The most basic question I can pose regarding this group dynamic is simple: to whom am I and am I not attending? When there is a conflict in term of who to approach, sometimes the better answer is to refrain from choosing.  If it becomes a matter of picking sides, whether to address the team with tight hips versus the team who isn’t breathing versus the team whose neck hurts versus the person who can do everything and already knows it all, sometimes my best choice is to remain neutral by finding the right exercise, often simple, to get everyone on the same page. At other times, I simply make the choice to let people have their own experience, and make a beeline for the person who is most in need of help.  Many times the person struggling has something valuable to teach the rest of the class.

There are also times when I notice that everyone in the room has tightened up,  and I often like to include myself in any critique I offer so that I never become an insensitive observer.  ”I have trouble with that too.” “I know how that feels.”  ”I used to have the same problem.”  In this context, being a teacher is not about establishing a hierarchy. This absence of strict delineation also makes it easier to say, “I don’t know,” and “I’ll have to think about that.” If the very act of observing changes that which is being observed, I like to imagine that sometimes that change can be for the better and that empathy is the key. Even harder, is to let difference remain without it becoming a barrier or a barrier that needs to be demolished.

Pilates teaches us to move with ease from a strong center.  It is also a model for how to be in a community with greater ease, following and leading each other simultaneously in a dance of acceptance of each other as such.  Furthering this ideal, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes about the profundity of ease in his work The Coming Community:

“The terrm ‘ease’ in fact designates, according to its etymology, the space adjacent (ad-jacens, adjacent), the empty place where each can move freely, in a semantic constellation where spatial proximity borders on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation.  The Provencal poets (whose songs first introduce the term into Romance languages in the form aizi, aizimen) make ease a terminus technicus in their poetics, designating the very place of love.”

I had an experience like this recently while reading a poem by Elizabeth Bishop entitled, “Poem.”  Bishop is a writer I read diligently in college, but haven’t read in a serious, prolonged way in years.  Taking up her collected work 18 years after my first bout of infatuation, felt risky in the sense that I would maybe have to admit to never having really read her work.  Of course, there’s the theory that integrating the work at a deeper, subconscious level allows novice thinkers to keep advancing without being overwhelmed and paralyzed by someone else’s expertise, albeit the cost for this kind of sublimation is a certain level of anxiety.  It is a commonly cited fact that Bishop spent great lengths of time producing her work, and one could certainly spend an equal amount of time mastering the subtleties and nuances of her forms.  That kind of investment, however, may not always be propitious or necessary.

The poem starts with an analogy: “About the size of an old-style dollar bill…”.  The description is about as vague as it is specific, but soon it becomes clear that she is describing an inherited painting that has been in her family’s possession since its inception. What is most interesting to me is the way she closely and carefully attends to the painting.  Of course, she describes in exquisite detail what she sees, but her evocation is infused with feeling, imagination, pensive inquiry.  Her attention spills out of bounds.  She is not merely influenced by the painting, she is inspired by it. Inspired, maybe, by how uninspiring it really is.

Perhaps the fundamental shift from ekphrasis to epiphany happens when Bishop reveals that her great-uncle was the progenitor of this humble rendition of a familiar childhood landscape. Referring to her deceased relative she writes:

I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it’s still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided–”visions” is
too serious a word–our looks, two looks:
art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?

The lessons here are innumerable.  For one, a great writer reveals to us what her influences are without invoking myth, religion or canon. She opens the field simply by being present.  She is unapologetic about her vision:  ”It must be Nova Scotia; only there / does one see gabled wooden houses / painted that awful shade of brown.”  And yet with that telling phrase from above, “which is which,” she affirms how selective and open to suggestion the gaze truly is so that the whole poem becomes a radical question becomes about why and how we judge.

Her pastoral concludes with a short litany of items both present and not present in the layers of coinciding visions, his and hers, theirs and ours, revealing the painting, the poem, our readings, embodiments, essays, practices, exercises, meditations all to be imperfect mirrors.

