienting exhaustion.
Her name was Milli, and this is a story about how she broke my brain.
Milli made a solo, originally choreographed for another dancer, which she later adapted to perform as her own. The solo is a set of tasks, roughly fixed in time and space but not in execution. In other words, a structured improvisation. Examples of what I mean by tasks are things such as, "Talk about whatever is running through your head for three minutes without gesturing, then gesture like you're speaking for three minutes without saying a word, then talk and gesture at the same time;" "Freak out;" "Dance beautifully;" "Repeat the same movement three times with a different emotion each time, and be dissatisfied with the result;" "Wave to the audience;" und so weiter. As for music, there were three versions of "Ne Me Quitte Pas" (Nina Simone, then some woman who talks through it, then the guy who originally performed it except redone in Dutch, his native language) each played through once. Monday through Thursday we practiced each task separately, observing, clarifying, and understanding it as a distinct dramatic unit. And on Friday we performed for each other--three intensely focused hours since there were fifteen of us--the final task being, essentially, to assemble all the work we'd done over the course of the week in an accessible way, making some sort of sense out of the wild and deep emotional palette the solo demanded.
I have absolutely no idea what it I would think, if I saw a solo like this performed on a stage, in a theater. I don't know if I'd react with contempt, respect, amusement, or boredom; if I'd think it worthwhile or another frustrating waste of a stage and lights and design and money. What I do know is that over the course of the week, our tight-knit group of fifteen dancers was asked to exercise will, sincerity, and belief through means unfamiliar, for the sake of displaying, very directly, the undertaking of these self-same endeavors. In the context of our little dance studio, this meant there was an attitude of respect, a reverence for the acts of bravery that were to be witnessed. There were stakes, and everybody was sensitized to that because everyone was a performer.
My brain broke near the end of my performance. I was standing there in front of my classmates, having just finished the "beautiful dance" section, relatively still from the neck down and running my face through a series of emotions. There was a pop--I was removed temporarily from what was going on, and in a lightning quick moment that I stole from the performance, I took stock. It was a foreign sensation of supreme arrogance, a truly complete assuredness, and I used it to surveyed the faces watching me. They were smiling, wide-eyed, more than one tearful, and I knew that they were completely, 100% rapt in what I was portraying, knew to the extent that I didn't have to look, but chose to anyways--a king surveying his kingdom. They were watching me and there was nothing in their minds, in their gazes, that wasn't full of the thing I'd just created, of me. As full of knowing as this moment was, it was also solitary in a way that surprised me, a little bit sad. I finished, came back to sit down, and I didn't need to wait for feedback to know I'd brought the house down, but it was a couple of minutes before I could look anyone in the eyes.
It's been over a week now, and I still don't know how to evaluate the experience--especially after watching 14 other people go through something similar--or how to contextualize it in my conception of performance, or how to qualify it as good or bad or something else. When I say something broke in my head, I'm still unsure as to whether that happened productively or or in a damaging way, as in, was something violently unstuck or did something get torn. Although now that I type it out a week and a half later, after the exhaustion and re-orientation of perspective, I think I can say with some degree of certainty that it's the unstuck bit. Like jamming your knuckle into one of the sensitive spots on the spine of your foot until your eyes tear up.
At any rate, we were talking for a bit after one of the performances and Milli said: "I think you can use everything for everything." She meant in the context of performing, which she clarified, though we'd all known what she meant immediately. Because dance, even if we talk about it frequently in terms of high abstraction, or treat it as interpretive and form-based, is actually quite brashly specific, tied as it is unshakably to a set of moments in time and to the uncompromisingly physical body. This for me is the grounds for integration, where the first "everything" in Milli's sentence--all the nonsense and attendant emotionality of the things we perceive; the inescapability of the ecstasies and betrayals which, by mere virtue of living, we are subjected to--is linked to the second "everything": the noise we make; the emotionality we produce; our attempts to trim edges or call attentions to patterns in order to affirm certain values, or the value of values. Using everything for everything, like an eternal dynamic compromise for stable living negotiated through performance.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
Mind over Body?
