Authentic Movement: Moving the Body, Moving the Self, Being Moved

A Collection of Essays - Volume Two

Patrizia Pallaro

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781846425868
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Praise for the first volume:

`It is very valuable to have [this collection of articles] all together in one place…a rich repository of insights and experiences for all the somatic disciplines. It is a wonderful collection of articles.' - Somatics 1999/2000

This second volume on Authentic Movement - a new discipline aiding the creative process in choreography, writing, theatre performance, dance, graphic and expressive
arts, as well as spirituality - is an engaging and dynamic collection of scholarly essays, personal stories, practical suggestions and resources. It reflects cutting edge work on creative expression, meditative discipline and psychotherapeutic endeavour.

Part I comprises five chapters written by the most prominent Authentic Movement practitioners and teachers and introducing the foundations and principles of Authentic Movement. In Part II, the contributors return to the source of Authentic Movement - the psychotherapeutic setting - and provide an in-depth examination of the personal processes in the therapeutic relationship and the potential of Authentic Movement to facilitate personal growth and change. Part III traces the development of Authentic Movement as a spiritual path and as interface with other spiritual practices. Part IV provides an overview of new developments in Authentic Movement, Part V offers inspiring personal accounts and Part VI provides guidelines drawn from practice as well as tools and resources. These latter chapters sow the seeds for a new understanding and directions for the developments of Authentic Movement.

This authoritative text is indispensable for practitioners of Authentic Movement, students and teachers working in the field of dance therapy, art therapists, all creative arts therapists and body psychoanalysts.

Part One

The Foundation

1

From Autism to the Discipline of Authentic Movement¹

Janet Adler

In this time of great privilege, there are many forms through which we can awaken. There are many disciplines, practices, teachers from which we can choose. We discern, we distinguish, we clarify, we choose this, we do not choose that. We sort, we categorize, we separate and, before we know it, we glimpse our paths unfolding. We are becoming because of each one of these choices, each one of these precious details that profoundly contribute to the manifestation of whoever we are. I have been asked to weave some threads about the evolution of my own path, about the relationship between my experience with autistic children and my experience of the discipline of Authentic Movement.

I don’t know what I am doing. I am searching hospitals and clinics for the child who cannot be found, for the child who cannot be touched. I am searching for the child who I need to find, the child who I need to touch. I am 21 years old. I see a boy in a big, dark room. The ceiling is so high, the chains on the furniture so shiny. I watch him from a distance as he spins. He is spinning with his arms spread wide and high, with his first fingers touching his thumbs. He is spinning and spinning in the back ward of a state hospital in New England. I remember how he brings his body into stillness. I see his eyes. He sees my eyes. In my heart I call to him. I imagine that he is calling to me. I need to come nearer to this mysterious being, this unknown presence. Yet why do I feel that I recognize him? Is it the indwelling God within this child that I need to touch, that I need to be touched by? Is it his suffering or my own that I need to open toward?

Forty years ago, autistic children were described as those beings that never had an experience of relationship with another human being. In such a child there is no hint of an internalized other, a mother, an inner witness. There is no internalized presence. For a decade I worked in big and empty rooms where autistic children, one by one, filled the space with their absence, until because of a momentary presence, we experienced a connection. Such moments of grace created resonance within our relationship, revealing a glimpse of light.

Autistic children represented the unknown to me. Now, so many years later, my desire to experience the unknown persists. I continue to be very drawn to that which I cannot see, that which I cannot touch, that which I cannot know. And this is very much what the discipline of Authentic Movement is about. I have had the privilege for the past thirty-some years of inviting movers to step into the emptiness of the studio with their eyes closed, to step into not knowing and to open toward becoming more and more of who they are. No longer a moving witness with eyes open, as I was with the children, I sit to the side of the movement space. My wish is the same: I want to accompany the other; I want to participate in these moments of discovery of a presence embodied.

This seems to be at the core of the connection within me, between my experience with those exquisite beings named autistic children and my experience within this discipline named Authentic Movement. The connection is about a call, a call within relationship, because of relationship, toward the unknown, toward a developing inner witness.

