Friday, June 29, 2007
Saturday, June 16, 2007
What is Right?
I'm trying to be a sponge the last couple weeks I'm here. Well, technically I've been working very hard on my sponge action the entire time I've been here, but I just activated my maximum absorption ability. Even though the contemporary teacher we're finishing with kinda sucks. Damn you Teresa, damn you and your spirals!
This is my attempt at an inventory. Those things I've learned that I want to keep with me at all times.
[Feet]
These toed bad boys upon which we tread aren't like other parts of the body. They keep themselves to themselves, do the work they got to but when it comes down to it, there's no hiding the facts of their potential: surprising mobility; critical connections to the rest of the body; the hyper-sensitivity of thousands of bundles of nerves that feel to keep us upright. Feet are the conduits of our weight, our formal gateway into the earth, and specialized routers for all information kinesthetic.
As such, all exercises of standing alignment begin with the feet. Warm-up should invariably involve some massage of the feet, whether manual or against the floor (foot-focused walking). Helpful exercises include breathing through the feet--experiencing the sensation of muscular expansion and growth, then narrowing and lengthening--while walking, thereby opening the spaces between the metatarsals as well as the arch and outside of the foot. Alignment of the hip/knee/ankle joints is achieved primarily through an open foot. Light bouncing through plie can help develop awareness of this connection, after a series of toe moving, supining, and pronating movements have warmed the foot. And finally, the line of the foot as a continuation of the leg is invaluable as extra leverage and extension in balances, while the information from and through the standing foot defines a balance.
Supported correctly, a complete connection from the foot to the tip of the spine can be achieved. This is your individual axis, made vigorous and strong by the energy passed from the ground into the body through the feet by way of reaction to gravity. The shoulder blades and arms fall from this axis when at rest. How much energy (the normal force resulting as a reaction to gravity), and in which manner the energy in relayed to the rest of the body depends entirely on our feet when in a default ambulatory position.
[Thoracic Spine]
A house of tension in my body, which is why it's getting bulleted here. This part of the spine feels to me at times like a no-man's land, the long and barren space between the pelvis and head and their attendant vertebra (lumbar and cervical spine, respectively). But without the cooperation of this connector, you have no spiraling, no back-bend, no deep and open inhales.
And so in warming up, you can activate it by taking spirals on the floor reeeeeeal slow-like. Spread out on your back and take one foot across your body, feel the pelvis start to tip, but don't take the ribcage and head with you until you have to. If you don't release the tension in the thoracic spine you're sunk. Repeat with the arm, which takes the head and ribcage first, but lets you feel the whole region of the thoracic spine opening up before it takes the pelvis with.
For arching, it's all about the sternum. I never could figure how to support my head until a revelation while in bridge a couple of days ago. Feel the sternum, feel the vertebra behind it and let all of them open up to make the chest wide. It's like the collar bones are detaching and shooting out even wider, which helps keeps the back from collapsing in. A bad situation because it brings the shoulder blades in tight and leave the cervical spine tense. You can trust the thoracic spine to carry surprising amounts of weight and energy as long as it is rooted long through the lumbar spine and pelvis. A helpful warm up exercise is that inverted push-up position from yoga. From sitting with legs straight out in front of you, you lean slightly back and place the hands with fingers pointing towards your toes. Push up, see the ceiling, point the toes, and you can feel the whole length of the chest opening up, supported through the thoracic spine.
The thoracic spine functions largely in relation to the shoulder blades and arms. It's space and maneuverability is increased by maintaining distance between the shoulder blades and openness across the chest.
[Opening the Hips]
Flexibility in the legs is largely a project of opening the hips, in all directions. Also, you can't ignore the importance of the lower back and lower abdominals, as they can restrict movement to an equal degree.
The key ingredient in this sort of stretching is breath. The breath has to enter all the way down into the pelvis and lower back in order to active the sensation of length, the meridians traveling from the hip joint all the way down through the feet. Without alignment along these meridians, it's almost impossible for me to feel my knee joint extended. I already spoke about feet, but again, their involvement in extending the line of the leg can completely change the experience of a stretch.
When stretching the adductors and hamstrings, it's really crucial that the superficial hip flexors remain relaxed. You only need to engage the iliapsoas, which goes from the top of the femur all the way back into the lower spine. Because of this it can be really helpful to prepare for stretching with abdominal exercises, slowly lifting and extending the legs from a lying position with careful attention to avoid tension in the superficial hip flexors. I've also found it helpful to do leg lifts while hanging from a pull-up bar to activate the iliapsoas, being very sure to avoid any swinging coming from lack of control in the abdominals.
