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.
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.
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Turnout Happens
Dance training is a gift that keeps on giving. There are the immediate visceral joys of a body engaged, what with the pumping blood and extended muscles and sweating and all, and then there's the surprises, like today.
As per the usual, I went to ballet class and stood at the bar in first position. You know, some plies, tendue, port de bras. Keeping it nice and easy to warm up. I've spent the last couple weeks in ballet trying to focus on turnout. Turnout is what you do in your hip joint, knee, and ankle to create that goofy ballet image, what with the knees pointing to side, the toes pulling backwards and the heel forwards. My latest tactic in this maddeningly futile struggle has just been to spend like five minutes before class pumping myself up: "Oh man your turnout is so awesome!" "Yeah, I know, it just comes naturally" and so on and so forth. We finish the warm-up and there I am facing the bar, looking into th
e mirror, in first position (which means legs like in the picture). Then I had a moment, my head and body in unison saying something along the lines of "let it happen," and all the tension, all the effort I'd been exerting to turn my damn legs out disappeared. They just went. In all my worry, all the times I've been told "turn out turn out turn out," I was working with superficial muscles in your ass that wrap around your waist and are actually for extension of the leg. I just let it go and suddenly the most basic movements, your plie, your tendue, were aligned in ways that made sense. Awesome. So the feeling is "let it go," but when I finished class my real turnout muscles, the internal ones, were spasming from the exhaustion of actually doing the entirety (more or less) of the work they're supposed to for the very first time.
A good ballet teacher notices stuff like that too, when a student gets a position in a way they didn't before, and they're there to line you back up, firm up the newness of the thing. Next for me to tackle is the connection between shoulder blade and the crest of the pelvis, which is good for keeping the length in the side of your torso which is money for balances.
I've been dancing for long enough to know that this surprise is just the start. Tomorrow I will have to fight and focus once again to find my turnout, and I'll have to rework old habits in movement I'm familiar with, and then maybe three vigilant months from now I'll have it firmly in my both my mental and physical repertory. Because really it's never just one moment, it's part of the process of stretching, every day, of standing at a bar sensitive to what's going on in your body, almost every day, then dreaming about it.
Ballet class reminded me of another movementy thing today--a movement generally doesn't start where it LOOKS like it starts. That's why it's so funny to watch people who haven't been trained in ballet (read, me just a few months ago) actually start to learn. You watch and see, oh sure you kick the leg up high and keep your torso straight, oh sure you balance on one leg and bring the other toe up to the standing knee. But it's just not how it works. The organization, especially in ballet which is so concerned with looking effortless, comes first. To balance with one leg on demi-pointe (that means standing on the ball of your foot) and the other in passe, first you have to arrange the ankle joint, adductors of the leg (inner thigh muscles), oblique and straight abdominals and pretty much everything else into a powerful line of support extending all the way from the floor to the top of your spine. THEN the other leg can come off the floor without disturbing the body.
Aight gonna go try and figure some stuff out about my lower legs and feet.
As per the usual, I went to ballet class and stood at the bar in first position. You know, some plies, tendue, port de bras. Keeping it nice and easy to warm up. I've spent the last couple weeks in ballet trying to focus on turnout. Turnout is what you do in your hip joint, knee, and ankle to create that goofy ballet image, what with the knees pointing to side, the toes pulling backwards and the heel forwards. My latest tactic in this maddeningly futile struggle has just been to spend like five minutes before class pumping myself up: "Oh man your turnout is so awesome!" "Yeah, I know, it just comes naturally" and so on and so forth. We finish the warm-up and there I am facing the bar, looking into th
e mirror, in first position (which means legs like in the picture). Then I had a moment, my head and body in unison saying something along the lines of "let it happen," and all the tension, all the effort I'd been exerting to turn my damn legs out disappeared. They just went. In all my worry, all the times I've been told "turn out turn out turn out," I was working with superficial muscles in your ass that wrap around your waist and are actually for extension of the leg. I just let it go and suddenly the most basic movements, your plie, your tendue, were aligned in ways that made sense. Awesome. So the feeling is "let it go," but when I finished class my real turnout muscles, the internal ones, were spasming from the exhaustion of actually doing the entirety (more or less) of the work they're supposed to for the very first time.A good ballet teacher notices stuff like that too, when a student gets a position in a way they didn't before, and they're there to line you back up, firm up the newness of the thing. Next for me to tackle is the connection between shoulder blade and the crest of the pelvis, which is good for keeping the length in the side of your torso which is money for balances.