The development of an inner witness is an excellent way of describing the development of consciousness. With the children and within the discipline of Authentic Movement, there is much learning about distinguishing between when we are here and when we are not here. In times of grace there is a shared presence and in these moments, with the children and in the Authentic Movement studio, ritual occurs. When this happens, an immediate sense of inherent order becomes apparent within a felt sense of a sacred space.

I cannot trace the history of my own work without tracing the work that preceded it. In the beginning being and dancing were inseparable within sacred space. I see one circle. In this one circle, individuals, in the presence of each other, are dancing in relationship to their gods. Dancing, they are healed. I see one circle, whole. Within this one circle, the embodiment of spirit heals. Within this one circle, I see the creative force entering from the earth through the feet of the one who dances, moving through the body of the one who calls to God, bringing God down into her body, down into the earth through her feet and back again, now circling up through her body, his body, their bodies until the world is whole, until the world is whole.

Our ancestors—dancers, healers, mystics—knew much about this longing to be present, to enter the unknown. I believe that our ancestors trusted the body. I believe that they embraced suffering and that they undoubtedly desired clear manifestation of spirit. Their work tells me that surrender, in conscious relationship to will, was necessary. Their work tells me that direct experience of union with the Divine occurred. Their practices describe ritual space and from that space, their offerings were known.

I cannot look into the history of modern dancers without discovering spirit in the bones of their dances. I cannot study the history of healers and mystics without acknowledging the depth of spirit that called them toward the suffering of others. The work of dancers, healers and mystics forms the ground of the discipline of Authentic Movement, a way of work in which we practice compassionate witnessing of movement becoming conscious.

Looking for my roots, I read words of my teachers and my teachers’ teachers, each one absorbing from his or her teachers what is needed, just as I did from mine. Looking for the web of lineage of this work, I find many dancers—for example Wigman (1966), Graham (1991), Duncan (1927)—as well as teachers of body-based disciplines, such as Johnson (1995), writing of a specific sense that they must descend into their trust of intuitive knowing without yet feeling the form of it, as if they have no choice. Many write of the pain of their descents, asking themselves why they continue to pursue their course of work. Some speak of their experience of sacrifice, but within the sacred meaning of that word. And through such an intense process of learning, often they are teaching others and, in so doing, acknowledge their choice to teach from their present, most current experiences and questions.

What follows are words from specific modern dancers whom I believe are a strong part of the ground of our work and who speak to me especially about spirit:

Rudolph Laban (1975) writes about an inner witness, about body dancing soul:

[There is] an inner attitude out of which true dance arises like a flame... (p.90)

There is energy behind all occurrences and material things for which it is almost impossible to find a name. A hidden, forgotten landscape lays there, the land of silence, the realm of the soul and in the centre of this land stands the swinging temple... (p.89)

[I]n which all sorrows and joys, all sufferings and dangers, all struggles and deliverances meet and move together. The ever-changing swinging temple, which is built of dances, of dances which are prayers, is the temple of the future... (p.91)

We are all one, and what is at stake is the universal soul out of which and for which we have to create. (p.94)

Mary Wigman (1966, 1973) writes about presence as if she is speaking the mover’s prayer:

Dance wants to and has to be seen. (1966, p.16)

I have always been a fanatic of the present, in love with the moment... (1966, p.8)

the dynamic force...moving and being moved...is the pulse beat of the life of dance. (1966, p.11)

Not turning oneself, but being turned. (1966, p.39)

Time and again I gave myself up to the intoxication of this experience...a process in which, for seconds, I almost felt a oneness with the cosmos. (1973, p.52)

I became the caller and the called all in one. (1973, p.18)

Isadora Duncan (1927) writes about the longing for union with the Divine:

I spent long days and nights in the studio seeking that dance which might be the divine expression of the human spirit through the medium of the body’s movement. (p.75)

Listen to the music within your soul. Now while listening, do you not feel an inner self awakening deep within you—that it is by its strength that your head is lifted, that your arms are raised, that you are walking slowly toward the light? ... This awakening is the first step in the dance... (p.76)

I had come to Europe to bring about a great renaissance of religion through the Dance. (p.85)

And Martha Graham (1991) also writes about the present moment, movement patterns, risk, death, fire:

