Douglas Ray
This is a note of three
parallels that occurred to me in Nancy Stark Smith’s recent Contact Improvisation
workshop in Melbourne(1). There’s only five minutes of that workshop which
I’ll refer to. It spanned some thirty hours over two weeks, so this is
not a review of the event. The words I attribute to Nancy are probably not exact.
This is how I remember it.
Contact Improv
Standing, more than two dozen of us scattered around the studio, Nancy habitually
directing from somewhere near the middle of the space. We are working individually
with a single arm.
“Make the smallest extension that you can register” – she speaks
clearly, giving space for her words, and pauses, giving space for our practise.
“Now make it smaller”. Pause. Our practise. “It doesn’t
have to be visible”.
She tells us this exercise came to her from Steve Paxton, that it has been used
consistently for generations of contact improvisors. “And smaller again”.
It is not a muscle action that she is bringing us to: it is the thinking of
the action. This is my thought.
“and smaller, and smaller, and smaller…” She’s no longer
giving time; she’s got the message across and is sweeping on to something
else, but the invitation is there: to return to the practice, to refine it.
To find clarity in differentiating gross muscle movement from this other thing,
this thing that happens when we bring our attention to body and ‘mentally’
rehearse an action, but with the thought in the body.
I’ll call this exercise Paxton’s differentiation.
Ideokinesis
Ideate: to form in idea, thought, or imagination(2)
At the heart of Ideokinesis is the repatterning of neuromuscular co-ordination
– alignment, in motion and at rest – through imagined movement. In
Lulu Sweigard’s words,
“This ideation is effective only when the student relies completely on
mental activity as it deals with [clear and accurate notions of body structure]
and on imagined movement without voluntary effort.”(3)
Ideokinesis usually uses visual images to embody the imagined movement(4), but
there is this element of the experience common with Paxton’s differentiation
exercise: the activation of the neural systems organising the musculature, but
without voluntary movement. Ideokinesis has its own way of reaching the point,
and its own justification for the worth of reaching it. Along the paths of C.I.
and Ideokinesis, this “embodied un-movement”, the thought of action
without action, is a common stepping stone.
Alexander work
F.M. Alexander also worked with the repatterning of neuromuscular co-ordination,
although in a wider context he was as concerned with what he termed ‘the
psychophysical whole’. He developed an approach to re-education in movement
during the 1890s involving four key steps: visualisation, inhibition, direction
and action(5). In these phases, the clearest example of “embodied un-movement”
is in his notion of ‘direction’. The term ‘direction’ has
many aspects in Alexander work, but the first is the notion of the orders or
instructions one gives to one’s body, the “means whereby” an
action is accomplished. Alexander often refers to these directions as a “wish”(6),
achieved by “merely framing and holding [the] desire”(7) to perform
an act.
“… there must be a clear differentiation in [the pupil’s] mind
between the giving of the order and the performance of the act ordered…”(8)
In the Alexander work, the neuromuscular re-patterning is learnt initially through
touch. The student inhibits their habitual way of doing an action, then “directs”,
“allows”, “gives consent” to a new way of doing the action,
then the teacher moves them as they “direct”.
So, the path of Alexander work similarly crosses at our stepping stone of the
thought of action without action.
Tangents: Sherrington,
Evolution, Gravity
One more stepping stone, somewhat further back along the paths. It is interesting,
though less significant an intersection than the thought of action. In the writings
of Sweigard, Todd and Alexander, there is a single author, a single book, which
their references, bibliographies or attributions hold in common: Charles Sherrington:
The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (Yale, 1906). They have each drawn
different material from that work. The coincidence stems more from the vast
scope and importance of Sherrington’s work than from any common starting
point here.
Even so, there are common starting points for Todd and Alexander. Evolution,
and the implications of evolving in gravity, were ideas which gripped the scientific
community in the mid-1800s, and had reverberations in wider society well beyond.
Both Todd and Alexander devote much time to these elements… and gravity
played a large part in Nancy’s workshop, as well.
Footnotes
1 ‘Deepening the Form’, 20/11/2000 – 1/12/2000, Victorian College
of the Arts, co-ordinated by State of Flux
2 Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd ed., 1997. “Imagine, conceive; form ideas”
– Concise Oxford Dictionary, 3rd ed., 1934.
3 Lulu Sweigard: Human Movement Potential: Its Ideokinetic Facilitation (Harper
and Row, 1974)
4 “Concentration upon a picture involving movement results in responses
in the neuromusculature as necessary to carry out specific movements with the
least effort” – Mabel Todd: The Balancing of Forces in the Human Being
(self published, 1929), quoted in Sweigard, op. cit. p6. Sweigard places more
emphasis on image without physical action than her teacher, Todd. Todd uses
images throughout The Thinking Body (Hoeber, 1937; Dance Horizons, 1968), but
most often in accompaniment with action.
5 F.M. Alexander: Man’s Supreme Inheritance (2nd ed., Dutton, 1918; and
3rd ed., Chaterson, 1941) pp199-204; (4th ed., Mouritz, 1996) pp124-127. This
text isn’t in the 1910 (Methuen) 1st ed. The Mouritz ed. attributes it
to a 1912 publication, Councious Control, which was inserted into the 1918 ed.
along with other material.
6 e.g., the Bedford Lecture, 1934, republished in Alexander’s Articles
and Lectures (Mouritz, 1995): p168.
7 F.M. Alexander: Man’s Supreme Inheritance, (2nd ed., Dutton, 1918; and
3rd ed., Chaterson, 1941) p203; (4th ed., Mouritz, 1996) p126.
8 Ibid.
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