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 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.

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.

Boycott Body Language

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MoveScape Center

As I mentioned in my last blog, popularity is seductive. The chance for serious movement analysis to garner publicity through the national media is almost irresistible. However, when serious study gets showcased as “body language,” the publicity does little to foster appreciation of movement.

A case in point is the March 7 story in USA Today bearing the headline, “Pentagon studies Putin’s body language to predict his actions.” The studies referred to involved legitimate analysis of movement patterns. Yet the press merely referenced this work as “body language.” Various additional banners read: “A Twitch, A Limp; U.S. Is Watching” and “Pentagon reads Putin’s lips, and rest of body.”

A subsequent interview with a CMA (though not one actually involved in the Pentagon’s studies) was aired on CNN. Then Jon Stewart used excerpts of the interview on his March 11 airing of the Daily Show, largely to lampoon the Pentagon’s studies of Putin’s movement. “What’s with the body language thing?” Stewart quipped. “It would be good information if you were on a date with him.” Referring to some of Putin’s isolated gestures, Stewart indulges in further parody, “Oh, he touched his nose. I think it means he’s going into the Ukraine.”

I would like to encourage all readers who are serious students of movement to boycott the use of the term “body language.” The meanings the public associates with this term are not the meanings we want associated with what we do.

So, the next time someone asks if you do body language, JUST SAY NO!

Movement Analysis is a Physical Activity

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Like other physical activities, observing movement is a process that involves effort and recovery. The following excerpt from my book, Beyond Words, describes movement analysis as a process consisting of four phrases: (1) relaxation, (2) attunement, (3) point of concentration, and (4) recuperation.

Relaxation
The initial preparatory stage involves relaxation as the observer strives to “get in the mood” for whatever will come. This takes the form of letting go in order to achieve a state of mind analogous to the “unfocused focus” of the naturalist who “goes alone into a field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance” (Wilson, 1986, 103).

Attunement
A second phase in the observation process is attunement. Attunement is to detailed movement analysis what a rough draft is to a finished chapter. Attuning allows one to sense the movement process in a sketchy and general way without feeling pressured to describe these perceptions in detail. We have all been observing movement since we were born. Nevertheless, when we are asked to observe, the process often strikes us as novel and difficult. Attuning allows us to use our senses of sight, hearing, and kinesthesis to establish contract with what we perceive, thus warming us up for more demanding tasks to come. 

Point of Concentration
Movement is comprised of multiple, on-going changes in the use of body, space, and dynamics. When we try to pin down what we see, as we do when analyzing movement with the Laban system, the multifaceted nature of the movement can prove to be mind-boggling. For this reason, it is often very useful to choose a single point of concentration and to study that element of movement only. Such concentration sorts the complex movement experience into simpler and more familiar units and keeps the observer from being overwhelmed.

Recuperation
As might be expected, the intense concentration needed for the third phase of the observation process can be quite draining. As a consequence, the observer must build phases of recuperation in, if he or she wishes to keep the powers of perception fresh and acute.

There are many concrete techniques that the observer can use to relax, attune, analyze effectively, and recuperate. Learn how in the forthcoming Tetra seminar. Register by March 1 for the early registration discount.

Insight and Effort Observation

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Have you ever had the experience of wondering “what is it about that guy”? It’s the kind of wondering that takes place when someone rubs you the wrong way but you just can’t put your finger on why that is.

I had that experience some years ago when my son was in grade school. He had a teacher, who by all reports was brilliant, but during communications with this man I had the regular experience of feeling very put-off. It’s not that the meetings were full of bad news; in fact this teacher gave a mostly positive reports on my son. So what was it that was bothering me?

At the same time I was puzzling over this, I was teaching a course in Laban Movement Analysis at Alverno College in Milwaukee. It was at a point during the semester when we were delving into effort and effort phrasing, and this turned out to be the key to answering my question. The troublesome teacher turned out to be an excellent example of impulsive phrasing!

He would consistently begin his sentences with sudden, rather strong emphases that were mostly evident in his voice, but also to a certain degree in his body. I realized that it was his manner of “front-loading” his phrasing that caused me to feel uncomfortable… a very valuable insight given that this was a teacher my son would have for several more years, and with whom I needed to have a productive relationship.

Effort phrasing in all its richness, will be part of our exploration of dynamics in the Tetra seminar. Maybe it will answer some questions about “that guy” for you. Register by March 1 for the early registration discount. 

Form and Color in Painting and Dance

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The artist Wassily Kandinsky and the dancer Rudolf Laban were contemporaries and moved in the same bohemian circles in Munich in the early 20th century. Interesting parallels run through their theoretical works.

Kandinsky observed that “painting has two weapons at her disposal: 1) colour, 2) form”. He goes on to note that there is an “essential connection between colour and form”.

An analogous delineation of elements can be found in Laban’s notions of effort and shape. Effort – qualities of dynamic energy – give expressive color to bodily actions. Shape – the imaginary vapor trails traced by moving limbs on the space around the body – give dance its form.

Similarly, there is an essential connection between effort and shape, for as Warren Lamb writes, “We cannot move in making an Effort without an accompanying movement of shaping.”

In painting, both color and shape are fixed in time and limited to a two-dimensional canvas surface. In dancing, effort and shape are constantly changing, appearing and disappearing as the dancer moves through three-dimensional space. In motion capture recording, the dancer disappears but the dance itself becomes visible, leaving a tracery of lines that look as if the dancer has been scribbling on empty space itself.

Nevertheless, Laban observes that this scribble, “can be divided into sections which resemble the Arabic ciphers: 1 2 3”. The forms in dance are produced by the limbs of the body and governed by their anatomical structure. According to Laban, this restricts dance forms to simple shapes from which “innumerable combinations are made”.

In the forthcoming Tetra seminar in March, Cate Deicher and I draw upon Laban’s artistic background for source material to stimulate movement invention and the exploration of shape. Register by March 1 for the early registration discount.

 

Empty Space Does Not Exist

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According to Rudolf Laban, space is a superabundance of simultaneous movements. He’s right, of course. Empty space is full of air. And air is full of molecules and atoms, each a bundle of energy and particles that orbit and pulse.

Space isn’t empty for artists. It has shape. Artists learn to see this shape through drawing exercises. Rather than sketching the object, they draw the shape of the space around the object.

MoveScape CenterSpace isn’t empty for architects. Like a surgical suture, space connects a building with the other objects in the environment. Without empty space, an architectural design has no context. What isn’t there allows us to see what is there.

Space isn’t empty for dancers, either. As a young student at the American Dance Festival, I spent free time walking patterns in the Connecticut College gym. Sometimes I walked blindfolded. And over the course of the summer, I sensitized myself to space. I began to be able to tell where I was in the gym, how near or far from the wall. And when I took the blindfold off, space had texture and a faint bluish hue. It wasn’t empty anymore.

Space had structure and meaning for Rudolf Laban. And he devised some very clever ways for dancers and movers of all types to think about space, so that what once seemed empty comes alive.

In the forthcoming Tetra seminar, we will explore the structure of space to tap its expressive power. Click here to find out more.