Movement never lies. (p.4)

I fear the venture into the unknown. (p.5)

In order to work, in order to be excited, in order to simply be, you have to be reborn to the instant. (p.16)

...anything that quickens you to the instant... (p.8)

...each moment is a new one and terrifying and threatening and bursting with hope. (p.260)

...you risk. Everything is a risk. (p.256)

When you have to do the same movement over and over, do not get bored with yourself, just think of yourself as dancing toward your own death. (p.251)

...the ordeal of isolation, the ordeal of loneliness, the ordeal of vulnerability... (p.118)

...one begins to realize that all human beings are the same. (p.144)

At least I think I know what it does mean to burn slowly from within...to feel so possessed by flame as to be infinitely hot and about to disintegrate into an ash at any instant. (p.187)

Finally she says: “I would like to feel that I had in some way given my students the gift of themselves” (p.267).

I want the autistic children to have the gift of themselves. I want every being to receive, to discover the gift of themselves, the gift of their own authenticity. Mary Whitehouse gave permission to the dancers who came into her studio to discover the gift of themselves. They were encouraged to explore their unique, personal experience of the archetypes, the same archetypes that the Graham and Wigman dancers embodied on stage. Within the intimacy of relationship, Mary’s presence made it possible for each dancer to return toward the one circle where being and dancing were the same.

And it was Marian Chace, whom I knew before I met the autistic children, who taught me about spirit manifest in the body moving. I had the great privilege of breathlessly running behind her, pushing a record player on a cart on wheels. I can vividly see her now working with psychotic adults, in her flowered cotton skirt, her hair on top of her head, extending her arms wide toward the patients, and a room full of collapsed and broken spirits, perhaps remembering themselves, rise and dance.

Here then is the essence of the connect between my experience of autistic children and of the discipline of Authentic Movement: my tremendous desire to see more clearly that which I cannot see, that which is unknown. And there is also within me—maybe it is a response to this call—a great need to know form, conscious embodiment, within such emptiness. What happens once we commit and stand, listening, opening into the vastness?

Our ancestors also knew about this. They knew about the practice of discernment. They knew about the impeccability of tracking movement and inner experience. They knew about the art of concentration. As many of us know, autistic children have a tremendous capacity to concentrate. They can do one movement indefinitely. What is the force in these children that draws them, continues to sustain them, into repeating certain movements over and over?

Needing to find the children, to find myself in their presence, I chose to concentrate into the very stuff of each gesture by actually entering the precious detail of their bodies moving. In doing so I had the privilege of learning their silent language. I found them in a merged state with their own movement—because of an absence of an inner witness—fervently focused on their idiosyncratic movement patterns. These children taught me about movement patterns. Could their prayers have been: “See me and then I can see myself?” Slowly, accompanied by an outer, but moving, open-eyed witness, they began, just began to see themselves. In such moments of grace, an inner witness was born, barely born—tiny beginnings, enormous moments in my life. It was here that an opportunity for a dialogic relationship between us emerged.

Meeting the children in such an intimate way was a direct source of my experience with the phenomenon of the inner witness, with the phenomenon of the development of consciousness. Meeting the children in this way also was a direct source of my future experience of the development of my own mover and witness consciousness, within my continuing commitment to the discipline of Authentic Movement.

In looking for more of the consciousness which I had glimpsed while working with the children, my questions brought me to brief but profound encounters with John Weir and Mary Whitehouse. I became a mover with eyes closed. The mover’s prayer could be the same as the prayer of the autistic child: “See me and then I can see myself.” Because the mover studies the art of concentration, she is attending to her longing to stay present. “Where am I now? What is my inner experience? Heneni”—meaning “here I am” in the Hebrew language—“Heneni.” I am here now with my wrists snapping together, my palms opening, my fingers extending, cupping. My shoulders are dropping, my arms are lifting. Here I am.”

When the mover comes back after moving, she is intending to remember what she has been doing so she can speak her experience of embodiment in the presence of the outer witness. Because language is the bridge between the body and consciousness, as the mover speaks her experience, she begins to see herself, hold herself, take herself seriously, attending to the detail, every precious detail of each physical movement and the concomitant inner experi...