I remember being younger and seeing those guys that could punch through stacks of concrete blocks on television. You talk about it with your friends, and usually somebody says something along the lines of "They can harness their chi!" Everyone is appropriately impressed by the display of mystic power and that is the end of that, except maybe for the private moments when you imagine you have phenomenal cosmic strength in your fist and can punch through anything! Bwap! These guys sure don't look huge so you accept it as further proof, along with mothers lifting cars off of their trapped children, of the mind's dominance over the body.
Ok. I'd like to speculate a little bit on the parts that get left out of that equation. For starters, the countless hours those guys spent punching through stacks of paper hung against a brick wall. In an earlier post I mentioned pain as an instigator of rapid body adaptation, and my understanding is that as you pursue this punching discipline, both musculature and bone growth adapt to the persistent presence of shock traveling like electricity through the arm all the way down to the feet. It is not my goal to de-mystify this process or to take away the agency involved in "focusing your chi." In fact it is exactly this mystification, the presence of a spiritual and philosophical framework integrated with physical feats, that matters to me.
You are taught, through study or as cultural heritage, the concept of chi-flow. Function and location in the body, sources of chi, history, literature by or about disciples of the concept, how the concept is otherwise related to Chinese belief, history, religion... I won't belabor the point that this idea about the body is an integrated element of an enduring cultural heritage. As you consider your body and explore your physical potentials, which everyone does with varying degrees of frequency and deliberateness, the idea may suggest new possibilities to improve physical strength or wellbeing. And so you begin to train. The body, too complex for any sort of perfection, will not match the idea, but you continue until you feel the alignment and discover the power of imagery, in this case chi-flow, which you understand deeply, to the point of belief. A framework which transforms the infinitely adaptable body. I don't care how many times you slam your fist into a wall--it's not until you understand why you are doing it, how exactly you do the slamming so stress runs consistently through musculature and skeleton, and where the movement and power come from, that you can begin the long process of change. These elements of understanding are accounted for and granted significance by the idea of chi-flow.
There's also an element of faith in the training, that the stresses you place on your body will lead you someplace, or will improve your quality of life, or will make you stronger and healthier, or will grant you peace in your days. And the boundary between the worldly, unreliable body and heady divine intent begins to blur. Because we have experience teaching us that our body is more than a house for the soul; that in actuality, it is involved in enacting our spirituality. For me, this experience happens most often while improvising, when the intent and necessity of movement becomes blindingly clear, underscored by an urgency to communicate. Or when the body is creative of its own accord, arranging itself surprisingly in a brand new way, and you get one of those sensations of body knowledge like I talked about in the previous post.
It's hard to stay away, at this point, from talking about drum circles or ecstatic dancing, but however important and enlightening these experiences may be, they alienate a lot of people and it's a big part of my goal to remain accessible, to present concepts of body and spirituality that feel integrate-able. Doable, not too serious or too ethereal.
Anywho, what was supposed to be a short, anecdotal post has now become an unsubstantiated preamble to other ideas.
To sum up, we have systems of belief, or imagery, or philosophy, that can be imposed on the body to achieve certain ends, be they physical, mental, or spiritual. But ultimately it is the body that becomes the teacher, enacting these concepts, living and enduring them and changing ever so slowly, so that eventually we construct a body knowledge we can listen to, an ongoing experience to reference and to make us present, alert, aware.
Ok. I'd like to speculate a little bit on the parts that get left out of that equation. For starters, the countless hours those guys spent punching through stacks of paper hung against a brick wall. In an earlier post I mentioned pain as an instigator of rapid body adaptation, and my understanding is that as you pursue this punching discipline, both musculature and bone growth adapt to the persistent presence of shock traveling like electricity through the arm all the way down to the feet. It is not my goal to de-mystify this process or to take away the agency involved in "focusing your chi." In fact it is exactly this mystification, the presence of a spiritual and philosophical framework integrated with physical feats, that matters to me.