Her final thoughts about the painting that evoke something life shaping that can’t, in fact, be left behind hymn bittersweetly:

…but how live, how touching in detail
–the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.

Click here to read the poem in its entirety

Next week happens to be the time Madison decides, somewhat arbitrarily, to celebrate gay pride.  Late August is a pivotal time in the cycle of ebb and flow in a college town, and I suspect that the date was moved to cater to the arrival of all the fresh faces.  In larger cities, pride is timed to commemorate the uprising at Stonewall.  It suddenly dawned on me this year that I was older than the kids in the pictures of that historic event.  I was also inspired by the fact that the kids in the pictures were ostensibly like me in some fairly stark ways: they’re improvisers in the truest sense, where necessity and survival become coextensive with any aesthetic concerns.

Needless to say, I’m happy I don’t have to hide my face in my hands when my hangout gets busted. I’m also a proud listener of dance music and am happy to trace my musical proclivities back to disco. Pride, for me, is more than an excuse for a good party, it’s a time to take off the masks of our workaday selves, so that we can reveal the underlying fictions supporting the ones that we glean from the mirror of a sometimes hostile society.  It’s about reverie, taking an inch and making a mile.

Speculating about what Joseph Pilates, a German emigre, might have thought about his new society ties into this picture of a culture shifting. His studio was certainly open during the uprising in 1969. The fact that so many dancers visited his studio says to me that he was probably pretty comfortable with a range of sexual attitudes. One of the Pilates elders, Ron Fletcher, is decidedly queer and it’s important to remember that there were always two-sides to the Pilates experience:  his side and his wife Clara’s side. Within the practice of Pilates, typically masculine and feminine ways of seeing, sensing and doing can be blended in a way that make the work readily tailorable to each body.

One of the inevitable things one confronts when exploring this rich history of progress is extraordinary loss.  I’ve known for quite some time about the star choreographers and performers who are no longer with us because of AIDS, but I haven’t been as aware of some of the other bright lights who have passed on. Teachers, in particular, are often not as touted. Once again, I was pleased to find materials in the library here that helped open my eyes. I became infatuated with this image of John Rolland teaching with a skeleton.  I’m also sorry to report that I felt a little cheated, pissed off that so many potential mentors and role models are no longer around.  I suppose the best we can do is to keep doing our homework… before we head out to the party!

]]> http://greggrube.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/living-in-my-pride/feed/ 0 greggrube Stonewall rioters at Stonewall rolland_photo http://greggrube.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/navigating-the-divide/ http://greggrube.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/navigating-the-divide/#comments Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:57:52 +0000 greggrube http://greggrube.wordpress.com/?p=274 ]]> An idea that’s often put forth in various forms of movement practice is the declaiming of who and who isn’t truly in their body.  To be in the body is seen as saner, smarter, healthier and more pleasurable.  The alternative, however, is not as clearly articulated, and I’ve always been perplexed by the idea that someone can be somewhere else other than his or her own body.

To inhabit the body in a certain sensuous, qualitative way seems a more apt way of describing the richness that we experience when we feel ourselves truly at home in our physical abodes.  We can do this in many ways: by breathing into a region of the lungs that had heretofore been inert, by honing in and freeing up how a joint moves, or by becoming better acquainted with some of our organs.  With the heart, for example, we can feel its shifting rhythms, imagine the blood flowing in and out of our powerful filling stations with their vaulted chambers, pumps and valves.  These are the pivotal breakthroughs, both major and minor, that come from working one-on-one with experienced teachers, finding appropriate classes, or dedicating ourselves to a home practice.

The sensations and energies that we experience when we come into our bodies in a new way are highly abstract and subjective. It is nearly impossible to describe or document what is really happening internally without sounding a little whacky.  At the same time, we have a sense that something profound is taking place: there’s a dissolution that occurs, a sidereal feeling that is instigated by these practices when we work hard and focus on the experiential process.  Concentration, moving with control and finding new ways to open up precipitate these profound, restorative sensations.