I've been dancing for long enough to know that this surprise is just the start. Tomorrow I will have to fight and focus once again to find my turnout, and I'll have to rework old habits in movement I'm familiar with, and then maybe three vigilant months from now I'll have it firmly in my both my mental and physical repertory. Because really it's never just one moment, it's part of the process of stretching, every day, of standing at a bar sensitive to what's going on in your body, almost every day, then dreaming about it.
Ballet class reminded me of another movementy thing today--a movement generally doesn't start where it LOOKS like it starts. That's why it's so funny to watch people who haven't been trained in ballet (read, me just a few months ago) actually start to learn. You watch and see, oh sure you kick the leg up high and keep your torso straight, oh sure you balance on one leg and bring the other toe up to the standing knee. But it's just not how it works. The organization, especially in ballet which is so concerned with looking effortless, comes first. To balance with one leg on demi-pointe (that means standing on the ball of your foot) and the other in passe, first you have to arrange the ankle joint, adductors of the leg (inner thigh muscles), oblique and straight abdominals and pretty much everything else into a powerful line of support extending all the way from the floor to the top of your spine. THEN the other leg can come off the floor without disturbing the body.
Aight gonna go try and figure some stuff out about my lower legs and feet.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Falling off your game/supporting limb or body surface
Dance School has had me down and out the past couple of weeks. A couple of minor injuries, an unnaturally warm spring with attendant distractions, too much partying. In dance training, there's just no room for an irregularity of cycles.
You reach a point in any discipline where you really understand what it means to take the next step. After unending hours of training, thinking, watching, you just get it. You're on the cusp; the tension and excitement of this position gives you the impetus to overcome whatever limits you've placed on yourself.
But you can slide backwards as easily forwards. Before the holidays, I was really getting a handle on how to perform some body-hurling, dangerous-looking leaps to the ground safely. Working on it meant I went home bruised and cut up, but that's where you gotta start. The pain forces you to learn how to sequence through joints, which surfaces can cushion impact to the floor, when to push and when to release. You only really make things dangerous for yourself when you're not connected, focus to body, and find yourself unable to get to the real maximum potential of all the supporting musculature, or the real maximum of mental surety. Which is where you have to be, all the way all the time. A little bit of negligence and you may, for example, coming crashing down on a hip and hobble for a day and half, damn those exposed joints. All the way all the time, especially in the discipline of dance, is not just mentally exhausting.
And it's funny how much easier things get when you're prepared to take advantage of all your physical support. You get a greater range of motion, better dynamics, more exciting stage presence AND you're so much more efficient. Your body thanks you for it and doesn't groan at the mere thought of grand plie or rolling over your knees. I've been having trouble getting there. Sleep more, eat better, worry less. Whatevah.
You reach a point in any discipline where you really understand what it means to take the next step. After unending hours of training, thinking, watching, you just get it. You're on the cusp; the tension and excitement of this position gives you the impetus to overcome whatever limits you've placed on yourself.
But you can slide backwards as easily forwards. Before the holidays, I was really getting a handle on how to perform some body-hurling, dangerous-looking leaps to the ground safely. Working on it meant I went home bruised and cut up, but that's where you gotta start. The pain forces you to learn how to sequence through joints, which surfaces can cushion impact to the floor, when to push and when to release. You only really make things dangerous for yourself when you're not connected, focus to body, and find yourself unable to get to the real maximum potential of all the supporting musculature, or the real maximum of mental surety. Which is where you have to be, all the way all the time. A little bit of negligence and you may, for example, coming crashing down on a hip and hobble for a day and half, damn those exposed joints. All the way all the time, especially in the discipline of dance, is not just mentally exhausting.
