From Part One | re-imagining

Extracts from PART ONE

EXTRACT ONE: Remember ‘flapping’ your arm like a wing? Then, you should have experienced the impulse as coming from the base of your spine. That’s not the pelvic-centre, but a particular part of it.

EXPERIMENT 6: So do this again, making the movement very large. Ask yourself, does the impulse arise in any kind of actual motion, however slight, in the pelvis or not? To test this, flap both arms at the same time, again very large. This prevents any slight abrupt rocking sideways of the pelvis. Ask the same question.

You should be able to feel the impulse originating at the base of the spine, but without feeling that the pelvis itself needs to be ‘active’.

It’s very important now to ask where exactly you experience the impulse originating from, hence where the ‘base of your spine’ seems to you to be located. Does the impulse seem to originate at the point at which the spine emerges from the pelvis (the beginning of the flexible lumbar vertebrae)? Or does it originate from the part of the spine (the fused sacral vertebrae and the coccyx) that is embedded in the pelvis?

If it’s the former, please make an effort of imagination to experience the latter instead. It may help to think of the end of your spine, the part which belongs to the pelvis, as a tail. After all, your arms are like wings. But don’t imagine any tail extending out from your normal body, that is, one going any lower than the base of your pelvic girdle.

Next, try to imagine the impulse not only travelling up your spine and out into your arms, giving the upstroke, but also as ‘firing’ down and out through your ‘tail’ too!

It will help here to think about explosions. Explosions always ‘go off’ in all directions. But there are means of directing the energy of explosions along specific pathways. A gun directs that energy out through the barrel. But in firing the gun, you feel the ‘kickback’ too.

Think of your impulses as explosions. Your body, of course, is infinitely more sophisticated than any gun in its capacity to channel the energy of those explosions in very varied ways. But, as with a gun, there will also be a ‘kickback’. That’s what I just asked you to feel going down and out through your ‘tail’ as you flap your arms upwards.

Now take this one step further. This time, exactly as you begin the upstroke with both arms, also stamp one foot, very firmly. It may take you a few moments to get the coordination right, but once you’ve done so you should experience the following. The impulse now begins in the pelvis and travels straight down the leg, but as the foot impacts the ground the energy of the impulse is immediately blocked and bounced back (or ‘kicked back’) up again, where it continues on up the spine and out into the arms. As you continue doing this, you should feel that no real effort is going into the flapping of the arms. It’s all going into the stamp. But at the same time you feel your upper and lower body to be very connected.

And in a way, that’s what we’ve been fundamentally concerned with for some time now: the connectedness of the upper body and the lower body. We can define this more appropriately as the connectedness of the downward-tending energy sources and the upward-tending energy sources in the body.

In relation to this, it is essential that you do not think of (or imagine, or feel, or experience) your spine as beginning only where it emerges (as the lumbar vertebrae) from the pelvis, for this sets up a kind of disconnect between lower body and upper body. Your spine, whose natural vector of energy is upwards, is also rooted in the lower body, to which the pelvis belongs.

The part of your spine that belongs to your pelvis, the sacral vertebrae and coccyx, is in fact like a different centre, a centre in its own right. You can send impulses to the arms from this centre, without the pelvis itself becoming expressive, though not so readily for all types of arm movements; when swimming, for example, it works considerably better for breaststroke than for crawl. When you imagine the pelvis as a whole to be your centre, you naturally become more centred in the hips, which are a little ‘distant’ from the spine, and thus in the downward-tending energy sources. But as we’ve seen, it’s really from here that you can also generate, in the dance, the energy flow in all directions that is your participation in the divine.

EXTRACT TWO: It is very important to realize that the impulses that originate in our bodies can go beyond the bodies in which they originate. It’s also very obvious – though we probably have never stopped to think about it in this way. It’s how a nail gets hammered into a piece of wood, for example. Look at it this way – it’s not the hammer that drives the nail into the wood, it’s your impulses. The hammer is just a medium for your impulses when they flow out from your body.

Your impulses are physical, bodily. While in one sense they ‘fly (or flow) out’ from your body, in another sense they take your body with them – because they belong to it.