On the other hand, when we are under pressure, maintaining a unified field of presence is equally important. When we have important work to do, when we need extra energy, it is vital that we know how to operate as efficiently possible, letting the body store and release energy without interference.  Muscles, in particular, aren’t designed to do the work alone, and as everyone knows extraneous tension is a real drain on vitality.  Using momentum and fostering the elastic nature of our movement potential, then, becomes particularly important.

If it is true that, at our least appealing, we are self-justifying creatures, I also think it is true that we are beings capable of incredible nuance and mystery. Just like the most finely wrought stories from literature, the ways of being in the body that we explore in dance, yoga and Pilates are fantastic narratives. We become the stories we tell about ourselves, for better and for worse.  At the same time, these stories can also bind us to certain patterns of inhabitation that we can fixate on.  If this happens, then we become stuck. It can be useful to diagnose and to explicate certain postural imbalances, for example, but at a certain point they become that truth rather than describing a truth that is never constant.

Sometimes, in fact, the stories that are most effective are more abstract, more suggestive, because they are the ones that we can more readily connect to.  I recently went to see Terrence Malick’s film Tree of Life, and was acutely aware of how it both impelled and thwarted me narcissistically. As it progressed, what took place on the screen was as much about me as it was about every other person sitting in the theatre.  It was also about how fantasy and knowledge are interwoven into a chiasma: each line of sight intersecting in a symbolic blind spot.  There is, and will always be, something arcane about life.

At times, we are fully in the body and fully in the world. Most of the time, though, we are somewhere in-between, and it seems like each new experience we have is entailed by a loss of some kind of innocence. For many people this can be very hard terrain to navigate.  There is a forfeiture that occurs when we trade-in ordinary experiences for blissful ones.  How do we come back to earth?  What stories do we tell so that this return isn’t dull and painful? How do we hold on to some aspect or kernel of what we discovered out surfing the cosmos?  How do we hold ourselves accountable? Perhaps by enjoying and honoring the primacy of the body, we can better understand this divide.

Some of these techniques can be quite simple.  These are the time-tested cues that correlate to dynamic movement principles. It can be as basic as feeling a spring in your step, or letting your arms swing freely like pendulums as you walk down the street. If you are in a class where concepts are explored more in-depth it can become more complex.  One might be encouraged to feel the breath move like a wave along the spine: on the inhale the tide rolls in towards the pelvis, and on the exhale it rolls out, back towards the ribcage. For a person like me who used to spend day after day swimming in the ocean this might be a very effective image. This image might not work, however, for someone who dislikes the beach, and it may have less impact on someone who isn’t familiar with how the diaphragm works. It’s also not an image that someone can use forever, day in and day out. At some point, like everything, it’s going to need to shift in order to be effective.

Something that many people don’t do is give themselves permission to invent and employ their own imagery.  I encourage everyone the next time they’re in class to see if they can find a way to inspire their practice uniquely.  Make the movement feel better somehow, take closer note of your surroundings and let that inform you, be your own expert.  If you are a musician, for example, search for analogies that you connect to: play a multitude of chords in the body, let the joints move like a glissando, play with tempo, enjoy the polyrhythms of the different systems in the body.

One important thing to remember is that the more senses you involve viv-a-vis the image, the more of your brain you will be using. Whether you hope to get the nervous system revved up, or need to take things down a couple of notches to recharge and reset, using multi-sensory images can be a gateway for change on the deepest level.  A strata of clouds billowing across the soft palate, little jet engines shooting your sits bones forward, winged fairies in designer clothes making your eyes sparkle with their magic wands–whatever–if you find can find the right image, it will serve you well.