And it's funny how much easier things get when you're prepared to take advantage of all your physical support. You get a greater range of motion, better dynamics, more exciting stage presence AND you're so much more efficient. Your body thanks you for it and doesn't groan at the mere thought of grand plie or rolling over your knees. I've been having trouble getting there. Sleep more, eat better, worry less. Whatevah.
Sunday, April 8, 2007
Kinesthesis
To start off with a correction: I talk pretty often about things "kinaesthetic," which I group under the term "kinaesthesia." Apparently these terms are nonsense and I actually mean "kinesthetic" and "kinesthesis." Sorry if I offended anyone's academic sensibilities. Nerds.
So four years ago at Swarthmore college, a dance teacher stopped her class and told her students to sit down and go through the dance phrase we'd been learning. In our heads, without moving. I did my best, taking advantage mostly of visual memory and my memory of the rhythm. As I recall, I couldn't get to the end of the phrase. I got distracted or hung up on exactly how a particular movement was functioning.
In dance school a couple weeks ago, a similar task was assigned. We could move small, but had to remain on our spots. And as I stepped through the phrase in my head, which was full of imagined swathes of force and weight, accompanied by predictable sound effects and dabs of color from the kinesthetic palette, the memory of this class at Swat came back to me. The way I went after the problem was entirely different. No longer was I using visual memory by literally trying to picture the image of my body in space, and rhythm memory had taken a back seat to kinesthetic memory. Also, I realized this abstract imaging was a part of my daily routine at dance school. You do it while watching others dance a phrase, waiting your turn. You use it while you're dancing. It pops into your head as you walk home, or when you trip and catch yourself--really at any time, because there are so many movement dynamics in your environment that are abstractly tied to dynamics dancing has made you familiar with. An entirely normal phenomenon as far as I'm concerned; like with any activity that you perform daily and place under some kind of focusing lens, it gets into your head and gets worked around.
To take a couple of steps back and talk about exactly what kinesthesis is, I went through the trouble of googling for its definitions: "The ability to feel movements of the limbs and body." And kinesthetic: "resulting from the sensation of bodily position, presence, or movement." This also turned up: "the kinesthetic system interprets the excursion and direction of joint movement." So the general idea is experiencing and filtering the physical sensations of movement. To me it sounds an awful lot like perception. Like kinesthesis is another of our senses, but for our internal environment instead of the world around us. It's an idea that appeals to me, at least on an aesthetic level, because it feels like it completes the five senses model--instead of an absent, passive interloper with instruments to perceive and mentally construct an external environment, separate from us, we're IN it, an embodied, integrated part of our environment.
I do not find kinesthesis to be at all encompassed by the sense of touch. There's just too much other information involved in the "movement" element, in being aware of weight, of force exerted by muscles, of speed, direction, and orientation in space for it to be merely about touch.
So I'm not at all done with this topic, I still want to talk about why I want to understand kinesthesis better, how we perceive and communicate through kinesthesis (kinesthetic empathy), how some dance arts are more visual than kinesthetic... but since we're working blog style we'll go in installments. Oh, I know you're on the edge of your computer chair.
So four years ago at Swarthmore college, a dance teacher stopped her class and told her students to sit down and go through the dance phrase we'd been learning. In our heads, without moving. I did my best, taking advantage mostly of visual memory and my memory of the rhythm. As I recall, I couldn't get to the end of the phrase. I got distracted or hung up on exactly how a particular movement was functioning.
In dance school a couple weeks ago, a similar task was assigned. We could move small, but had to remain on our spots. And as I stepped through the phrase in my head, which was full of imagined swathes of force and weight, accompanied by predictable sound effects and dabs of color from the kinesthetic palette, the memory of this class at Swat came back to me. The way I went after the problem was entirely different. No longer was I using visual memory by literally trying to picture the image of my body in space, and rhythm memory had taken a back seat to kinesthetic memory. Also, I realized this abstract imaging was a part of my daily routine at dance school. You do it while watching others dance a phrase, waiting your turn. You use it while you're dancing. It pops into your head as you walk home, or when you trip and catch yourself--really at any time, because there are so many movement dynamics in your environment that are abstractly tied to dynamics dancing has made you familiar with. An entirely normal phenomenon as far as I'm concerned; like with any activity that you perform daily and place under some kind of focusing lens, it gets into your head and gets worked around.