[Dancing is Fun]
Body knowledge and flexibility and awareness of what is happening when you move are all fantastic things. They inform not only your dance, but all of the movement you undertake through the world. But in the end, dancing is something else. You don't need to know what's happening with your joints and muscles to understand movement dynamics or kinesthetic sensations, and you definitely don't need to have high legs or sweet moves to break it down.
It does take a certain sensitivity, to environment, to your body, to whatever rhythm or music or situation is going on around you. But anybody can get there if they want to. The best dancing I saw all semester was in improv class with a Russian guy in his late thirties, completely untrained from a dance technique perspective, who, failing to relay his concepts in broken english, just started dancing for us. He was in it all the way, like a rock and roller, and that was the important thing to watch--not just the forms or dynamic choices, as instrumental as those may be in creating effect.
Maybe I'll have more notes in the days to come, but in all likelihood I'm occupied by the fact that, in four days time, I'll be on a freakin plane heading into a whirlwind summer followed by a whole lot of what the hell am I going to do. But for sure, more dancing to come.
This is my attempt at an inventory. Those things I've learned that I want to keep with me at all times.
[Feet]
These toed bad boys upon which we tread aren't like other parts of the body. They keep themselves to themselves, do the work they got to but when it comes down to it, there's no hiding the facts of their potential: surprising mobility; critical connections to the rest of the body; the hyper-sensitivity of thousands of bundles of nerves that feel to keep us upright. Feet are the conduits of our weight, our formal gateway into the earth, and specialized routers for all information kinesthetic.
As such, all exercises of standing alignment begin with the feet. Warm-up should invariably involve some massage of the feet, whether manual or against the floor (foot-focused walking). Helpful exercises include breathing through the feet--experiencing the sensation of muscular expansion and growth, then narrowing and lengthening--while walking, thereby opening the spaces between the metatarsals as well as the arch and outside of the foot. Alignment of the hip/knee/ankle joints is achieved primarily through an open foot. Light bouncing through plie can help develop awareness of this connection, after a series of toe moving, supining, and pronating movements have warmed the foot. And finally, the line of the foot as a continuation of the leg is invaluable as extra leverage and extension in balances, while the information from and through the standing foot defines a balance.
Supported correctly, a complete connection from the foot to the tip of the spine can be achieved. This is your individual axis, made vigorous and strong by the energy passed from the ground into the body through the feet by way of reaction to gravity. The shoulder blades and arms fall from this axis when at rest. How much energy (the normal force resulting as a reaction to gravity), and in which manner the energy in relayed to the rest of the body depends entirely on our feet when in a default ambulatory position.
[Thoracic Spine]
A house of tension in my body, which is why it's getting bulleted here. This part of the spine feels to me at times like a no-man's land, the long and barren space between the pelvis and head and their attendant vertebra (lumbar and cervical spine, respectively). But without the cooperation of this connector, you have no spiraling, no back-bend, no deep and open inhales.
And so in warming up, you can activate it by taking spirals on the floor reeeeeeal slow-like. Spread out on your back and take one foot across your body, feel the pelvis start to tip, but don't take the ribcage and head with you until you have to. If you don't release the tension in the thoracic spine you're sunk. Repeat with the arm, which takes the head and ribcage first, but lets you feel the whole region of the thoracic spine opening up before it takes the pelvis with.
For arching, it's all about the sternum. I never could figure how to support my head until a revelation while in bridge a couple of days ago. Feel the sternum, feel the vertebra behind it and let all of them open up to make the chest wide. It's like the collar bones are detaching and shooting out even wider, which helps keeps the back from collapsing in. A bad situation because it brings the shoulder blades in tight and leave the cervical spine tense. You can trust the thoracic spine to carry surprising amounts of weight and energy as long as it is rooted long through the lumbar spine and pelvis. A helpful warm up exercise is that inverted push-up position from yoga. From sitting with legs straight out in front of you, you lean slightly back and place the hands with fingers pointing towards your toes. Push up, see the ceiling, point the toes, and you can feel the whole length of the chest opening up, supported through the thoracic spine.
The thoracic spine functions largely in relation to the shoulder blades and arms. It's space and maneuverability is increased by maintaining distance between the shoulder blades and openness across the chest.
[Opening the Hips]
Flexibility in the legs is largely a project of opening the hips, in all directions. Also, you can't ignore the importance of the lower back and lower abdominals, as they can restrict movement to an equal degree.