Today, while waiting to get a much needed car cleaning at Octopus Carwash, I read the poem “Body Language,” by Charles Wright from his book Appalachia: “… When body becomes the unbody, / Look hard for its certitude, inconclusive, commensurate thing /  Look for its lesson and camouflage. / Look hard for its leash point and linkup. / The shadow of the magnolia tree is short shrift for the grass.” This quote sums up why poetics is such a vital concept: we live in a world with many dangers and with a great deal of uncertainty. There is also so much that we can commit to, feel passionate about and enjoy that truly is beneficial for us.  Eating all kinds of delicious food; finding a form of exercise that is smart, fun and engaging; even reading a great poem with its rich, evocative use of imagery.  It truly is the best kind of medicine.

From "Rope Piece," choreographed by Collette Stewart

“My vision of the dancer, through the intervention of performance as practice, is as a conscious flow of multiple perceptual occurrences unfolding continuously.” Deborah Hay

Apart from all the resources that we have available to us in a specific place, we also live in a time when travel is relatively easy to undertake.  I learned this early in life, and am thankful that my suburban upbringing allowed me safe passage in and out of a number of urban centers with their rich trove of culture and entertainment. I remain committed to crossing borders in this manner whenever I have the opportunity. In fact, my experiences as a young kid of being bused into the blighted trenches of Wilmington, Delaware in an attempt to countermand the travesties of poverty and segregation shaped me in extraordinary ways that I would never exchange, even if that means being a forever less contented person.  This does not mean that I intentionally choose being forlorn and confused, but rather acknowledge that I work from a place where conviction and messiness are more proper to bearing witness to events around me than a simplified schema born from entitlement and seclusion. Something I’ve learned is that obstinacy and resolve are absolutely necessary in order to manifest hope.

On a recent trip to Chicago, I was aware of how much my countenance has remained unchanged throughout my life.  For example, as an adult who can be quite gregarious, I can revert quickly and become as shy as I was as a child.  I am also adept at navigating different terrains (rural, suburban and urban) and attribute that to early experiences in my life. If it is true that one of the ways we can bear witness to the present is by taking stock of the past–what we readily remember, what we work to recall, and what emerges more surprisingly as we roll along–then revisiting old haunts, posing certain kinds of questions, as well as coming in contact with people who challenge us in certain ways can be of great benefit. It’s a kind of research that informs and enriches our various efforts. I lived in Chicago for a year when I was 24, before the millennium, and even though I visit the city regularly, on this particular trip I kept running into fictions, vestiges, shards, past incarnations of somebody with whom I don’t have much in common these days.  One important way I’m different, is that I am better informed about the body, how it works, what it is capable of, how it regulates and nourishes itself:  I am skilled in the arts of self-care; I am a confident dancer of some kind or another.

The primary reason for the visit was to attend a couple of workshops that were offered as part of a dance improvisation festival.  The teachers, Nancy Stark-Smith and BeBe Miller, are renowned, the price was right and I had ample time so diving into the fray didn’t require serious consideration.  I was prepared physically, and I think what I mostly gained were insights into how our engagement with movement as an art really is a vital part of contemporary life and thought. My principal breakthrough came when I was asked to explain to a group a current interest.  I stated simply that I am interested in being a participant, in being part of a qualified audience. Then, in an attempt to be a little more dramatic, I told the group that I was interested in beholding.

From "Catch and Release," choreographed by Maureen Janson

One of the terms popular in philosophy right now is mobilization, and finding ways to curate our engagements can be a way of spurring thought, activity, even the best kind of discipline when the work suddenly becomes more fascinating and relatively easier. I know working smarter, not harder, is a cliché, but I also think it is true that there are multiple ways of being lazy, and not all of them are necessarily unproductive. The idea of being a witness was further complicated during the times when I was actually dancing.  In class, we talked a great deal about seeing and listening; as dancers, our proprioceptive and kinetic senses are also highly tuned. What was particularly fascinating to me were the times when I really wasn’t sure what was happening, whether because it happened so fast or was too complex too grasp.  In addition, the idea that there is an object to behold, whatever its rate of flux, is radically reassembled within the whirring folds of committed, improvisational dance making.  As Mike Vargas, another facilitator at the workshop pointed out, everything is always changing, it’s just that the rates are different which relates causally to what we are able to perceive. The best way I can find to describe the sense of the dissolution of subject, object and self, a wonder which I trust is absolutely invaluable, is that the dancer shapes and inhabits a blind spot, a poetic, cathartic aporia.  If this is true, I’m wondering if dance really is the best metaphor we have to learn and live by not just for life in the contemporary fast lane, but for all creative endeavors, even the ones where we find the most stillness.