To take a couple of steps back and talk about exactly what kinesthesis is, I went through the trouble of googling for its definitions: "The ability to feel movements of the limbs and body." And kinesthetic: "resulting from the sensation of bodily position, presence, or movement." This also turned up: "the kinesthetic system interprets the excursion and direction of joint movement." So the general idea is experiencing and filtering the physical sensations of movement. To me it sounds an awful lot like perception. Like kinesthesis is another of our senses, but for our internal environment instead of the world around us. It's an idea that appeals to me, at least on an aesthetic level, because it feels like it completes the five senses model--instead of an absent, passive interloper with instruments to perceive and mentally construct an external environment, separate from us, we're IN it, an embodied, integrated part of our environment.
I do not find kinesthesis to be at all encompassed by the sense of touch. There's just too much other information involved in the "movement" element, in being aware of weight, of force exerted by muscles, of speed, direction, and orientation in space for it to be merely about touch.
So I'm not at all done with this topic, I still want to talk about why I want to understand kinesthesis better, how we perceive and communicate through kinesthesis (kinesthetic empathy), how some dance arts are more visual than kinesthetic... but since we're working blog style we'll go in installments. Oh, I know you're on the edge of your computer chair.
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Commitment
The first scene is in a Swarthmore dance studio. I'm nervous; it's one of my first dance classes. I am the only guy there. Clearly not quite sure what sort of comfortable clothes are appropriate for dance class. During the warm up, we're asked to kneel, to sit on our heels. I do my best, but the pain in my ankles is unbearable after a few moments. The skin over the joints of my metatarsals is pinched and stinging. I try again, then adjust onto my ass. Try again, get off my feet and back onto my flank. I fidget in discomfort watching everyone else still as yogis. After just this one class I have tiny, oozing scrapes on the top of my feet. It would take two years to develop the appropriate calluses to protect the skin on my feet. Another two for the position to be comfortable, with weight evenly distributed and joints aligned without strain. No pinched skin. Every time I settle into it, it feels like a miracle.
I decided to become a dancer after seeing a performance. I'd been in a couple musicals before, nursed a secret desire to be in the limelight, but never anything serious. What captivated me in this particular show was not an over-arching artistic statement, not even the choreography, per say, but the execution. The mastery of the dancers in their bodies, the sheer athleticism, something pure about what was happening that made my body feel charged, tensed and forward in my seat before even realizing what was going on. And something in my head said "You can do that." Not just a voice, but something I knew. Just like that, without understanding anything that was involved. I wanted that command, or felt like it was some potential I had within me, or something. Presence of mind and body, over myself, over the lyricism of the thing, over the space around me. Luckily enough, I was at the same time sufficiently prescient and sufficiently ignorant to go for it.
Another scene, this time in the hallway of my freshman dorm. At this point in my life I am all about the social dancing. Life has been too kind in introducing me to alcohol and rib cage isolations all at the same time. It should also be noted that I am a member of the varsity soccer team, and consider myself the pinnacle of youthful fitness. The girl across the hall is telling me about yoga class and how great it is. She shows me her favorite position which is downward dog. Psh, I can do that. So I try. She looks at me kinda funny and says, well, ok, but you have to make this small adjustment, and move your hips this way, and press your heels towards the ground... at which point I lose all conception of the outside world because my mind is utterly consumed by the hellfire rising from my calves and hamstrings. Perhaps "pinnacle" was too strong a word, I think to myself.
Dance training meant I had to learn about release. Release the tensions induced by environment, because suddenly straight white guy means curious minority. Release pride, because however fast or strong I was didn't matter when I couldn't touch my toes or coordinate myself to learn fifteen seconds of dance phrase. Release myself to the conclusion that I didn't have to perform for everyone else, or outperform anyone else. Rediscovery of a genuine personal process. And whether a product of perversity in my mind or in my circumstance, I was thrilled to be starting off with the absolute basics, ill-suited feet and tense musculature and all. Oh, there would be wonderful, daunting obstacles!
And there still are. But the moral of the story is, at least my feet aren't leaking pus.
