Behaviour & Movement Part 1

Habits. Patterns. Familiarity. One of the ways that I think we as people “deal” with our fear of the unknown is by conquering it with habits: behavioral patterns that we follow so often that they cease to become conscious. We all have our specific way that we drive to work, we have a certain order of events that we partake in when we get out of bed in the morning, we have certain ways and methodologies for developing relationships, making money, and essentially getting what we want. Psychology talks a lot about social and behavioral patterns and how those can be both facilitative and dangerous. But what about going to the smallest component of our daily life: movement? Consciously or subconsciously, we choose specific ways to move our bodies through space—up, down, quick, slow, forwards, backwards, small, big. What information can these tiny indicators unlock in our personal quests for self-awareness?

When I was in college for dance, I took a course in Movement Behavior which basically required us to look at the ways our bodies habitually moved in response to internal (psychological) and outside (physical) stimulus and to challenge those habits. The idea was to break out of your movement habits so as to break out of your point of reference and expand the place from which you see the world. In the same way that people draw references to entire towns based on their own neighborhoods (“Vegas is so racist,” “All the homes here are the same,” etc.) such do we base our judgments of ourselves and others from the way we position ourselves and our bodies through space.
The key to this investigation is that we typically are unaware of our own movement patterns—which necessitated that we work in pairs. Individually, we would improvise for 5-10 minutes with our classmates watching and taking notes. No music, no sound, no boundaries. Our partners would then remark on what we tended to do—and believe me, repetition was the norm. We each would then have to improvise using ONLY the things we did NOT do, and eventually create a larger piece from these foreign items.

I soon found out that I had a propensity towards direct movement that covered lots of space, was very upright, involved lots of straight lines, and NEVER went backward. Rhythmically, my work was even (never fast and never slow and NEVER completely stopping). Much of this makes sense, considering that as an acrobat (a gymnast and a diver), movement is linear, it always ENDS upright, and the only time you stop completely is when the routine is finished. But going backwards?

As an acrobat, I was great at back flips—so much that they were my specialty. But on deeper investigation, I realized that in flipping backwards, the action of the body is not exactly backward—it’s moving forward (eyes first) in a backward pathway that arches. I laughed as I realized why I had “cheated” for so many years on my back flips and could never quite set a flip straight up without looking back behind me first.

This much was charming. But then the real work came. I now had to do an entire 5-10 minute improv moving backwards.

To be continued...