EXPERIMENT 7: Kick a ball. Throw a stone into the sea. Imagine – feel – believe, as you do so, that your body itself is flowing out of you, not as an object, but as an actor upon and within the world. Think of a kind of line, a visible arc, of your energy being left in space by the ball or the stone, before it fades away. That line was also you.

Pick up a mug, to drink from. Move a vase from one place to another. Put flowers in it. Even send a text message with your phone. In each case, do not think of the objects you are handling as separate from you. Think of them as becoming extensions of yourself in the way they receive and carry your impulses onwards, out into the world around you.

In this way you will begin to experience your body as much less “cabined, cribbed and confined”. It’s very much part of the world, interacting freely with it – not a closed entity, separated off.

In this way we begin to shift focus – from your potential centres to your potential boundaries. It may be paradoxical, but in order to be fully inside your body, you need to realize that your body doesn’t simply ‘stop’ at your skin.

EXTRACT THREE: At this point, I need to introduce a third concept, which I call your psychological skin. This is the ‘skin,’ the boundary, of your You. It’s elastic. That is, it’s very variable – and it’s highly context-sensitive.

EXPERIMENT 8: Just reach out to pick something up, let’s say a glass of water. Try this standing and try it sitting. In each case, first imagine that the glass lies outside your psychological skin, so that your hand has to ‘break through’ and reach out beyond that boundary of your ‘You’. Then perform the same action again, but this time imagine that the glass lies well within your psychological skin. Notice how different the action feels in each case.

In general, if you’re tense and anxious, your psychological skin contracts. It can even seem smaller than your actual body. If you’re relaxed and confident, it expands. By imagining your psychological skin in different states, you can actually switch such feelings on – as you should have just experienced.

These three things – your personal space, your kinesphere, and your ‘psychological skin’ – are different things. But they are all aspects of the way you relate to the space around you, in particular to a kind of space which is in some sense ‘yours’. Initially, the exercises that follow focus on the kinesphere, for this is the easiest to work on directly. Then, as the exercises go (literally) beyond the kinesphere, in order to psychologically-extend it, they start to work on the way you experience (or relate to) your personal space and your ‘psychological skin’ too.

EXERCISE: FLOWING KINESPHERE PHASE 1 – DRAWING

For this, you don’t have to keep your feet planted, as you did for FINDING YOUR KINESPHERE. You can move freely. Begin simply by making broad movements that take up plenty of the space around you, as you’ve done before. Recall that you can make these movements seem bigger and stronger by imagining them being generated by impulses from the chest-centre, or the abdominal-centre. This time, also think of these impulses as continuing out beyond you, extending you. For the moment, however, don’t think of your impulses as flying out far beyond you, but as ‘leaving lines’ around you.

If I say, ‘Draw shapes in the space around you, as large as you can, with your movements,’ you will probably think initially of ‘drawing’ shapes with your hands. That’s fine. But you can do the same thing with other parts of the body too. The legs, obviously (one at a time, if you’re standing – but you can lie down too). The head. The shoulders, either together or one at a time. The hips. The buttocks. A knee.... Any of these, can become the ‘pencil’ that draws the shapes, all as large as possible, in the space around you. Try them all, then combine them, switching from one to another in any way you feel like – but in such a way that the movements keep ‘flowing’. Throughout, try to keep imagining the impulses that generate the movements continuing out beyond you, extending you, in the sense of generating the lines.

EXERCISE: FLOWING KINESPHERE PHASE 2 – SELF-SCULTURE

When you’ve really got the hang of this – that is, when you can easily keep the movements flowing while continuously shifting the focus of the movement in the body (the ‘pencil,’ if you like – or the point from which the impulse leaves the body) – go on to imagine that you are doing this inside a stretchy elastic membrane. Feel its resistance. It’s never slack. If you stand still and upright with your arms at your sides, it fits you snugly. But as you move, it forms a continuously varying shape. Imagine it to be opaque, not transparent, so you can more easily see, in your ‘mind’s eye,’ the moving sculpture in space that your body is creating. You’re no longer drawing two-dimensional shapes in the space around you but sculpting three-dimensional ones – or rather, you are sculpting one three-dimensional shape that keeps evolving, changing, transforming itself. Think of yourself as stretching. It’s as though you’re trying to stretch out in all directions at once! Above all, believe this: whatever shape your stretching out gives rise to, it’s beautiful – and the way one shape turns into another is also beautiful.