You are taught, through study or as cultural heritage, the concept of chi-flow. Function and location in the body, sources of chi, history, literature by or about disciples of the concept, how the concept is otherwise related to Chinese belief, history, religion... I won't belabor the point that this idea about the body is an integrated element of an enduring cultural heritage. As you consider your body and explore your physical potentials, which everyone does with varying degrees of frequency and deliberateness, the idea may suggest new possibilities to improve physical strength or wellbeing. And so you begin to train. The body, too complex for any sort of perfection, will not match the idea, but you continue until you feel the alignment and discover the power of imagery, in this case chi-flow, which you understand deeply, to the point of belief. A framework which transforms the infinitely adaptable body. I don't care how many times you slam your fist into a wall--it's not until you understand why you are doing it, how exactly you do the slamming so stress runs consistently through musculature and skeleton, and where the movement and power come from, that you can begin the long process of change. These elements of understanding are accounted for and granted significance by the idea of chi-flow.
There's also an element of faith in the training, that the stresses you place on your body will lead you someplace, or will improve your quality of life, or will make you stronger and healthier, or will grant you peace in your days. And the boundary between the worldly, unreliable body and heady divine intent begins to blur. Because we have experience teaching us that our body is more than a house for the soul; that in actuality, it is involved in enacting our spirituality. For me, this experience happens most often while improvising, when the intent and necessity of movement becomes blindingly clear, underscored by an urgency to communicate. Or when the body is creative of its own accord, arranging itself surprisingly in a brand new way, and you get one of those sensations of body knowledge like I talked about in the previous post.
It's hard to stay away, at this point, from talking about drum circles or ecstatic dancing, but however important and enlightening these experiences may be, they alienate a lot of people and it's a big part of my goal to remain accessible, to present concepts of body and spirituality that feel integrate-able. Doable, not too serious or too ethereal.
Anywho, what was supposed to be a short, anecdotal post has now become an unsubstantiated preamble to other ideas.
To sum up, we have systems of belief, or imagery, or philosophy, that can be imposed on the body to achieve certain ends, be they physical, mental, or spiritual. But ultimately it is the body that becomes the teacher, enacting these concepts, living and enduring them and changing ever so slowly, so that eventually we construct a body knowledge we can listen to, an ongoing experience to reference and to make us present, alert, aware.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Deep Breaths
Anatomy class the other day, so we all dragged our broken bodies into this smallish room with a green, spongy floor upon which we spread even spongier mats. For sprawling on. Somehow the teacher got the idea that the prevailing winds of our little group were gusting from areas of high-pressure exhaustion and defeat, which can happen when three of sixteen are injured and two others traveling. She was also exhausted, sleeping in the hospital with a baby who has been sick off and on for a year, so you can imagine.
We did breathing exercises with partners. You lay down and breathe, and the other person "walks with the hands on the back like a cat," relaxing all their weight down. As you get used to it the masseur role changes to forearms, then knuckles, then elbows, so it gets pretty intense. 15 minutes. It's a real workout for the myriad muscles involved in making air go in, deeper and deeper in, then out out and all the way out. It felt like time was slowing down. We moved to sitting on chairs. The sitting person relaxes their head backwards against the partner's torso, standing behind the chair, and they simply lay their hands on your chest, butt of the palm at the collar bone. The teacher's image suggestions were of the touch and the heat traveling all the way to the bottom of your lungs, picturing the lungs swelling with the touch and heat etc. After your partner left, you stayed, listening for a while. Then you started to move, as directed by the breath and the sensation of the lungs expanding.
It's rare that you get asked to picture things that are not musculature or bones when dealing with movement. And it was wildly liberating. I feel like part of the whole practice of "relaxation" in yoga and dance classes is not actually relaxing, being limp, but rather deactivating the muscle groups and support structures that function habitually in order to understand that there are alternative possibilities. Often, because of how we learn to present ourselves, because of the images of the body we are accustomed to viewing, the habitual muscles are superficial. So being told to relax is helpful in discovering something deeper, closer to the bone structure that can handle movement more efficiently. You don't have to fight for postures or movement, you don't have to make them, you just have to be in them, to listen to them and trust your body's knowledge.
