From Part Two | re-imagining

Extracts from PART TWO

EXTRACT ONE: EXERCISE: BONY RUNNING / SQUISHY RUNNING

Just run around, freely, easily, energetically, playfully. (If you don’t have much room to really run around in, you can perform the exercise as a kind of ‘dancing around’ instead.) As you do so, imagine a) that you’re a skeleton running around, then b) that you’re a liquid-filled skin, with nothing hard inside, running around. Alternate these perspectives as and when you feel like it. Notice how your movement changes. Notice also how your feelings change.

This is great fun. It’s especially fun to do in a group because you don’t need to be so focused on yourself and your own body that you can’t or shouldn’t be aware of others. In fact you learn from watching others and there’s a kind of feedback set up between individuals which can stimulate new ideas. But you should never merely imitate. The primary impulses must always come from within, as they are stimulated by your imagination of your body state.

But what’s the point?

The essential starting-point for Butoh is for the performer to leave behind her or his socially-conditioned body, and this exercise contributes to that process. But beyond that, it has a deeper significance. Experiencing the contrast between these two images of the body, one as a skeleton, the other as a liquid-filled bag, is a first step towards a transformation of your relationship to movement. To understand this, we need to leave behind some of our cultural preconceptions.

Perhaps oddly, while Butoh has spread throughout the world, its origins and practice in Japan are associated with a ‘physical system’ called Noguchi Taiso which remains relatively little known in the West. As a physical system, Noguchi Taiso involves exercises, but its core is a way of imagining the body. To Noguchi Michizo, the founder of the system, the human body is best seen as a kind of liquid-filled leather bag in which the organs, muscles and bones are all floating (Kasai (1999), 1). With this image, we lose the ‘western’ sense of movement which is rooted in the anatomical relationship of bones, muscles and tendons. We lose, that is, the sense that movement depends on a system of levers. The ‘problem’ with that system of levers is that it is subject to the will. Put differently: the crane needs an operator.

It is sometimes said that Noguchi Taiso promotes ‘passive movement’. This is probably a misleading formulation, but the system does reject the kind of ‘active movement’ which seems to need that crane operator to initiate it. It is profoundly anti-mechanical, because mechanisms or machines are intrinsically distinct from their operators. To Noguchi Michizo, the muscles are not means to exert a pull, via the tendons, on the bones. They are like ears – ears for listening to the word of god, the god of gravity (Kasai (1999), 1).

In this system, gravity is not an enemy. But it is very powerful.

Notice how this shifts the emphasis from the internal to the external. In the western view, our movements originate within us, in our willed choices. In Noguchi Taiso, movement is a kind of easy, unforced response to the environment, even a kind of ‘echo’ of it.

It’s simple to find a prosaic explanation of the value of Noguchi Taiso: willed movement, via mechanical means, is often more than required, if only to make sure that it’s enough. (This, of course, is something we’re typically unconscious of; but if we sensitize ourselves to it, we will be very struck by it.) But responsive movement, fully attuned to the demands made on it by the environment, can be perfectly minimal. Hence less tense.

But I think the principle behind Noguchi Taiso goes even deeper, for it involves the idea of receiving impulses, energy, even strength from the outside.

EXTRACT TWO: EXERCISE: BECOMING THE SEA

Firstly, you will become the sea. Start by imagining the sea in front of you. It’s blue or turquoise, clear and not too cold – very inviting. In imagination, you go into it. Feel the water level increasing from the ankles, to the calves, to the knees, to the thighs.... Then, at a certain depth, whatever suits you, but with your feet still on the soft sea bed, you start playing. You swirl and swish the water with your arms and hands... you move your legs, your hips, your upper body in whatever way you like, simply enjoying the feeling of resistance of the water, but also the way it ‘lets you through’. Feel the resistance of the water all the time, in all your movements and with all the immersed parts of your body.