On my short trip, I also made a point of heading down to the South Side of Chicago to pay a visit to one of the best bookstores I’ve ever been to: The Seminary Coop Bookstore on the campus of The University of Chicago.  Not only did this part of my foray heighten and assuage all those contradictions and tensions that are inherent when crossing the lines that America convolutes so deftly, it also helped me think through some of my previous concerns on this blog, and my hopes for what I could take home from my time at the festival.  After spending a couple hours browsing and doing my esoteric cost-benefit analysis, I emerged with a small stack of books from the emporium. The one I want to quote from is entitled, “Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global,” edited by Andre Lepecki and Jenn Joy.  The chapter, “Paradoxical Body,” by José Gil, explores the phenomenology of dance from an expository perspective:

“… [W]e would like to consider the body no longer as a ‘phenomenon’, no longer as a visible and concrete perception moving in the objective, Cartesian space, but rather, we would like to consider the body as a meta-phenomenon, simultaneously visible and virtual, a cluster of forces, a transformer of space and time, both emitter of signs and trans-semiotic, endowed by an organic interior ready to be dissolved as soon as it reaches the surface. A body inhabited by–and inhabiting–other bodies and other minds, a body existing at the same time at the opening toward the world provided by language and sensorial contact, and in the inclusion of its singularity through silence and non-inscription.” (94)

The dance, like this exquisite, corollary passage, is an intensification and extension of what we call the body. My delight in its ramifications also highlights another important way I’m different from the changeling who replaced that 24-year old I referred to above.  Instead of going out to the disco, I remained in my comfortable hotel room tarrying with words, images and sensations that are imbued with a certain kind of reverence, a conjuring that is entirely different and yet coextensive with the ecstatic rituals of dancing all night in a club where all this, for me, was born.  This is, indeed, a beautiful paradox.  Ultimately, these practices are ways of living in harmony, of coexisting, with everything we are and are not.

This process of repentance started awhile back, as it is basically my job as a teacher to suspend this kind of judgement.  Seeing where people have difficulty is a good way of establishing a starting point that will lead to someone being able to make some progress. In the examples above, the person who can’t bend their knees might not be strong enough or they may be extremely tight and hold too much tension. There’s a big difference between these polarities that often isn’t accounted for in different training methods. In addition, the person struggling may not understand the principles of healthy movement in a certain area of the body, which can be easily remedied with some astute imagery.

Similarly, the person who can’t hold their head still in the hundred might need more abdominal strength or they may need to figure out how to breathe fully while engaging only the muscles needed to keep their head lifted, preferably with a degree of ease. Learning how to differentiate and coordinate different muscles is a real challenge for most people learning something new. Finally, the person with poor balance may need to develop strength and flexibility, focus on their breathing, as well as learn to release any extraneous muscle tension just like the people in the previous examples. In addition, they may need help with how they see and how they perceive their surroundings proprioceptively.

Learning doesn’t take place in a vacuum and is always made piecemeal, step by step, depending on our learning styles in tandem with the kinds of instruction, equipment and materials we have access to.  In the beginning, it may be hard to acknowledge that we have actually made any progress, and that the notes we eke out when we start to play a new instrument only start sounding mellifluous if we stick with it. Furthermore, it is not particularly advisable to sit down at a piano and start banging out a piece by Rachmaninoff even if you are a prodigy. This is partly due to the technical demands, but also because of the sustained investment it takes to understand the music personally, aesthetically and philosophically in order for it to be truly moving. The nice thing about a movement practice is that it enhances our physical, mental and emotional health all at once, right from the start, no matter at what level we are practicing.  This may help take some of the sting out of the fact that most of us will never master some of the more advanced poses or look like the models that we see in the pages of some magazines.