I also want to comment shortly on something kind of bracing and large-feeling that happened in the room. The focus of listening to and following your partner's breath, of releasing your weight entirely into their body, watching their ribcage expand more and more, their lower back fill, was incredibly strong and shared between all the pairs. And there is tangible release of tension in opening lung space, diaphragmal and vertebral space also as breath is seized consciously and with force, only to settle back into unconsciousness with a new vigor and torso-cavity-filling power. Other tensions break also, and in the silence in this atmosphere of shared intent people's eyes were glassy or tear-filled and faces red, and it felt buoyant, not upsetting or sad. It's a tight little community we have here, wound tight and built tight and loved tight, and I'm glad to be a part of it not only for moments like this, when we all experience the same thing together and you've got no words for the significance, but also for those when we can't even stand to look at each other any more.
Seeing as I'm out of here in six weeks, can't help being a bit sentimental. I'm going to miss our deep breaths.
We did breathing exercises with partners. You lay down and breathe, and the other person "walks with the hands on the back like a cat," relaxing all their weight down. As you get used to it the masseur role changes to forearms, then knuckles, then elbows, so it gets pretty intense. 15 minutes. It's a real workout for the myriad muscles involved in making air go in, deeper and deeper in, then out out and all the way out. It felt like time was slowing down. We moved to sitting on chairs. The sitting person relaxes their head backwards against the partner's torso, standing behind the chair, and they simply lay their hands on your chest, butt of the palm at the collar bone. The teacher's image suggestions were of the touch and the heat traveling all the way to the bottom of your lungs, picturing the lungs swelling with the touch and heat etc. After your partner left, you stayed, listening for a while. Then you started to move, as directed by the breath and the sensation of the lungs expanding.
It's rare that you get asked to picture things that are not musculature or bones when dealing with movement. And it was wildly liberating. I feel like part of the whole practice of "relaxation" in yoga and dance classes is not actually relaxing, being limp, but rather deactivating the muscle groups and support structures that function habitually in order to understand that there are alternative possibilities. Often, because of how we learn to present ourselves, because of the images of the body we are accustomed to viewing, the habitual muscles are superficial. So being told to relax is helpful in discovering something deeper, closer to the bone structure that can handle movement more efficiently. You don't have to fight for postures or movement, you don't have to make them, you just have to be in them, to listen to them and trust your body's knowledge.
I also want to comment shortly on something kind of bracing and large-feeling that happened in the room. The focus of listening to and following your partner's breath, of releasing your weight entirely into their body, watching their ribcage expand more and more, their lower back fill, was incredibly strong and shared between all the pairs. And there is tangible release of tension in opening lung space, diaphragmal and vertebral space also as breath is seized consciously and with force, only to settle back into unconsciousness with a new vigor and torso-cavity-filling power. Other tensions break also, and in the silence in this atmosphere of shared intent people's eyes were glassy or tear-filled and faces red, and it felt buoyant, not upsetting or sad. It's a tight little community we have here, wound tight and built tight and loved tight, and I'm glad to be a part of it not only for moments like this, when we all experience the same thing together and you've got no words for the significance, but also for those when we can't even stand to look at each other any more.
Seeing as I'm out of here in six weeks, can't help being a bit sentimental. I'm going to miss our deep breaths.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Spaces
I find myself sidelined once again, once again having pulled a muscle. This time I tore it where it attaches to the bone, but it didn't tear all the way through like I did to my hamstring. Two weeks projected recovery time.
I wonder what it is that makes me so inclined towards the pulling and straining of muscles.
So with these things in mind, I'd like to take this post to hop onto a track parallel to my dance training. In dancing, in studying dance, my body has changed from what moves me around to an unending internal space, rife with potential and mysteries to be plied with infinite patience and calm. Joints, instead of points where things bend, are open, extendable, pliable. The spine is long, strong, and capable of unbelievable spirals, not a mere stack of vertebrae that supports us when we stand upright. And the feet, and the shoulder blades, and the lungs, and the abdominals... all different types of spaces in the body, where before there was no life, movement, or awareness and that now extend and grow, like widening, detailing, and arching the ceilings of an internal palace structured to our own imaginative specifications, vaunted or tortuous or minimalistic as we like. And always mutable.