Experience your impulses as flowing into this shape, to keep it evolving.

It’s best to do this with your eyes closed. This helps you feel or sense the whole body shape that you are making at every instant, whereas when you were drawing lines at the edges of your kinesphere you were focused primarily on the leading edge or ‘pencil’.

EXERCISE: EXPANDING INTO SPACE 1

Go back to the first phase above, DRAWING your kinesphere. Once again you’re going to draw shapes in the space around you, using different parts of your body to do so, all the time keeping your movements flowing. But this time, instead of imagining making shapes around you at the edges of your kinesphere, think of these shapes as being made – still by your movements – far out into the space around you. If you’re in a room, entirely fill it with your shapes. If you’re outdoors, let your movements seem to flow out to the horizon, up into the sky, even down into the earth. There’s no need to ‘fling’ your movements outwards. Smooth expansive movements work best. To achieve this, don’t think so much of your impulses flying far out from you as that the movements themselves continue on into the space around you.

This is a very strong and a very beautiful experience. But how exactly you experience it will depend on your associations. Do you feel like a king or queen – or a god – or, perhaps, a recently born baby that hasn’t yet realized where it begins and ends?

EXTRACT FOUR: If I were pressed to choose just one idea or principle from all those in this book as being the most important, it might well be this one – inner movement. We’ve already come across it, for example in the OPENING and CLOSING exercises, and it’s closely associated with the RADIATING exercise just described. We’ll come back to inner movement a great deal in what follows, because it is so central to the mind-body relationship.

Just about everyone has experienced inner movement at some points in their lives. In perhaps the most obvious situation, recall being very tired while sitting on a chair but needing, for whatever reason, to get up. First you need to gather all your reserves of energy; as you do this, it’s as though you start the process of standing up before you start the process of standing up! The same is true when you’re very tired and you badly need to sit down. The relief you feel on just having sat down is just like the act of sitting down continuing!

EXERCISE: INNER RUNNING (OR WALKING)

Still, we need to develop a stronger and more refined sense of inner movement than this, one that does not depend on being very tired. The simplest, most effective exercise I know for beginning to build this sense is Lorna Marshall’s ‘Running Inside’ (Marshall, 132-3). You start by running as fast as you can for fifteen seconds or so, then you freeze for about eight seconds, aware of your stillness. There should be no unnecessary rigidity in the freeze. Then you run again, then freeze, then run again, then freeze.... On the third freeze, you aim to keep the sense – the feeling – of your running continuing inside you, so that when you start running again, you simply ‘pick up’ this inner movement by re-connecting with it. Then you freeze again, maintaining the sense of your inner running, as before. This time, however, when you start moving again, you can run more slowly, or even walk, while experiencing your inner running as continuing to be very fast.

I find that this exercise works well if students are simply asked to walk very fast, rather than run. What is achieved in this case is not such a dynamic sense of inner movement, but it is still strong enough to impress people that inner movement is a psychological reality.

The exercise is also an excellent way of demonstrating the point behind Zeami’s statement, introduced earlier: “What is felt in the heart is ten, what is shown in movement is seven”. It can also be associated with the Japanese concept of zanshin, which can be translated both as ‘continuing body’ and as ‘continuing mind’ (for shin is a rich concept that means your centre or core or heart or spirit). In Kyudo, for example, the action and ‘movement’ of the archer is not completed at the moment of the arrow’s release. It continues inside the archer through to the point at which the arrow finds the target, and even after. Something similar can be observed when a good golfer strikes the ball, as I discussed earlier in a different context.

If you think that ‘inner movement’ exists, but only in imagination, then please take note of an important observation made by the famous and influential movement analyst and teacher Rudolph Laban. If a dancer, A, has to lift another dancer, B, high in the air, B can become lighter, hence easier for A to lift, if she simultaneously imagines lifting her own centre of gravity upwards. Conversely, if she moves her centre downwards she becomes much harder to lift (Newlove and Dalby, 121).