Notice now some waves. They’re not very big, just strong enough to push and pull you gently, and to lift you up and drop you down lightly. Your own movements, playing in the sea, now become combined with the way the sea is moving you. Can you still tell the difference? If you can, just keep playing in the sea. There will come a point at which you no longer have a will to initiate your own movements and all your movements will be the movement of the sea itself. You will have become the sea. You cannot choose this moment (you left the ‘conscious controller’ on the beach), you can only become aware that it has happened. Don’t stop now! Instead, let the waves moving through you get gradually bigger and stronger. Let go of yourself completely, just go with the sea, with yourself as the sea.

And don’t stop suddenly. Reverse the process. First, let the waves get smaller and smaller, then, at a certain point, find yourself again, playing in the sea. Then just walk out of it, feeling the water level going down your body as you do so.

(If you like, see your ‘conscious controller’ relaxing on a beach towel. This should make you smile, since it’s not what conscious controllers usually do!)

EXERCISE: BECOMING THE WIND

Next, you will become the wind. Imagine that it’s a windy day, very windy. It helps in this exercise to imagine a gusty wind which keeps changing direction, maybe even setting up little whirlwinds. Initially you have to fight against the wind in order to go wherever you want to go, or just to prevent yourself being blown over. At a certain point, however, but not too soon, you just ‘give up’. At this point you become the wind. Rather than blowing you, it is blowing through you.

This exercise is a little more difficult than becoming the sea. The reason is that it’s all too easy to consciously or deliberately choose that moment of giving up. But you can’t truly ‘become the wind’ by an act of will. As with becoming the sea, you really want to be ‘surprised’ by the moment at which the energy of the element you are in becomes your own energy. To help achieve this, while you are being blown around, but still resisting as much as possible, try to empty your mind. Above all, don’t make any decisions on behalf of the wind as to what it will do next. You have to feel the wind as something other than yourself before it can take you over.

Once again, when you’ve become and been the wind for a while, don’t just stop. Instead, let the wind drop gradually. This will force you, at a certain point, to ‘find yourself again’ (like finding something in the street, by accident).

EXTRACT THREE: When we feel energetic, it is also a feeling of ease, of lightness, of relative effortlessness. Our energy seems to flow freely. This little and lovely word – flow – encapsulates a great deal that, over millennia, human beings have deemed to be positive. Flow is good. Anything that blocks flow is bad. To a great extent, ancient medical systems rest on these two complementary observations.

In Chinese medicine, qi, or chi, is the vital energy, or simply the vitality, that flows through the meridians. If it is blocked, or unbalanced, sickness occurs. In yoga, prana is the life-force that promotes health if it is abundant and leads to sickness if it is depleted. To the Ancient Greeks, pneuma once denoted a similar idea.

All three concepts, qi, prana and pneuma, are closely associated with breath, the breath of life. The famous words of Zhuangzi, “Qi gathered together is life; qi dispersed is death,” make perfect sense if qi is simply translated as breath. But a yogi will stress that our normal, unconscious breathing does not increase prana. Prana enters into us only with the conscious breath; hence it cannot be the same thing as breath itself. Even so, its original meaning – constant motion – perfectly mirrors the role of breath in life. As for the Greek pneuma, the concept became Christianized as spirit, but before that it meant breath. Its association with breathing is reflected in the derivative English words pneumonia, a disease of the lung, and pneumatic, which means inflated with or worked by air – whereas the corresponding Modern Greek word, pneumatiko, is best translated as ‘spiritual’ (though often its sense is closer to ‘intellectual’). The word ‘spirit,’ too, comes from the Latin for breath and breathing, an etymology that can still be felt, to greater or lesser degree, in our words expire, inspire, aspire, conspire, though not now in perspire – although in certain breathing exercises later you’ll be asked to breathe out through the pores of your skin!