The more I live in these spaces, the more they are populated with sensations of the mundane. Anxiety lives beneath my jaw, triumph in the lumbar spine, anger along the front of my thighs, and so on and so forth in networks of deepening complexity. I stumble across these connections while dancing, while walking, or in the meditation of stretching, and really they are so astonishingly clear, so brazenly and intuitively comprehensible that there is no question in my mind that they are trustworthy. Beyond trustworthy, really--they are the closest things to self-knowledge I'm ever come across. Like instead of passively perceiving then channeling sensation to the mind, the body manifests the kinesthetic information spontaneously, exactly as a whim or a thought, and this body knowledge has a part in governing our behavior and our state equal to the directives of the mind. And I'm reminded then that the brain is really just another organ, subject to the stresses and movements and homeostatic rigors of the entirety of the body. I'm thinking of a hard-earned, experientially constructed mind-body unity, as opposed to a New Age (in the perjorative sense) one. It took dancing to break down the mind/body dichotomy for me, in a way that I can live and that makes personal sense. And it feels like the responsibility of existing is spread out somehow, or maybe that I have a more comprehensive set of tools and sensitivities to locate and enact myself.
And so I came across the space of immediacy, or ecstasy, or desire, or hunger, or whatever that sensation of fullness is that no one seems to be able to name and that lives on the line between bliss and desperation. It washed over me relentlessly as I walked over the bridge to school, while visions of the future and of fantasy ran through my head and I was glutted on opportunity, imagined or otherwise, reeling from the force of all the experiences of all the possibilities of things to come. For me, strangely enough, it was directly over the left hip joint, kind of like my lower left gut all the way back through to my kidney. Out of habit, I approached it as a physical space: how it can be relaxed, how stretched, how made tight with strength, or with a malleable force. Its effect on the surrounding regions of the body; its effect on the entire body. I tried to let it have it's space, like when you stretch and damn it hurts like hell, but you relax into it so that this feeling blocks out anything else you could possibly focus on, and after the hurting part you're left with something warm and emanating, the ghost of the pain that promises consolation in the form of pounding blood and physical satisfaction.
And I try to extract resolve, and motivation. From the feeling that is bliss and desperation or the muscle, blood, and organs in my lower left gut.
I wonder what it is that makes me so inclined towards the pulling and straining of muscles.
So with these things in mind, I'd like to take this post to hop onto a track parallel to my dance training. In dancing, in studying dance, my body has changed from what moves me around to an unending internal space, rife with potential and mysteries to be plied with infinite patience and calm. Joints, instead of points where things bend, are open, extendable, pliable. The spine is long, strong, and capable of unbelievable spirals, not a mere stack of vertebrae that supports us when we stand upright. And the feet, and the shoulder blades, and the lungs, and the abdominals... all different types of spaces in the body, where before there was no life, movement, or awareness and that now extend and grow, like widening, detailing, and arching the ceilings of an internal palace structured to our own imaginative specifications, vaunted or tortuous or minimalistic as we like. And always mutable.
The more I live in these spaces, the more they are populated with sensations of the mundane. Anxiety lives beneath my jaw, triumph in the lumbar spine, anger along the front of my thighs, and so on and so forth in networks of deepening complexity. I stumble across these connections while dancing, while walking, or in the meditation of stretching, and really they are so astonishingly clear, so brazenly and intuitively comprehensible that there is no question in my mind that they are trustworthy. Beyond trustworthy, really--they are the closest things to self-knowledge I'm ever come across. Like instead of passively perceiving then channeling sensation to the mind, the body manifests the kinesthetic information spontaneously, exactly as a whim or a thought, and this body knowledge has a part in governing our behavior and our state equal to the directives of the mind. And I'm reminded then that the brain is really just another organ, subject to the stresses and movements and homeostatic rigors of the entirety of the body. I'm thinking of a hard-earned, experientially constructed mind-body unity, as opposed to a New Age (in the perjorative sense) one. It took dancing to break down the mind/body dichotomy for me, in a way that I can live and that makes personal sense. And it feels like the responsibility of existing is spread out somehow, or maybe that I have a more comprehensive set of tools and sensitivities to locate and enact myself.
