Effort in Japan – Play Hard

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MS4 The Japanese also play hard, and some of the biggest, most labor-intensive parties take place in the street during traditional festivals.  The fall festival in the city of  Takayama, where our daughter teaches English, is one of the most spectacular.

Takayama’s festival is famous for its yatai, some of which are 300 years old.  Yatai are elaborately carved and richly decorated three story wooden wagons.  People ride in the wagons, and many have small groups of children on board, playing traditional Japanese flutes and drums.

Unlike our floats, yatai are not mechanized.  They don’t have steering wheels.   Instead they are pulled through the streets by elaborately costumed teams.  This is where the effort comes in, for yatai weigh several tons and they are not easy to steer or to turn.

The two-day fall festival in Takayama involves 11 yatai. On the opening morning, the yatai are parked on display near the festival’s home Shinto shrine.  In the early afternoon, a small cohort are paraded through the street for several hours.  Then in the evening, all 11, decorated from top to bottom with lighted lanterns, are pulled through the town.

To do so, the members of their teams have different jobs.  Some march in front, pulling the yatai with thick ropes.  Other crew members hover near the front of the wagon, serving as human brakes when needed.  Still other team members march behind.  At least one or two fellows use thick wooden posts to steer the wagon from the front and back and correct its course as it moves down the street.

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The yatai pause when they come to a corner.  In order to make the sharp turn, the yatai must be tilted and oblique wheels lowered. Then the team grabs onto the float and, pushing altogether, rotates it 90 degrees. The spare wheels are retracted, and the float is set back on regular wheels.  Then the arduous pulling, braking, and steering resumes.

Those who ride on the yatai can also have challenging jobs, for some wagons are so tall that they will not pass under the electric wires that hang over the street.  We watched one grey-haired gentleman climb up on the third story roof with long stick to lift the wire so that the elaborate golden phoenixes adorning the roof did not catch on the wires.

Clearly, it requires a lot of effort to have fun in Japan!

Effort in Japan – Work Hard

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MS7Working hard is a tradition in Japan.  Nowhere is this clearer than in Shirakawa-go, a remote farming village located in the mountainous region of Honshu between Takayama and Kanazawa.  Shirakawa-go, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, is an outstanding example of a traditional way of life perfectly adapted to the environment and the resident’s social and economic circumstances.

The village was founded in the late 12th century by survivors of the Heike clan. Virtually wiped out by the Genji clan in a brutal battle in 1185, the Heike followed the Sho River deep into the densely forested Japan Alps until they found an isolated valley in which to settle.  Here they developed a unique style of wooden farm houses with thickly thatched roofs that can resist the high winds and deep snows of winter.

On the day we visited, the weather was mild and sunny.  Shirakawa-go has three parts:  a vast parking area with tourist facilities, an uninhabited outdoor museum of traditional farm houses, and, across the river, the historic village that is still inhabited.

The latter is idyllic.  The mountainside literally gushes with water, which has been carefully channeled to sustain the rice fields and vegetable and flower gardens that are attached to each house.   Tourists are free to roam as long as they respect the inhabitants and don’t barge into occupied homes.  It is possible to explore one or two of these uninhabited, thickly timbered, two story houses.  But the real story of these unique buildings is told in a videotape in the museum village that demonstrates how these homes are built using only local materials.

The building process is incredibly complex, especially the thatching process.  This utilizes a special grass, which the farm families grew and stored.  The grasses are bound into bundles and attached to the steep roofs.  This involves the labor of the whole village, for the men must climb up on the roofs, position the thatch and tie the bundles to the log framing of the roof, layer after layer to a depth of three feet.  When complete, these houses can stand for 300 years, a testament to human effort, craft, and cooperation.

[image from http://lucky-japan.blogspot.com/]

A Movement Analyst in Japan

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MS12I just spent three weeks traveling around Japan by train with my husband and daughter.  Both of them can speak and read Japanese.  I cannot.  Consequently, I am useless when it comes to most verbal transactions.

While deaf and dumb, I still can see.   To avoid total confusion, I spend a lot of time observing behavior, the social context, and the environment.  In the following blogs, I share some of these observations through the lens of Laban Movement Analysis.  I will focus on effort, general and personal space, and the use of the body.

Effort and Habit

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As Fred Astaire crooned to Ginger Rogers —  “The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea, the memory of all that, no, no they can’t take that away from me. “ Simple actions are memorable.  According to Mabel Ellsworth Todd, “It is not our parents’ faces that come back to us, but their bodies, in the accustomed chairs, eating, sewing, smoking, doing all the familiar things.  We remember each as a body in action.”

We all have a preferred way of being in the world, and we embody this.  Our identities rest, much more that we believe, on the repetition of characteristic movements.  How we sit, how we stand, the cadence of our steps, habitual actions. and recurring gestures – these are as unique as our fingerprints.