I decided to become a dancer after seeing a performance. I'd been in a couple musicals before, nursed a secret desire to be in the limelight, but never anything serious. What captivated me in this particular show was not an over-arching artistic statement, not even the choreography, per say, but the execution. The mastery of the dancers in their bodies, the sheer athleticism, something pure about what was happening that made my body feel charged, tensed and forward in my seat before even realizing what was going on. And something in my head said "You can do that." Not just a voice, but something I knew. Just like that, without understanding anything that was involved. I wanted that command, or felt like it was some potential I had within me, or something. Presence of mind and body, over myself, over the lyricism of the thing, over the space around me. Luckily enough, I was at the same time sufficiently prescient and sufficiently ignorant to go for it.
Another scene, this time in the hallway of my freshman dorm. At this point in my life I am all about the social dancing. Life has been too kind in introducing me to alcohol and rib cage isolations all at the same time. It should also be noted that I am a member of the varsity soccer team, and consider myself the pinnacle of youthful fitness. The girl across the hall is telling me about yoga class and how great it is. She shows me her favorite position which is downward dog. Psh, I can do that. So I try. She looks at me kinda funny and says, well, ok, but you have to make this small adjustment, and move your hips this way, and press your heels towards the ground... at which point I lose all conception of the outside world because my mind is utterly consumed by the hellfire rising from my calves and hamstrings. Perhaps "pinnacle" was too strong a word, I think to myself.
Dance training meant I had to learn about release. Release the tensions induced by environment, because suddenly straight white guy means curious minority. Release pride, because however fast or strong I was didn't matter when I couldn't touch my toes or coordinate myself to learn fifteen seconds of dance phrase. Release myself to the conclusion that I didn't have to perform for everyone else, or outperform anyone else. Rediscovery of a genuine personal process. And whether a product of perversity in my mind or in my circumstance, I was thrilled to be starting off with the absolute basics, ill-suited feet and tense musculature and all. Oh, there would be wonderful, daunting obstacles!
And there still are. But the moral of the story is, at least my feet aren't leaking pus.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Big Strike
So, there is a movement in ballet called grande battement, in which one leg kicks as high as possible to the front, to the side, or backwards. Turned out and straight with the foot pointed, of course. The rest of the body, to the audience, looks entirely undisturbed. For the dancer this means a shitload of work in organizing the weight and supporting musculature over the standing leg. I am a big fan of grande battement.
Basically what is happening (when performed to the front or the side) is there are a lot muscles in and around the hip joint going into intense flexion. Dancers of the classical/modern tradition invariably have a lot of tension in this area (hip flexors and their compatriots). Abdominals, both straight and oblique, are somewhat tensed to maintain the length of the torso on both sides and to cushion the impact to the hip joint of the standing leg.
Now, the body is structured for efficiency. It knows that when one joint goes into flexion, probably there are more joints that need to go into flexion. Think squatting, or cowering, or shielding yourself from the rain, crouching, crawling, sitting, etc. So when you start learning grande battement, your body suggests to your shoulders, your hands, your other leg, elbow joints dot dot dot that they contract. This is contrary to the dancer's goals. This is also where I talk again about the surprising utility of imagery.
Whenever a teacher talks about movement related to grand battement, they focus on the muscles paired opposite the hip flexors, which necessarily become relaxed so the leg can stretch high. You talk about energy being sent downwards, instead of focusing on the upwards movement of the leg. You imagine length of the lower spine, weightlessness of the leg, and the shoulders falling downwards. It's like trying to forget that the iliapsoas is working like hell to pick the leg up, that the quadraceps are flexed to extend the knee joint, the calves to extend the ankle joint. All these things, your mind molds into the sensation of an airy arc extending out from your strongly grounded center so you can keep your port de bras (carriage of the arms) and neck relaxed, extended, and effortless-looking.
Dance training sometimes feels like one of those metal puzzles with lots of pieces linked together. You adjust one part and it prevents three other parts from moving, but then you adjust this other way and two parts are free and rotatable but still stuck to the whole. You learn to isolate and organize, when to be gentle and careful with a muscle group, when you need to throw force abruptly. And things are tangled up to an absolutely unbelievable extent, and everybody's different. Flexing my toes upwards, for example, tends to make me perform the analogous movement with my right hand, while my Polish friend can't swing his arms in backwards circles without pulling the muscles on the side of his nose up.