And so I came across the space of immediacy, or ecstasy, or desire, or hunger, or whatever that sensation of fullness is that no one seems to be able to name and that lives on the line between bliss and desperation. It washed over me relentlessly as I walked over the bridge to school, while visions of the future and of fantasy ran through my head and I was glutted on opportunity, imagined or otherwise, reeling from the force of all the experiences of all the possibilities of things to come. For me, strangely enough, it was directly over the left hip joint, kind of like my lower left gut all the way back through to my kidney. Out of habit, I approached it as a physical space: how it can be relaxed, how stretched, how made tight with strength, or with a malleable force. Its effect on the surrounding regions of the body; its effect on the entire body. I tried to let it have it's space, like when you stretch and damn it hurts like hell, but you relax into it so that this feeling blocks out anything else you could possibly focus on, and after the hurting part you're left with something warm and emanating, the ghost of the pain that promises consolation in the form of pounding blood and physical satisfaction.
And I try to extract resolve, and motivation. From the feeling that is bliss and desperation or the muscle, blood, and organs in my lower left gut.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
FREE THE PELVIS
It's been there, that mystifyingly torqued and crested mass of bone, sitting atop your legs and sprouting up into your spine, for all your waking days. Wrapped up in all kinds of muscle, tied in ligament and tendon well you've got to let it out. Let it breathe, make some space up in there for a bit o' tilt, a bit o' swing, maybe a gy-ration or two.
It's time to free the pelvis. Accept no other measures.
It's time to free the pelvis. Accept no other measures.
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Round 2
Dancing has a lot to do with familiarizing yourself with sensations of the body, with the internal kinesthetic sense--how your weight's aligned, tension and relaxation around joints, and the maximum potential length of your limbs to take a couple of examples. Different styles have different ways of emphasizing and expanding upon this relationship. Limon technique may be taught in skirts to understand the sensation of fabric against the body, to feel and see weight extending away from the body in a different way. It changes how you move, and how you perceive your movement. In release technique and many contemporary classes, there's an emphasis on movement performed on the floor, and you'll spend a lot of time relaxing body surfaces which usually do not bear loads into the ground, developing a real sensitivity of skin and joints to floor. And you can even take the step of abstracting it, like some improv classes do, and you're asked to interpolate improvised movement from a sensation (sun or breeze on the body, physical state induced by an image) with a concrete kinesthetic memory. The point I'm trying to get to is that under the contemporary dance paradigm, "learning" to dance means studying these kinesthetic sensations and using them to strengthen certain alignments, cultivating an exact understanding of the body and expanding its capabilities.
Pain, being a body sensation itself, plays a large role in this process of parsing and understanding kinesthetic information. It's a signal that can tell you a movement is being performed wrong, or, in some cases, that it is being performed right. I had a teacher line me up in a yoga pose a couple of months of ago and besides being absolutely positive that one of my shin bones was going to sever, the bony protrusions of my ankle joints were grinding into the ground with a force that sent sharp pain all the way up to my ears. The tears were streaming from my eyes, streaming. But when I got up from that pose there was something wild and free feeling in my lower legs. She claimed that with daily repetition, the pain goes away. Damned if I'll ever find out. Anywho, different styles place very specific stresses on the body, and until you really understand how to handle them efficiently, you're gonna hurt. Starting to dance was the most brutal for me. I talked a little bit earlier about my horribly inflexible feet and the constantly reopening wounds that resulted over the joints of my metatarsals. My knees were a mess until I learned how to support a grand plie, because I was training with SDT dancers who love to fall, rapidly and with force, in and out of this squatting position. Almost without fail, people dynamically loading weight onto the shoulder for the very first time in any variety of rolls or shoulder stands get bruises or scrapes that can last upwards of a week. Point is, you deal with it or fake the movement and do what you have to do to get through class and wait for it to heal up. The part that fascinates me is that two weeks later, when the same movement that was such an ordeal for the body pops up in a bit of choreography, you just know how to approach it. You haven't been practicing every day; you haven't been able to practice because your joint was swollen or the bruise or the cuts were just too much. But you move through it and suddenly your shoulder isn't grating so uncomfortably into the floor, suddenly your weight is more even across the surface of the foot so you don't get floor burns or blisters. We have some pretty remarkable mechanisms in place for adaptation and self-preservation, and the body doesn't forget pain.