Bodily behaviors matter.  We disturb others, and we disturb ourselves, when we move in unfamiliar ways.  And yet, these perturbations remind us of something important.  As Esalen founder Michael Murphy writes, “ We live only part of the life we are given.  Growing acquaintance with once-foreign cultures, new discoveries about our subliminal depths, and the dawning recognition that each social group reinforces just some human attributes while neglecting or suppressing others have stimulated a worldwide understanding that all of us have great potentials for growth.”

Growth requires moving beyond habit.  But what kind of effort is required to overcome habits, especially those that we have forgotten we have?

Effort and Inner Life

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Effort is not only about doing; it is also about being, or what Rudolf Laban calls movement thinking.  “Movement thinking could be considered as a gathering of impressions of happenings in one’s own mind, for which nomenclature is lacking.  This thinking does not serve orientation in the external world but rather it perfects man’s orientation in his inner world.”

Laban relates movement thinking to effort in the following way: “Man’s desire to orientate himself in the maze of his drives results in definite effort rhythms.”  Laban goes on to describe these drives in effort terms.  The way he conceives it, there are four effort drives:  the Action Drive, the Passion Drive, the Vision Drive, and the Spell Drive.  Laban’s mapping of effort rhythms makes it possible to explore this world and its inner landscapes by moving mindfully.  I had one such adventure during my training to be a movement analyst.

I chose a phrase with the Spell Drive configuration in it.  The Spell Drive combines effort qualities of space (direct or indirect), weight (strong or light), and flow (bound or free).  Spell is the timeless drive, hypnotic and mesmerizing.  As I note in Meaning in Motion, “When our sensation of the passing of time disappears, we usually find the experience to be slightly unreal, even uncanny.”   And that is indeed what happened to me.

I struggled to embody an effort rhythm combining strong, bound, and indirect qualities.  When I finally succeeded, I was transformed into a Grendl-like creature.  It was a very real experience. It shook me up, and started me on a long journey to understand the psychological ramifications of effort.

We use effort to assert our will over things in the outer world, but the effort choices we make also influence our inner worlds.

Effort and Assertion

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Every voluntary human movement involves applying energy to change the position of the body.  Energy can be applied in many different ways.  Rudolf Laban referred to these various qualities of kinetic energy as effort.  Similarly, the moving body can trace many different shapes as it traverses space.  Consequently, the human beings possess a richer range of motion than most other species.   As Laban observes, “When jumping the cat will be relaxed and flexible.  A horse or a deer will bound wonderfully in the air, but its body will be tense and concentrated during the jump.”   A human being, however, “can jump like a deer, and if he wishes, like a cat.”

Voluntary movement is intentional. Thus our bodies serve as an immediate means of acting on the environment to our satisfy needs.  We must make an effort to act.  However, according to Warren Lamb, “Effort goes with Shape organically…. The fact is we can never do Effort without Shaping and, if we emphasise the Shaping we still have to make an Effort.  The two are a duality, inseparable from each other, and fundamental to balance.”

Though fundamentally inseparable, it is possible for an individual to place more emphasis on effort than on shape, or vice versa.   This differential emphasis will characterize how the individual goes about acting in the world.

For example, Warren Lamb found that when a person emphasizes effort, he or she takes a more assertive approach.  Being assertive is commonly seen as being direct in claiming one’s rights, insistent, demanding and even aggressive.  In movement behavior terms, however, being assertive simply means applying one’s bodily energies to make things happen. The assertive person will believe that almost anything can be accomplished if he or she maintains focus and applies enough pressure at the right time.

This is the effect of an effort emphasis focused outwardly, on doing.  But effort also plays an important role in the inner life.  I take up this subject in my next blog.

Somatic Mysteries

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We rely on our senses to perceive ourselves and other objects in the world.  We must always regard other objects from a third-person perspective.  However, as I explain in Beyond Words,  “we can combine objective and subjective perspectives when we consider our own bodies.”  This is due to dedicated sensory systems that provide information about one’s own body that is not directly available for other objects.

Nevertheless, the soma can be confused.  Out-of-body experiences, in which people report leaving their physical body and looking down on it from above, are the most widely-experienced forms of somatic misperceptions.  According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Anil Ananthaswamy, neuroscientists have become interested in these instances when we aren’t anchored in our physical bodies but seem to be standing outside, observing ourselves from a third-person point of view.  And they have been able to create somatic confusions experimentally.

The brain relies on multiple sensations, both from the outside and the inside of the body, to construct a map of the body and its parts.  These maps are what we perceived as our physical selves.

Conflicting sensations can disturb these maps.  For example, in one study, the experimenter stroked the subject’s hand with a brush while brushing a rubber hand simultaneously. The subject could not see his own hand, only the rubber hand.   In a few moments, the subject reported feeling the brush on the rubber hand.  The conflicting perceptions of vision and touch altered the body map, so that the subject’s brain took ownership of the rubber hand.

