Formal Movements
July 22, 2008
Formal Movements
I’ve been involved in a series of workshops* recently to do with Dance. It’s a strange and interesting thing to go back to an activity which one had left behind long ago – sort of like going back to a more primitive self, a self where one did not have the means to articulate a feeling or an experience, a point of view or a criticism – and where the body, in some anonymous way, became the natural medium to tell that inarticulate story.
I, like many people I’m sure, have had a ambiguous relationship with my own body – at once appreciating it profoundly while at the same time chastising it for it’s limitations, it’s imperfections, it’s alternate language and expressions.
I have wanted to explore this alternate language for some time now – it’s proving difficult, uncomfortable, irritating, cumbersome…and it’s not like it used to be, this body language. Something has happened in the interim – and I don’t particularly need to know what. I simply know that the language has evolved, and has become more sophisticated and more hidden. I feel I need to find a way to influence this hidden language, to collect its nuances and attempt to align it to what is now my mother tongue, the visible & spoken word. I don’t particularly know why I need to do this either, but I think it has something to do with experience…and being able to experience accurately so that I can think accurately, evolve accurately…I mean, with care.
There is a replication, which has been ongoing in this journey back to movement – a replication, as in a folding back…
I remember a time when jumping & running & playing stopped – I remember the very moment I responded ‘No’ to my sisters request to play. I don’t know why that happened – but I must have remembered it for some reason. It was an indelible utterance.
“Speech is irreversible: a word cannot be retracted, except precisely by saying that one retracts it.”1
Roland Barthes, Image Music Text.
Folding back to movement, closing ones eyes and escaping sight, shutting off one sense in order to experience others more carefully – this is the kind of practice I wanted to engage with – a careful and aware practice – trying experience out. But of course I am doing this with no professionalism – I profess not to be a dancer – but I can move, my body has language, it has simply been ignored. Each time I place my fingers on the key board – in my notebooks when I scribble through thoughts and nonsense, I make gestures – they pause with reflection, they speed with excitement, they flurry with ambition. My breathing changes depending on the energy of my thoughts – sometimes my fingers seem to tap still, they feel the plastic keys pushed into them, like phantom appendages.
I wondered how I could amplify these thought full movements into full blown movements – I wondered whether this might provoke some kind of change in my thinking, whether it might help me to articulate my concerns, which are presently, at best, visceral echoes of themselves…
Is this simply a kind of romantic lament for a mythical time when mind and body were in some kind of synchronous balance? A certain Utopia of being? Perhaps it is. And that remains to be one of the most frustrating aspects of attempting to engage in movement of any “formal” kind…it seems doomed to charade and invention – completely subjective invention…and for some reason that isn’t good enough.
“It always involves, for example, a loss of personal identity, a refusal to allow the sense of reality to invade and control the sphere of the emotions, and a romantic rebellion against dependence upon both people and things. Tenderness is always the goal aimed for and missed and therefore surrounded by frustration. And this is always accompanied by the anguish that derives from the absence of an ‘adult’ and altruistic form of love.”
Lea Vergine, The Body as Language.2
A simple desire, a simple request, that body speak louder than mind – and that maybe some good would come of it? That something would be discovered. An imbalance the other way for a change, would it change anything? Would it reveal new ways of thinking? Would it make one a more accurate practitioner of whatever it is one does? Could an improvisation between text based thought and body based thought happen, and what would it do? Shouldn’t everything be in a state of improvisation anyway – isn’t it anyway? ‘Savour the experience of non-relatedness’3; said Mr. Merce Cunningham…is that what we have been doing? Allow things to co-exist without forcing them together…a natural improvisation will occur…
“Meanwhile, in the night, I would often wake up startled, dancing in my sleep. One of my recurrent sleep-dances always ended in my reaching past the mattress and loudly rapping my knuckles on the floor. I think that improvisation was really beginning to pain me. I can remember saying that my inner ear could no longer take those limitless seas. There just seemed to be all this turmoil and turning of image upon image.”4
Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion.
Maybe when one moves – when one acts out a feeling – that is when one really speaks in a primitive language, that is when the word becomes subservient to the movement, that is when action become subservient to reaction, or even response. Maybe when one flow’s out an ‘authentic movement’, movements dictated by the balances & inclinations of the body, one loses some control over direction, and must instead respond constantly, one movement rolling after another, one gesture pushing out after another, ‘turning image upon image’ without the space for reflective response.
When language becomes reducible to one tongue, so to speak, that is when homogenization manifests itself – that is when the edge of language sharpens into focus, demonstrating a kind of linguistic fascism. Improvisation is one thing, Immanence is another, and there must be room for both –savouring the experience of non-relatedness while still leaving a space open for improvisation – is that possible in the adventure of movement & text?
“If it is true that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be reflection or coincidence it prejudges what it will find, then once again it must recommence everything, reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over’, that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ & ‘object’, both existence & essence, and hence give philosophy resources to redefine them.”5
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Intertwining – The Chiasm.
I am going to walk around and think about this for a bit…
*Often we explored a practice called ‘authentic movement’. Here the dancers were paired up, one became a witness and the other became the mover. The mover generally shut their eyes, became still and relaxed, focusing on an awareness of the present, of the body in space, and began listening and sensing intently the actual tendencies of the body – and slowly mover began to move. While the witness was observing & actively attempting to memorise the order & direction of the movements, the mover was attempting to do the same, while still allow the body’s inclinations to direct the movement. The mover would think ‘I lean to the left and twist my right hand in figures of eight…’ as they carry out the movement.
Once a period of five minutes or so had passed the mover would relax, and ‘come back to the space’. The mover would then recount the story of their movements – all in the present tense, as if through words re-enacting the authentic movements – ‘I move my head around to the right and my spine moves with it…’ The Witness listens, and when the mover is finished telling, the witness recounts, in the present tense what they observed. There is no room for simile; this is pure description, as much as possible. ‘I see you tilt your head to the right, and your spine is moving round to the right following your head…’
1. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, 1977, Fontana Press, p.190.
2. Charles Harrisson & Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900-2000 An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2003, extracts from ‘The Body as Language’ by Lea Vergine, Blackwell Publishing.
3. Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham (ed. Germano Celant), p.154/163, 1999, Charta.
4. Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion, 1974, Cummings Printing Co., p.33.
5. Clive Cazeaux ed., The Continental Aesthetics Reader, 2006, Routledge, p. 164.
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