These days in dance school I feel like, in some ways, I'm starting all over. After making my body into an instrument that didn't suffer from basic stretches and basic floor work, then one that excelled at these things, I thought I could apply the process of patience, diligence, and kinesthetic intelligence to whatever challenge and come out on the other side unscathed. Ah, pride! The next step of relating to the floor, not from the floor but from the air, is putting my body through the wringer all over again. As soon as my hip recovers, consider this the start of round 2. And oh, my knees will be mighty and my elbows will be as my hands!
Pain, being a body sensation itself, plays a large role in this process of parsing and understanding kinesthetic information. It's a signal that can tell you a movement is being performed wrong, or, in some cases, that it is being performed right. I had a teacher line me up in a yoga pose a couple of months of ago and besides being absolutely positive that one of my shin bones was going to sever, the bony protrusions of my ankle joints were grinding into the ground with a force that sent sharp pain all the way up to my ears. The tears were streaming from my eyes, streaming. But when I got up from that pose there was something wild and free feeling in my lower legs. She claimed that with daily repetition, the pain goes away. Damned if I'll ever find out. Anywho, different styles place very specific stresses on the body, and until you really understand how to handle them efficiently, you're gonna hurt. Starting to dance was the most brutal for me. I talked a little bit earlier about my horribly inflexible feet and the constantly reopening wounds that resulted over the joints of my metatarsals. My knees were a mess until I learned how to support a grand plie, because I was training with SDT dancers who love to fall, rapidly and with force, in and out of this squatting position. Almost without fail, people dynamically loading weight onto the shoulder for the very first time in any variety of rolls or shoulder stands get bruises or scrapes that can last upwards of a week. Point is, you deal with it or fake the movement and do what you have to do to get through class and wait for it to heal up. The part that fascinates me is that two weeks later, when the same movement that was such an ordeal for the body pops up in a bit of choreography, you just know how to approach it. You haven't been practicing every day; you haven't been able to practice because your joint was swollen or the bruise or the cuts were just too much. But you move through it and suddenly your shoulder isn't grating so uncomfortably into the floor, suddenly your weight is more even across the surface of the foot so you don't get floor burns or blisters. We have some pretty remarkable mechanisms in place for adaptation and self-preservation, and the body doesn't forget pain.
These days in dance school I feel like, in some ways, I'm starting all over. After making my body into an instrument that didn't suffer from basic stretches and basic floor work, then one that excelled at these things, I thought I could apply the process of patience, diligence, and kinesthetic intelligence to whatever challenge and come out on the other side unscathed. Ah, pride! The next step of relating to the floor, not from the floor but from the air, is putting my body through the wringer all over again. As soon as my hip recovers, consider this the start of round 2. And oh, my knees will be mighty and my elbows will be as my hands!
Friday, May 4, 2007
A Continuity of Arches
Ah, the mystery of the head circle. Something funky happens when you roll the head to the back, right? The cervical spine, especially at the occipital joint, is a pretty wild area and you hear mildly frightening things about it all the time, like, "The head circle is a dangerous movement, anatomically speaking," and threats of serious spine problems from "breaking the neck," releasing the head backwards in a way that causes the shoulders to pull up and in. Support can be really hard to find once the skull crosses that threshold where the weight drops behind the occipital joint.