So, whether you're aware of it or not, every waking moment you are orchestrating a massively complicated operation with alarming connections and potentials. Yee-haw.
Basically what is happening (when performed to the front or the side) is there are a lot muscles in and around the hip joint going into intense flexion. Dancers of the classical/modern tradition invariably have a lot of tension in this area (hip flexors and their compatriots). Abdominals, both straight and oblique, are somewhat tensed to maintain the length of the torso on both sides and to cushion the impact to the hip joint of the standing leg.
Now, the body is structured for efficiency. It knows that when one joint goes into flexion, probably there are more joints that need to go into flexion. Think squatting, or cowering, or shielding yourself from the rain, crouching, crawling, sitting, etc. So when you start learning grande battement, your body suggests to your shoulders, your hands, your other leg, elbow joints dot dot dot that they contract. This is contrary to the dancer's goals. This is also where I talk again about the surprising utility of imagery.
Whenever a teacher talks about movement related to grand battement, they focus on the muscles paired opposite the hip flexors, which necessarily become relaxed so the leg can stretch high. You talk about energy being sent downwards, instead of focusing on the upwards movement of the leg. You imagine length of the lower spine, weightlessness of the leg, and the shoulders falling downwards. It's like trying to forget that the iliapsoas is working like hell to pick the leg up, that the quadraceps are flexed to extend the knee joint, the calves to extend the ankle joint. All these things, your mind molds into the sensation of an airy arc extending out from your strongly grounded center so you can keep your port de bras (carriage of the arms) and neck relaxed, extended, and effortless-looking.
Dance training sometimes feels like one of those metal puzzles with lots of pieces linked together. You adjust one part and it prevents three other parts from moving, but then you adjust this other way and two parts are free and rotatable but still stuck to the whole. You learn to isolate and organize, when to be gentle and careful with a muscle group, when you need to throw force abruptly. And things are tangled up to an absolutely unbelievable extent, and everybody's different. Flexing my toes upwards, for example, tends to make me perform the analogous movement with my right hand, while my Polish friend can't swing his arms in backwards circles without pulling the muscles on the side of his nose up.
So, whether you're aware of it or not, every waking moment you are orchestrating a massively complicated operation with alarming connections and potentials. Yee-haw.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
The Body's the Limit
"Be a tree!" is not an uncommon first reaction to the topic of contemporary dance, if you don't know any better. The joke, however, is on the dancers. Because it's true. Not funny, but true.
I was talking to a friend about stretching the other day, and it came up that he was reading while working on passive flexibility exercises. I was completely taken aback, because to me the act of stretching is one that uncompromisingly demands all faculties: musculature, breath, awareness, and imagination. Imaging is the tool a dancer uses to challenge physical limits and habits. I spent years playing sports, warming up, stretching out, but it wasn't until I was introduced to the concept of employing imagery of geometry, or imagining weights attached to certain points on my body, or breath making space between vertebra and so on and so forth that I began to discover areas of new potentiality in my body. The tangible result of all this imagined space being that I went from touching the top of my feet to touching the floor to laying my palms on the ground to putting my forehead to my shins. Reaching and pushing will only get you to the point at which the mind and body decide there's a risk for injury. Extending this limit, overcoming the mind's block to work places in your muscles you never imagined requires a much more deeply integrated framework, one with the power to coax and convince the mind to release its stops in the absence of adrenaline. Enter our creative agency.
To get back to the tree, imagining the standing leg rooted firmly into the ground below you during a balance entirely reconfigures your understanding of your weight, engaging muscles your body didn't intuitively know to utilize. Even on two legs it's a really useful image, and with practice you begin to recognize the body pushing/resting along a slightly different alignment, a connection from the center of your heels all the way through to the occipital joint. These are the awarenesses that are critical not only in performing challenging balances and creating the classical line in space, but also in constructing new, more complicated images which help you visually and kinaesthetically project the body through space. This is the ability we utilize when learning new movements, choreographing, and watching dance.