If we understand that our nascent, awkward efforts are part of what make us stronger, more fully capable in our lives, then perhaps we will be more lenient with ourselves and with others. In The Psoas Book, Liz Koch writes about this process in infants as they learn to walk: “Holding a baby’s hands above his or her head… and ‘walking her,’ for example, does not quicken development but deters it.  Each stage of development is a preparation and foundation for the next.”  I think the unspoken key point here is that we should not rush to some imagined finish line, and we should always be primed for going back to the basics.

Interview with Gregory Grube

How did you get involved with yoga?  My first exposure to yoga was in high school.  I was training at the Wilmington Aquatic Club (WAC), and they incorporated asana into their dry land conditioning for the swimmers. As an adult, I returned to yoga because it seemed richer and less monotonous than other forms of exercise.  There seemed to be more freedom in a yoga class than there was at the gym where people were lifting weights and running on treadmills.

What is appealing to you about yoga rather than other types of exercise? A well put together series of poses creates a sense of continuity and integration. It’s a progression, it has an ebb and flow, and it asks the body to move in all three dimensions in a very complex and elegant manner.  I think the name yoga also hints that there is much more to the practice than just challenging yourself physically: there’s a poetry and an ethos to be found in the practice as well. Since I don’t really study yoga with people who teach a traditionally mired practice, having spent time with classic models such as Ashtanga and Iyengar provides a stable platform to study a variety of other styles, similar to the way studying ballet proves beneficial to studying many modern dance techniques.

Do you think yoga could serves as a supplement or could be the sole training for dance technique? I think yoga serves as an ample supplement for the practice of dance, but I don’t think it could ever be a substitute.  As a dancer, you have to be invested in exploring so many other aspects of moving, feeling and cognition that yoga can basically dispense with: yoga isn’t a mode of articulating or manifesting of voice; it isn’t impelled towards idiosyncrasy.

How do you think yoga effects the body from a somatic perspective, i.e. alignment, a body system, breath, etc…? Yoga can be an ample vessel for a deep and profound somatic exploration, but it doesn’t always start out that way.  I think there’s a difference between form and structure that comes up with a question like this.  When you start peeling off the layers and looking at the deeper, underlying nature of what’s at play you are in the realm of something that can be properly termed somatic, where sky’s the limit.  Everything from bone rhythms, to optics, to developmental patterns of movements, to cellular processes can successfully be brought into the mix when that material is introduced sensitively.

What do you think the unique effect of training in yoga to improve general movement is? One way of answering this question is through the perspective of the joints. In order for a joint to be healthy, it needs to be moved in its full range of motion, as well as being subjected to regular compression and decompression.  Yoga, if practiced mindfully, can prove its merit relative to this criteria.  From another point of view, we realize that changing the way you move changes the way you think and vice versa.  Yoga can effect these kinds of mental and emotional changes as well. Yoga is not unique in its ability to create healthy movement and thought patterns, but it can be applied in an extensive number of ways to yield something far greater than the sum of its poses.

Do you have any other general comments that would be beneficial to our research? I think to really understand the difference between yoga and dance you would want to use some of your movement analysis training.  It would be interesting to think about how a fuller range of movement qualities could impact a yoga practice and how that would impact things on a somatic level.  As a dancer who practices yoga, and a yoga practitioner that is involved in dance, I feel that I have more choices, more freedom, and that’s what it should all be about.

It seems that in most endeavors we undertake seriously, we run the risk of letting something that isn’t the primary focus of the project loom so large that we lose sight of many other equally important aspects of the enterprise. A basketball player who only trains her ability to jump higher is probably going to get cut from the team if the team is any good. Even worse, she may train out her ability to enjoy playing the game; she may lose sight of the myriad benefits that her love of the game intrinsically brings to her.