In The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (the fascinating book that I mentioned earlier), Kuriyama shows how, in the 5th century BCE, a momentous change took place in the evolution of Greek thought, one that laid the groundwork for modern medicine to evolve. This was when the concept of pneuma was internalized. This, Kuriyama says, “redefined the nature of the body” (Kuriyama, 262). Prior to it, pneuma meant wind, an external force or influence. The human body – and with it the human being – was conceived as a site which was traversed by such external forces and influences; thoughts, emotions, states of mind, states of health, and fits of madness were not conceived as arising within the human being but as entering from without. But with the internalization of pneuma, “instead of tracking the airs that shaped human life from without, doctors became increasingly captivated by the notion of breaths shaping and animating human beings from within” (Kuriyama, 260).

Prana, however, continues to be conceived as a vital energy that pervades the universe – one draws it in from outside. Qi too is usually thought of in a similar way as a life-force that is all around us and which we can draw on.

This momentous shift in Greek thought laid the groundwork for what became, many centuries later, the concept of the autonomous individual.

I’m going to suggest that one, powerful way to help attain the flow of energy inside you is to think of energy as flowing in from outside. You will need to imagine this, of course – but this doesn’t mean that the idea is fanciful. While it doesn’t correspond to the Western scientific view of how energy is generated within the body (although this too relies on prior intake from outside of both food and oxygen), you should take this alternative view very seriously. I’m not saying believe it. I’m saying imagine it as if you believe it!

Apart from that, the Western concept of the autonomous self-contained individual is in some ways a trap, for it’s the concept – or better, the set of concepts – that puts the ‘conscious controller’ in its commanding position.

EXTRACT FOUR: Breathing in through the anus, the navel or the soles of your feet (while really breathing in through the nose) is a bit like placing those ‘imaginary centres’ we began this journey with. They’re not experienced as ‘centres’ in the present case, but you need to focus your body-consciousness in much the same way.

EXERCISE: BREATHING IN TO...

Now, in a similarly imaginative way, you can breathe into (as distinct from in through) different parts of your body. You’re already doing this, in fact, by breathing into your abdomen. So go a step further and breathe into your pelvic floor, or, what’s nearly but not quite the same thing, into your groins. Both of these are best done by lying on your back with your feet raised on a chair so that your legs form a right-angle at the knees (but with nothing placed under your head). Take your time with this.

Where else can you ‘breathe into’? More or less anywhere, in fact, though you won’t necessarily see or feel the part move in the marked or obvious way that you should with your abdomen. You can breathe into a thigh (one at a time), into the lower back, into a shoulder, into your skull, even into your little finger. Experiment with this, adopting different physical positions, including ‘odd’ ones, to help you breathe into the target area. You can also breathe into different parts of your body while you are stretching (while you’re holding the stretch, that is) or when in certain yoga poses. In such cases, you may find you can only breathe into certain parts of your body – but that’s fine, it’s an insight into the nature of the stretch or the asana, and a kind of deeper involvement in it.

You should find that there are two different types of body parts that you can breathe into – those you can actually stretch by breathing into them, provided that you adopt the right position first, and those that you can’t. You can stretch your lower back, for example, by breathing into it, but not your thigh or little finger. To experience such a stretch, stand with your feet fairly close together, then bend fully forward from the waist; either a) place your right hand on your left shoulder and your left hand on your right shoulder, as though holding yourself fairly tightly, or b) grip your hands behind you back and raise your arms as high as you can behind your back, keeping them straight. Now breathe deeply and slowly into the lumbar region. You will feel your whole lower back pleasantly stretching.

Experiment with finding physical positions which allow you to stretch the maximum number of areas of your body by breathing into those areas. You may need to be inventive with the positions you adopt. In the end, you should find you can stretch any part of the torso like this in a focused way, that is, in a way that isolates that part.

You can relieve pain and discomfort in this way, at least up to a point. The really ‘silly’ thing is, though, that you can do this even in those areas which you can’t stretch by breathing into them!