Any good dance class is absolutely stuffed with metaphors for movement and state. "Be a pile of bones rolling down a hill," "The leg circles and floats out of the hip joint," "It's like trying to wrap your spine around a pole," "Really press against something there," "Move like you're underwater," and so on and so forth. It's not only a mental exercise for improving the effectiveness of stretching or the ability to visualize the body, it also plays a role in defining details of movement, in specifying a choreographic aesthetic, in enacting certain dynamics. It's a huge part of what makes the act of performance so immersing, and our ability to perceive movement along the same imagistic lines is what makes viewing it so engaging.
My image for the day is my musculature wringing the post-alcohol fallout from my soft tissue so it can drip into my kidneys and leave my poor hung-over body to aching in peace.
I was talking to a friend about stretching the other day, and it came up that he was reading while working on passive flexibility exercises. I was completely taken aback, because to me the act of stretching is one that uncompromisingly demands all faculties: musculature, breath, awareness, and imagination. Imaging is the tool a dancer uses to challenge physical limits and habits. I spent years playing sports, warming up, stretching out, but it wasn't until I was introduced to the concept of employing imagery of geometry, or imagining weights attached to certain points on my body, or breath making space between vertebra and so on and so forth that I began to discover areas of new potentiality in my body. The tangible result of all this imagined space being that I went from touching the top of my feet to touching the floor to laying my palms on the ground to putting my forehead to my shins. Reaching and pushing will only get you to the point at which the mind and body decide there's a risk for injury. Extending this limit, overcoming the mind's block to work places in your muscles you never imagined requires a much more deeply integrated framework, one with the power to coax and convince the mind to release its stops in the absence of adrenaline. Enter our creative agency.
To get back to the tree, imagining the standing leg rooted firmly into the ground below you during a balance entirely reconfigures your understanding of your weight, engaging muscles your body didn't intuitively know to utilize. Even on two legs it's a really useful image, and with practice you begin to recognize the body pushing/resting along a slightly different alignment, a connection from the center of your heels all the way through to the occipital joint. These are the awarenesses that are critical not only in performing challenging balances and creating the classical line in space, but also in constructing new, more complicated images which help you visually and kinaesthetically project the body through space. This is the ability we utilize when learning new movements, choreographing, and watching dance.
Any good dance class is absolutely stuffed with metaphors for movement and state. "Be a pile of bones rolling down a hill," "The leg circles and floats out of the hip joint," "It's like trying to wrap your spine around a pole," "Really press against something there," "Move like you're underwater," and so on and so forth. It's not only a mental exercise for improving the effectiveness of stretching or the ability to visualize the body, it also plays a role in defining details of movement, in specifying a choreographic aesthetic, in enacting certain dynamics. It's a huge part of what makes the act of performance so immersing, and our ability to perceive movement along the same imagistic lines is what makes viewing it so engaging.
My image for the day is my musculature wringing the post-alcohol fallout from my soft tissue so it can drip into my kidneys and leave my poor hung-over body to aching in peace.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Sometimes
This country is dumb and the people here are too foreign and there is nothing under my feet and the future is filled with worry and projected failures. Days like that can happen. Even in dance school.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Bound Flow
Bodies have tendencies. A lot of contemporary dance training is preoccupied with making the body a neutral palette, and you're constantly urged to work outside your habits, or to change the lines and tensions in your body to make it more, well, neutral. The indirectly proposed "ideal" body is possessed of the ability to access the entirety of human movement potential and all the forces, rhythms, and dynamics contained therein. Lifted shoulders, a tilted pelvis, tense fingers -- these are all viewed as ironable wrinkles on the smartly starched shirt of true virtuosity. Which means being a movement chameleon. Maximize potential to be the ultimate vehicle for any and all art.
Funny thing is the amount of work and focus needed to achieve an anatomically correct, natural, aligned, and physically efficient body. What do these words even mean when time, gravity, and use twist joints and grow eccentric musculature into a comfortable, specific vessel for moving through life? I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't acknowledge my fondness for this space-eating, potential-infused ideal body, and if I didn't say that I utilize imagery of this sort daily as a means for deepening movement or for strength exercises. But there's a lot of body to get through, and even the littlest parts can take years, and everything's connected in ways you never anticipated when you started. A lifetime of re-imaging and rebuilding the body along guidelines proposed by anatomy and physics.