So lately I've been re-imaging the movement. Before I thought of the path of the top point of my skull as inscribing a circle on the horizontal plane, which is unrealistic and physically unsatisfying. Tilt that plane on a diagonal forward, and everything changes. Going forward the head is also going down, which creates the sensation of space between the vertebra. As it goes backwards it is also lifting, which allows for continuity in the movement and helps me feel the support traveling up the entirety of the spine, all the way from the sacrum, or from the heels on a good day. Doing this when making a circle with both the cervical and thoracic spine (in other words you're circling both the head and shoulders) has also helped me open the front of the body, both chest and abdominals, while maintaining support and continuity in the movement.
It's funny learning how parts of the body behave. In the morning, my spine is like a steel pole, like when I was sleeping all my vertebra compressed and fused. Seriously, if I'm sitting with my legs straight out in front of me, I can't release my head even half of the way down to my knees. For other people it's the hips, or the hamstrings or the shoulders, but I always have to focus on things spiney to warm up. But after like, three in the afternoon, even if I haven't been dancing or thinking about the spine or warming up, I can do comfortable back arches, or roll backwards onto my shoulders with my head tucked between my knees.
Gotta run. Someone at the university thought it would be an awesome idea to schedule a performance at 11 o'clock at night, on a Friday to boot.
So lately I've been re-imaging the movement. Before I thought of the path of the top point of my skull as inscribing a circle on the horizontal plane, which is unrealistic and physically unsatisfying. Tilt that plane on a diagonal forward, and everything changes. Going forward the head is also going down, which creates the sensation of space between the vertebra. As it goes backwards it is also lifting, which allows for continuity in the movement and helps me feel the support traveling up the entirety of the spine, all the way from the sacrum, or from the heels on a good day. Doing this when making a circle with both the cervical and thoracic spine (in other words you're circling both the head and shoulders) has also helped me open the front of the body, both chest and abdominals, while maintaining support and continuity in the movement.
It's funny learning how parts of the body behave. In the morning, my spine is like a steel pole, like when I was sleeping all my vertebra compressed and fused. Seriously, if I'm sitting with my legs straight out in front of me, I can't release my head even half of the way down to my knees. For other people it's the hips, or the hamstrings or the shoulders, but I always have to focus on things spiney to warm up. But after like, three in the afternoon, even if I haven't been dancing or thinking about the spine or warming up, I can do comfortable back arches, or roll backwards onto my shoulders with my head tucked between my knees.
Gotta run. Someone at the university thought it would be an awesome idea to schedule a performance at 11 o'clock at night, on a Friday to boot.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Exhaustion
I've been an active person my whole life. Weeks of soccer camp, long runs, lifting--I hit most of the high points. I thought I knew what it meant to be completely, irrevocably beat. But there's just nothing in the world says exhausted like the fifth consecutive week of 10+ hr. days of dance school, weekends featuring rehearsal.
I'm not trying to throw the misery poker tougher-than-thou trump card here, because I'm sure there are people who engage with their sports or other training experience in a way that completely uses them up. Just that I've never felt so genuinely at my limit. It's weird because I'm awake, brain's still goin. I just can't get up to go get my book from the shelf, or to wash the dishes, or to move to my bed.
I'm not trying to throw the misery poker tougher-than-thou trump card here, because I'm sure there are people who engage with their sports or other training experience in a way that completely uses them up. Just that I've never felt so genuinely at my limit. It's weird because I'm awake, brain's still goin. I just can't get up to go get my book from the shelf, or to wash the dishes, or to move to my bed.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Addendum
So Greg, friend and fellow dancer extraodinaire, had the subject of turnout come up in recent e-mail correspondence with a friend starting into some ballet. I hope you find his insight as illuminating as I have.
ballet. ballet. it took me nearly a year to figure out that ballet is a form of dance. i was like "oh". but you have to fight for it, they don't make it easy to figure out.Exactly.
and turn out. i mean, turn out is really a philisophical question. it answers itself with further interrogation. it interlocutes. it is the absent present, the square root of negative 1, necessary but undefinable. you can't search for it to find it. i wish you a relationship wiht your turn out which is a journey which is its own end.
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