The key ingredient in this sort of stretching is breath. The breath has to enter all the way down into the pelvis and lower back in order to active the sensation of length, the meridians traveling from the hip joint all the way down through the feet. Without alignment along these meridians, it's almost impossible for me to feel my knee joint extended. I already spoke about feet, but again, their involvement in extending the line of the leg can completely change the experience of a stretch.
When stretching the adductors and hamstrings, it's really crucial that the superficial hip flexors remain relaxed. You only need to engage the iliapsoas, which goes from the top of the femur all the way back into the lower spine. Because of this it can be really helpful to prepare for stretching with abdominal exercises, slowly lifting and extending the legs from a lying position with careful attention to avoid tension in the superficial hip flexors. I've also found it helpful to do leg lifts while hanging from a pull-up bar to activate the iliapsoas, being very sure to avoid any swinging coming from lack of control in the abdominals.
[Dancing is Fun]
Body knowledge and flexibility and awareness of what is happening when you move are all fantastic things. They inform not only your dance, but all of the movement you undertake through the world. But in the end, dancing is something else. You don't need to know what's happening with your joints and muscles to understand movement dynamics or kinesthetic sensations, and you definitely don't need to have high legs or sweet moves to break it down.
It does take a certain sensitivity, to environment, to your body, to whatever rhythm or music or situation is going on around you. But anybody can get there if they want to. The best dancing I saw all semester was in improv class with a Russian guy in his late thirties, completely untrained from a dance technique perspective, who, failing to relay his concepts in broken english, just started dancing for us. He was in it all the way, like a rock and roller, and that was the important thing to watch--not just the forms or dynamic choices, as instrumental as those may be in creating effect.
Maybe I'll have more notes in the days to come, but in all likelihood I'm occupied by the fact that, in four days time, I'll be on a freakin plane heading into a whirlwind summer followed by a whole lot of what the hell am I going to do. But for sure, more dancing to come.
Do it Right
Two weeks from now I will no longer be in Dance School, and parting will be such sweet sorrow. Part of the resolution I made with myself as I exit this Eden of kinesthetic and artistic exploration is to remain, at all times, a dance student.
Seven years ago, in the prime of my willfully starry-eyed youth--an embracing illusion shored up by the support of teachers and parents alike--I went with my mother to buy a clarinet. I was talented, I was interested, and maybe this was the undertaking, the crucial mineral additive to the soil of my upbringing that would lead me to flower in glorious form. Committed mother that she was, she sought out trustworthy, quality clarinet information, and received a recommendation from my teacher, a slight man sharpened and pulled taut by an unflagging and self-aware commitment to impossible expectations. For him, of course, the only guy to see about a new instrument was Paul Olivia, the clarinet guru of the Bay Area.
So we drive to some other tree-inhabited town with impossibly long driveways and low stone walls, and walk into this guy's garage. It had been transformed into a labyrinth of shelves, clamps, and workbenches, dimly lit but reflecting a yellow-gold glow from unexpected surfaces. He had on a thick black apron, looking like he'd just walked out of a foundry, and attached to his glasses was a device that could swing over the left lens and that looked like something a jeweler would use to inspect fine stones. Naturally his face was covered with black smudges, smeared by the faint perspiration of intense focus. When he maneuvered his wide shoulders through the rows of shelves he left no question that he knew exactly where each box of imported reeds was, each type and size of impossibly small screw, each plastic bag of oddly shaped metal keys and levers. In no time he had two options for a student of my level--the first, less expensive, which he treated with gentle contempt, and a second model which was already sold by way of his respectful treatment.
I played a bit, so he could figure out which number imported French reed I should buy. In two minutes, after one scale and a chromatic, I had already been thorougly sized up. It wasn't just that the corners of his mouth were pulled down into a near-scowl, or that he stopped my playing, or that he had no time for niceties in his speech, because these were all defaults of the alchemical workshop thing he had going on. More that he recognized serious when he saw it, and it was bugging him that I was sitting there with a smile on my face, buying a nice instrument and possessing the ability to play the clarinet, but lacking the reverence to go deeper, to will the tone richer. I knew sitting on that stool and blowing my lungs out that I'd been seen through, and that to some extent I was an intruder to his shrine of clarinet-ing just riding the swell of good feelings: praise from my clarinet teacher and band director; the love involved in my parent's sacrifice and commitment to see me succeed; the vague promise of future success. Paul Olivia tilted his head forward and looked at me through his glasses, complete with outwardly-hinged eyepiece, and he knew that I knew I'd been seen through, so he threw me the following bone: "You only really need to practice for ten minutes a day. But you have to practice right."
