Tarantism: Movement as healing?

Can you imagine a condition with physiological symptoms such as the blackening of the hands and face, causing vomiting, fainting, and reportedly death, which had no remedy... save for an uncontrolled shaking and flailing that can be said to mimic only dance? 

Tarantism is one such condition. What explains such a phenomenon? Is it reducible to anomaly or hysteria? Would it be any more anomalous than the ability of psychological stressors and loneliness to be immunosuppressant or carcinogenic? Does it perhaps instead shed light on the human condition? Maybe that says more of our relationship to hysteria… maybe hysteria isn’t some side-effect of the proper mind, but is rather a proper-effect of the side-mind… 

The existence of Tarantism also opens up lines of inquiry within the field of of movement. What is going on with that category of movements that is  not just involuntary, but voluntarily involuntary? What is it about movement that we invite, that we can guide but not directly control? Does this overlap with dance? Is Tarantism a dance? Is an exorcism a dance? Or is dance a form of possession - in which you set the parameters with your intentions and background and the patterns stored in your basal ganglia, but you don’t decide what comes next. What’s the name for the factor that decides what comes next? A djinn? A dybbuk? 

We’ll be screening a documentary on the topic of Tarantism on November 2nd. Here’s the event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/626958657711019/

“… began first moving the feet, legs shortly afterwards. He stood on his knees. Soon after an interval he arose swaying. Finally, in the space of a quarter of an hour he was leaping, nearly three palms from the ground. Sighed, but with such great impetus, that it terrorised bystanders, and before an hour, the black was gone from his hands and face, and he regained his native colour.” 

At the Edge

When you’re going to the edge, whichever edge, the edge of reason and sanity, or of weightshift and balance… what defines the moment is the quality of attention. You can afford no lapse in concentration, no hubris to lure you beyond the base of support. 

To stay sane, to keep balance as you flirt with madness and falling... this is how poets live, but it’s how we all realize the moment. 

Why do you think we return to these places, over and over? 

Where do you think the mystery and paradox of creativity is born? All life is an improvisation, but we’re asleep to that fact 99% of the time - making it feel like anything but. We live for the other 1% - when we realize, oh shit, I have no idea what’s coming next. Of course, we never knew what was coming next, we all just fall for the statistical anomaly of a seemingly persisting state of things. Pattern recognition is the boon of humanity, and the curse. 

So it’s up to us as a society to find the edges, to constantly generate pattern interruption. 

The Missing Body User Manual

It’s curious - we come into this world with the absolute highest form of technological development, the human body, and seemingly zero instruction on how to operate it. 

Why is that? Why don’t we come into this world with a body user manual? At first glance, it would seem obvious that evolutionarily, we should be optimized to survive by coming into this world with only the best instincts. Instincts for eating, for moving, for fighting… Why do I need to train to avoid the startle reflex when I get hit in the face? Why must I work on coordination, timing, distance management (as Ido puts it, installing the booster packs for our instincts)? 

One common answer is thatwe are “distracted” from the body user manual by our modern environment. But… maybe the answer is less based on an argument in favor of a lost past, and more… science. 

Why, from a neuroscience and evolutionary biology perspective, are we not optimized with a "body user manual” (“perfect” instincts)? 

The reason is… because not having a body user manual IS the most optimal. By sacrificing a user manual, we ended up with something much greater - the most neuro-flexibility of any animal.

Unlike other animals, we don’t have a “natural” way of being. Our natural way is to invent artifice at the first opportunity. This allows us to be the most complex creatures on this planet, the most anti-fragile, the most creative… We can pick and build our instincts, to create the vision of ourselves that we wish; that’s amazing enough that I could spend all day doing it… 

What system are you?

Bodies organized into somatotypes… that’s old-hat. Lesser known, but more interesting… which “system” dominates? The same Dr. Sheldon who gave us endo/meso/ecto- morph gave us also viscero/somato/cerebro- tonia.

• Viscerotonia: focused on the digestive system, enjoyment of the processes of the human body.
• Somatotonia: focused on the musculoskeletal system, there is a need for physical exertion
• Cerebrotonia: focused on the nervous system, hungry for intellectual/mental stimulation

In the way psychology describes them, they are all defined by their excesses - viscerotonia is nearly synonymous with gluttony and hedonism, cerebrotonia with being stuck in the head, somatotonia with aggressiveness.

But there’s a way of inverting this pathologizing and revealing insight… What happens when you bring these three into balance?

A movement practice has the effect of balancing these dispositions. In the right balance, there is doing / thinking / being. Action, reflection, stillness. You are the athlete, thriving in the exertion of fighting, improvisation, competition. You are the philosopher, sitting back to reflect on all of it, recalibrating and mapping the territory. You are the yogi, able to sit and enjoy the processes of the body.

You’re disposed to one? Run towards the others. The neurotic cerebrotonic doesn’t need to read another book… maybe s/he can learn to sit, simply sit (no, not a book in hand). The meathead somatotonic doesn’t need, maybe, to hit another PR… maybe you can steal a book from the cerebrotonic. And the relaxed viscerotonic - go lift something heavy, for god’s sake.

Long has philosophy looked to resolve our nature, with conceptions such as the tripartite soul, or mind-body dualism, or four humors. The Greeks did it, the Ayurverdic did this, every psychological “-ism” does it, statistical analyses attempt to identify them… This is just one way to “slice and dice” (as Ido describes it). What an incredibly useful tool, if only we understand its applications and limitations.

Movement Practice

It would seem that the only way to practice movement is through specific disciplines – gymnastics, dance, fighting, fitness (god forbid), etc. But there is another way – broader, more general, and connecting the dots, exploring the space between the disciplines. That’s what we’re after: we want to create a practice around movement itself. It appeals to us, because that’s who we are, people pulled in by big pictures.

But movement is an incomprehensibly large universe, and we run into problems, dilemmas and obstacles. Lack of clarity, lack of community, lack of process. Not knowing where to start, what to aim for, who to practice with, when to shift gears, etc.

There IS an approach, a way to navigate the chaos… for those who understand the importance of a process and who believe it’s worth the work and effort to transform their physicality. IF you come to learn, you will walk away understanding more and more of this complex subject of movement.

Nobody walks in knowing what’s going on. But the longer you stick around, the more and more you realize how little you understand, and the more space you make for yourself for real growth.