The words too often associated with Pilates are core strength.  Joseph Pilates indicated his interest in this nebulous concept as part of his six fundamentals:  center, concentration, control, precision, breath and flow.  Focusing on sets of muscles, then, is inherently a way of avoiding the whole.  In fact, there isn’t a Pilates exercise, a yoga pose, or a move across the dance floor that exclusively trains the core, the shoulders, the legs, the feet, or any other part of the body.  Everything we do affects the body as a whole.

As trained movers, we embrace the idea that even when we are working with specific areas of the body we are working with the whole. We look at particular bones, study the movement of joints, feel how those movements are limited by the tendons, start looking at the organs, glands, thinking about the vestibular system, the breath, we go deeper and deeper and when we go too far we pull back so that we can begin again, but throughout our explorations we understand that we are involved in something much vaster.  Involving the mind in this complex set of operations only heightens the sense that life truly is a wonder: surprising, inexplicable, deserving of the profoundest admiration.

A rudimentary tally of the total number of cells in the body confirms this and at the same time tells us very little:  how does the figure 10 to the 14th power help explain what it feels like to watch an injury heal, to feel that we are able to expedite this process with our attention, to see skills get honed, become stronger, faster, more flexible, to see ourselves adapting, sometimes growing wiser? It’s clear that the body truly is a phenomenon.

One of the hardest lessons to learn in all this is when to let go of something that previously had utility, but no longer serves.  Early in this writing, I was tempted to employ the term synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a phrase is substituted for a broader concept, and I wonder if core strength is code for something else: if it implies a characteristic that is unduly prized in our culture. I’ve also used the term fetish to describe what happens in certain styles of training where all the cues highlight something specific and highly mannered; where the impetus is always toward the extremes.

We also mistake the trees for the forest, when we don’t allow our perceptions to shape our own experience.  In a recent workshop, I was provided some information that simply didn’t resonate for me.  A healthy skepticism on my part instigated further research that implied that the information imparted was absolutely sound, but was only part of the picture. When dealing with feelings associated with one’s own body, there is nothing that is invalid unless it proves to be injurious. As Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen writes, “…accept what fits; let go of that which doesn’t; and lay aside that which you may want to reevaluate in the future based upon your discoveries.”

Living in a college town is certainly not the same as living in a major metropolis, but this does not mean that excellence does not abound in many forms, whether it be writ large in the form of research funded by millions of dollars or tucked away more modestly, offered on a smaller scale, secreted away in the real or proverbial archive waiting for some excited novitiate to discover its invaluable lessons.  In fact, in our libraries, learning from the masters is part of the commons, and a few weeks ago I found something on campus that I wanted to write about related to my own experience as a thinking body.

It was a simple thing really: I sat down to watch an instructional video on the legacy of Mabel Todd, which featured Andre Bernard, one influential person among many whom I have inherited work from. What struck me most, was that I could hear my own voice intertwined with his, or rather I could hear his voice speaking through what I perceived to be my own voice.  I heard the trace of similar phrasing, and saw him modeling something with his hands using a skeleton the way I had a couple weeks prior.  I loved the way his eyes lit up when he spoke about the work of teaching imagery for movement and the way he spoke with gratitude about his own mentors, his own predecessors, the giants that he had the privilege of standing on the shoulders of.

I think if I had less confidence in my own ability to synthesize material and to relate to the business and bodies at hand, I might have started to feel like a dummy in the hands of a ventriloquist, but instead I felt honored to be able to share things as simple and potentially meaningful as letting the spinous processes of the vertebrae release down the back, allowing the sitting bones to spread when the legs are in flexion, feeling all the parts of the body soften in towards the central axis.  It also reinforced the lesson that the reason this work has lasted so long is because it really does work.  Like Newton’s discoveries, these ideas adhere to the laws of nature as we currently understand them.

I guess if we are lucky, it all starts to add up; our many teachers, including ourselves, start to function as a meta-teacher that we keep learning from and finding support from so that we can keep seeing and traveling for miles.  I would also like to thank Eric Franklin and Collette Stewart for emphasizing the importance of knowing about our elders in the work that we share.