Authenticity and Movement

The Problem of Copy–Paste Movement

Lately we’ve been reflecting with our teacher, Ido Portal, on the problems of our movement culture - so much copying and pasting things from outside, not really letting them emerge from a development of ourselves.

There is a lack of authenticity in the movement presented. Movements are copied (from tutorials, etc), and pasted without the internal development that would make them truly one’s own.

And the finger points back at us: we’re all guilty of this.

Take a simple acrobatic movement like the macaco or a cartwheel. Countless tutorials of these exist.

But who was the first person to discover a macaco? That person discovered this movement INSIDE their body. They didn’t copy a video. They had a practice that created the conditions necessary for the movement to arise.

The movement was autochthonous to them.

The Autochthones

The ancient Greeks had the idea of “Autochthones”: beings that live where they come from. They arise from the land itself.

We use the word “indigenous” to refer to who is first to arrive to a place, but autochthones are something else: a downstream differentiation of that place itself, a manifestation of it, ARE it, in a way.

This is relevant to the question of authenticity in movement.

Create the Conditions

Instead of copying and pasting the macaco, we can invest ourselves in developing the conditions that give rise to it: familiarity in certain positions, mobility, elasticity, other inversions, connections through the arch of the body.

The result is something completely different.

You might not see a difference when viewing it “straight on” - but do the movement with a slight twist, and the deficits of the “copy-paste” method will be revealed.

That’s not to say tutorials are the problem. You can copy something, and use it as a scaffold for growing inside of it. That’s what we’re in the business of offering with teaching movement classes.

Nurture the seed

Imagine there is a seed inside you, some essence.

When you see something impressive outside of you, the temptation is to copy that thing - at the expense of the seed.

Because this seed inside of you is not capable of this impressive feat, you replace it with a copy of what you see from the outside. Now, you can “do that trick”, but it’s not connected to anything else inside of you.

Now, imagine instead of replacing that seed, you start to nurture it. You use what is outside to indicate possibilities, as a roadmap, but you don’t replace the essential quality. You nurture that seed until IT is ready to perform the trick.

That is the autochthonous movement, bringing OURSELVES to the practice.