Movement is a hologram
Movement practice is a hologram - our practice is not in the sum of the parts. It is not defined by the specifics, but more in the path that binds them together.
If you cut a photograph in half, you have two incomplete halves, but if you cut a hologram in half, you still have two complete wholes.
Movement practice is a hologram - our practice is not in the sum of the parts. It is not defined by the specifics, but more in the path that binds them together.
As Gilles Deleuze says - "there is other, without there being several".
This was the punchline on Saturday. We had an intro session for students to clarify the basics of some of the subjects we are tackling lately. We worked on mobility, dynamic posture and reaction games, floorwork, organic and gymnastic strength, proprioceptive mapping, etc…
But what makes this movement, what defines the intrinsic nature of what we do, is NOT those things. It is only contained in them.
If you remove the gymnastic rings, or some system, or a specific protocol, or whatever, guess what - we still have a practice.
Welcome to the hologram.
From zero to one: “fail until you fail to fail”
At first, it feels hopelessly impossible - there’s no way to keep up 3 sticks with 2 hands.
A far cry from adding another rep or kilo; to paraphrase, it’s more like going from zero to one.
How do you start from zero, from 100% failure rate? In the spirit we learned from Ido: “failing until you fail to fail”.
And so we introduce such processes into our practice, to acquire that true beginner’s mind.
Integration Beats Power
New computers can be designed in such a way that the components (cpu, memory, neural engine, etc) are integrated onto a single chip as opposed to having the components be spread across and connected through a motherboard. The tighter integration result in superior efficiency and performance, so that a device that with much weaker support (eg RAM) can run circles around a similar motherboard-based computer with more.
When we work on coordination and connection and teach our body to work as a unified whole, aren’t we working on an analogous process? Sure, we want to work on improving the component attributes themselves, the elasticity and strength and reaction and timing and and and. But by working on coordination and connectivity, we also get to work on pulling these together in a superior way, resulting in greater force transmission, efficiency, and still with the quickest time possible.
(With the system-on-a-chip design, it comes at a cost - a loss of flexibility/modularity. You cannot swap out components as easily. But we CAN adapt the components, and then re-solder the separate things into the unified whole, recalibrating the thing.)
If we didn't need integration, doing footwork and spine work would be enough to succeed in tasks using both, but when we confront a task requiring a synthesis of qualities, we realize it’s not. That task, which can be extraordinarily simple in nature, by operating at a higher level than the isolated qualities will produce many many connections between those various layers. Redundancy is thus built in.
And we don’t need perfect connectivity, to do reps of everything to everything else - once we do enough, like a team of teams, there is enough connection.
So, often it will seem like we are disconnecting things, like footwork from the spine, to accomplish a task, because there isn’t a 1 to 1 relationship between what the feet and spine are doing. But actually, they are integrated into countless new patterns (transistors, to stay close in the analogy). This is the singular power of these synthesis-provoking tasks.
(As above, so below)
Movement as language
Movement is not a language...
Movement IS language.
As Merleau Ponty says of language - “there is only one language in a state of becoming... that is becoming different from itself while remaining the same”.
There isn’t some collection of “movements”, but just movement as dynamic phenomenon, a non-static entity that unfolds into the many manifestations that we call movements, and is never really distinct from those many manifestations, but neither is it apart from them...
To see movement at the same hierarchical level AS language, is to realize the enormity of what it is, can be, and can bring into our lives as container...
Don’t Kill the Golden Goose: the Uncontrollable is Sacred.
I could build the perfect wall in my studio, then maybe a rail, and all the other things besides. I’d never have to venture outside; I would have the perfect self-contained environment of practice.
Except...
Except, I would lose the part of my practice that demands adapting to a changing scenario by finding hidden solutions.
Except, I would lose the part of my practice that pushes me out of my comfort zone.
Except, I would lose the part of my practice that involves discovering unknowns within the task, as the environment itself changes in unpredictable ways.
Except, wouldn’t the entire endeavor denature the essence of an “Environmental Movement Practice”?
Environment represents what we don’t have control over. This uncontrollability is tied fundamentally together with the qualities that we turn to environment for - it is a golden goose, and if we exert too much influence, we suffocate it.
This is endemic to movement practice, a key genetic material - we must embrace it, planting seeds that nourish chaos and uncertainty within the edifices, concrete and conceptual, that we build.