He continued on a little bit about tone and what to aim for, but this was the important part, the bit that's stuck with me these last seven years. Just the words are little more than a revision of the quality over quantity truism, but in context it felt more like: "I have this passion for this instrument and its capabilities, which has built all of this around me. I'm going to tell you where to start, so that if your exploration of this sound in its fullest incarnation is sincere, you could love it like I do." In context, it was a gentle reminder from a severe man that in striving for something pure, you've got to be driven by more than good feeling. That in time the knowledge of the thing, made in your effort and commitment, will change you; that those ten minutes a day of doing it right can nurture a craft, a discipline, a life.
There was the evidence, standing right in front of me, too much a caricature filled out with human dimensions to not make an impression. Thus impressed, and having encountered something personally worthwhile in my daily ten minutes of dance (done right, of course), I'm off to America not only to obtain gainful employment, but also to be a dance student in a new environment. I foresee future posts having to do with the lumbar spine in sitting positions...
Seven years ago, in the prime of my willfully starry-eyed youth--an embracing illusion shored up by the support of teachers and parents alike--I went with my mother to buy a clarinet. I was talented, I was interested, and maybe this was the undertaking, the crucial mineral additive to the soil of my upbringing that would lead me to flower in glorious form. Committed mother that she was, she sought out trustworthy, quality clarinet information, and received a recommendation from my teacher, a slight man sharpened and pulled taut by an unflagging and self-aware commitment to impossible expectations. For him, of course, the only guy to see about a new instrument was Paul Olivia, the clarinet guru of the Bay Area.
So we drive to some other tree-inhabited town with impossibly long driveways and low stone walls, and walk into this guy's garage. It had been transformed into a labyrinth of shelves, clamps, and workbenches, dimly lit but reflecting a yellow-gold glow from unexpected surfaces. He had on a thick black apron, looking like he'd just walked out of a foundry, and attached to his glasses was a device that could swing over the left lens and that looked like something a jeweler would use to inspect fine stones. Naturally his face was covered with black smudges, smeared by the faint perspiration of intense focus. When he maneuvered his wide shoulders through the rows of shelves he left no question that he knew exactly where each box of imported reeds was, each type and size of impossibly small screw, each plastic bag of oddly shaped metal keys and levers. In no time he had two options for a student of my level--the first, less expensive, which he treated with gentle contempt, and a second model which was already sold by way of his respectful treatment.
I played a bit, so he could figure out which number imported French reed I should buy. In two minutes, after one scale and a chromatic, I had already been thorougly sized up. It wasn't just that the corners of his mouth were pulled down into a near-scowl, or that he stopped my playing, or that he had no time for niceties in his speech, because these were all defaults of the alchemical workshop thing he had going on. More that he recognized serious when he saw it, and it was bugging him that I was sitting there with a smile on my face, buying a nice instrument and possessing the ability to play the clarinet, but lacking the reverence to go deeper, to will the tone richer. I knew sitting on that stool and blowing my lungs out that I'd been seen through, and that to some extent I was an intruder to his shrine of clarinet-ing just riding the swell of good feelings: praise from my clarinet teacher and band director; the love involved in my parent's sacrifice and commitment to see me succeed; the vague promise of future success. Paul Olivia tilted his head forward and looked at me through his glasses, complete with outwardly-hinged eyepiece, and he knew that I knew I'd been seen through, so he threw me the following bone: "You only really need to practice for ten minutes a day. But you have to practice right."
He continued on a little bit about tone and what to aim for, but this was the important part, the bit that's stuck with me these last seven years. Just the words are little more than a revision of the quality over quantity truism, but in context it felt more like: "I have this passion for this instrument and its capabilities, which has built all of this around me. I'm going to tell you where to start, so that if your exploration of this sound in its fullest incarnation is sincere, you could love it like I do." In context, it was a gentle reminder from a severe man that in striving for something pure, you've got to be driven by more than good feeling. That in time the knowledge of the thing, made in your effort and commitment, will change you; that those ten minutes a day of doing it right can nurture a craft, a discipline, a life.
There was the evidence, standing right in front of me, too much a caricature filled out with human dimensions to not make an impression. Thus impressed, and having encountered something personally worthwhile in my daily ten minutes of dance (done right, of course), I'm off to America not only to obtain gainful employment, but also to be a dance student in a new environment. I foresee future posts having to do with the lumbar spine in sitting positions...
Friday, May 25, 2007
"I think you can use everything for everything."
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.
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 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.
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