As Ananthaswamy notes, the experimental creation of somatic illusions does not make a case for mind/body dualism.  Rather, this research that “the sense of bodily self is something that is constructed by the brain moment by moment.”

Ananthaswamy continues:  “Our sense of self arises from a complex interaction among brain, body, mind, and culture – and in the full-blown selves we are, all aspects of the self interact with and influence one another.  But it all begins with the body.”

Or, we could say, the soma.

The Somatic Revolution

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In the previous two blogs I have been contrasting body language and body movement.  Body language tends to isolate still poses and particular gestures from the stream of ongoing bodily action and read fixed meanings into these snapshots.  In so doing, the process of change, which is the essence of movement, disappears, as does the broader context of sequential actions. Body language treatises tend to present a stilted and mechanistic view of movement behavior.  Perhaps this is why much of the study of body language promises to improve an individual’s ability to manage his/her image and manipulate others.

The study of body movement, on the other hand, is much more difficult.  This is because movement is dynamic, changeable, and ephemeral – thus infinitely harder to pin down.  In addition, appreciating movement as a process of change necessitates altering certain habits of the mind.  It requires not only perceiving the beginning and ending positions of an action, but also all the bits in between.  It demands a shifting of focus from what is done to how it is done.  But in so doing, to quote Bergson, “What was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion…. We are more fully alive.”

Increasingly, body language, with its mechanistic view of human behavior, is out.  Body movement is in.  This can be seen, for example, in the rising popularity of various somatic practices.  The term “somatics” was coined by the American philosopher Thomas Hanna.  He defined the term as follows:

“Somatics is the field which studies the soma:  namely the body as perceived from within by first-person perception.  When a human being is observed from the outside – i.e., from the third-person viewpoint – the phenomenon of a human body is perceived.  But, when this same human being is observed from the first person viewpoint of his own proprioceptive senses, a categorically different phenomenon is perceived:  the human soma.”

Hanna understood that this shift in perception is revolutionary.   As I note in Meaning in Motion, the somatic perspective contrasts long-standing scientific views and medical practices that have tended to objectify the body and nullify personal agency.  Somatic practices approach the body from a different angle, acknowledging the intrinsically subjective aspects of corporeal experience and viewing the individual, not as an object to be acted upon, but as an active agent.

Body Movement Is In

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Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, was fascinated by how analytical thinking leads us to misperceive our own experience of being alive.  For Bergson, life is an unceasing, continuous, undivided process, a sort of cosmic movement.  Yet, we tend to conceive our lives as passing from feeling to feeling or thought to thought, as if each is separate, unchanging thing.  In reality, feelings and thoughts are themselves in a state of flux, and it is the experience of continuous changes that is central to the experience of being alive.

Bergson illustrates this view with a movement example.  Let us consider a movement that begins with the arms in an open position, and ends with the arms folded across the chest.  The movement of the arms will trace a line in space.  That line, like any line, can be broken into a series of points.  With high speed photography, multiple placements of the arms as they traverse a line from the open to the crossed position can be captured and made discrete.  But as Bergson points out, these snapshots turn the movement into a series of static positions.  The movement itself is something else.

Echoing Bergson, Rudolf Laban writes, “In the past we have clung too stubbornly to a static conception of our environment, and consequently to a misconception of life in general, as well as of our own personal lives.”  The body language proponents are clinging to a static and mechanical conception of bodily being.  They are missing the continuity of change that is the essential quality of movement.  Consequently, they misconstrue the meaning of nonverbal actions.

Therefore, body language should be out.  Body movement should be in.

Body Language Is Out

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Virtually any time I tell someone that I am a movement analyst, I am met with a puzzled look and the query –“Oh, like body language?”

Warren Lamb hated having Movement Pattern Analysis characterized as body language, and rightly so.  Popular treatises on body language primarily focus on poses and isolated gestures and affix simple meanings to these.

For example, while trawling the internet recently, I came across a “scientific portal on body language” that explained the meaning of various poses and gestures.  For example, one photo showed a man (his head cropped out) seated in a narrow and erect pose.  According to the explanation, this position conveys interest or surprise.

Another headless photo showed the fellow with his arms crossed over his chest.  This gesture was said to indicate being defensive.

Of course, postures and gestures do have meaning.  But poses and gestures come and go in an ongoing stream of human behavior.   Just as the meaning of individual words can change depending upon how they are used in a sentence, so too the meaning of poses and gestures must change in the context of the ongoing movement flow.

As Warren Lamb would say, there are so many ways to fold the arms over the chest.  Surely there are worlds of meaning to be perceived when we stop thinking of bodily action as a set of static punctuation points – arms open, arms crossed – and start to perceive it as a process of change, one that can be done in many ways.