You learn how to move past it. It's art because you make your body according to the dictates of your own imagination. Interesting art, that is with you every second of every day. Want to make your feet into pointing ornaments? Get to training, get to understanding the mechanisms of your lower leg. Marry sensation to thought. Dance training is as hardcore as any tattooing or piercing.
So, repeated feedback on my movement from people I trust labels me a "bound flow" sort of dancer. Which is not in and of itself a bad thing. Looking back on choreography I've done, it all incorporates bound flow unabashedly and with a modicum of success. What bound flow usually means is that, no matter how big I may be in space, there's a sense that I'm taking some part of the movement back into me. Holding onto it. This happens VERY frequently with tension in my face, and also at times in the region of my thoracic spine.
Much like astrology, people like to take body tendencies and use them as a way into personality or behavior. Last night one of my friends and fellow dancers said that watching me dance, even if I just move one arm, feels like there are a million things going on inside my body but only one of them comes out. She proceeded to tell me that's like how I am in real life. A minimal front plus a riotous inner life that, when it does come out, remains bound. She's Hungarian, which is why she says things like that. Also it means I had to paraphrase. I'm up and down with introspection these days, but it was definitely a fun insight to toy with. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like this whole process of immersing myself in dance has been, at least personally, about finding honest, integrated, and immediate channels for me to be focused and effective in expressing myself. There was always a problem for me, being present and aware, and dancing insome sense is like an anchor, disciplining my mind to bear on my immediate environment. She also said that this wasn't the case when I was improvising, but when we were working with proscribed technique or phrasing.
So here's to unbinding my flow, letting the noise and impulse in and out like I'm squawking and trying to hop on my shoulders.
Funny thing is the amount of work and focus needed to achieve an anatomically correct, natural, aligned, and physically efficient body. What do these words even mean when time, gravity, and use twist joints and grow eccentric musculature into a comfortable, specific vessel for moving through life? I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't acknowledge my fondness for this space-eating, potential-infused ideal body, and if I didn't say that I utilize imagery of this sort daily as a means for deepening movement or for strength exercises. But there's a lot of body to get through, and even the littlest parts can take years, and everything's connected in ways you never anticipated when you started. A lifetime of re-imaging and rebuilding the body along guidelines proposed by anatomy and physics.
You learn how to move past it. It's art because you make your body according to the dictates of your own imagination. Interesting art, that is with you every second of every day. Want to make your feet into pointing ornaments? Get to training, get to understanding the mechanisms of your lower leg. Marry sensation to thought. Dance training is as hardcore as any tattooing or piercing.
So, repeated feedback on my movement from people I trust labels me a "bound flow" sort of dancer. Which is not in and of itself a bad thing. Looking back on choreography I've done, it all incorporates bound flow unabashedly and with a modicum of success. What bound flow usually means is that, no matter how big I may be in space, there's a sense that I'm taking some part of the movement back into me. Holding onto it. This happens VERY frequently with tension in my face, and also at times in the region of my thoracic spine.
Much like astrology, people like to take body tendencies and use them as a way into personality or behavior. Last night one of my friends and fellow dancers said that watching me dance, even if I just move one arm, feels like there are a million things going on inside my body but only one of them comes out. She proceeded to tell me that's like how I am in real life. A minimal front plus a riotous inner life that, when it does come out, remains bound. She's Hungarian, which is why she says things like that. Also it means I had to paraphrase. I'm up and down with introspection these days, but it was definitely a fun insight to toy with. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like this whole process of immersing myself in dance has been, at least personally, about finding honest, integrated, and immediate channels for me to be focused and effective in expressing myself. There was always a problem for me, being present and aware, and dancing insome sense is like an anchor, disciplining my mind to bear on my immediate environment. She also said that this wasn't the case when I was improvising, but when we were working with proscribed technique or phrasing.
So here's to unbinding my flow, letting the noise and impulse in and out like I'm squawking and trying to hop on my shoulders.
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