in peripheral vision, soft focus with awareness of self and what surrounds you. Now use your eyes to see something specific, drawing you out into space.
• Grow a tail of your choice: poodle, salamander, or dinosaur. Move your tail and feel how it resonates throughout your spine. Enjoy! Shake out any tension from your spine, as you elongate head-to-tail.
• Continue moving, dancing, exploring all the senses involved in orientation (tonic system): hands and feet, spine, otoliths, and eyes.
• Now, yield down to the floor, lying on your back and releasing your weight into the ground.
• Feel the sensations of being “backed up,” surface to surface, supported by the Earth.
• Yield, and breathe deeply—full breath in and full breath out.
• Before you roll to a seated position, notice the pre-movement in your body. Can you stay spacious as you prepare to bring yourself to vertical?
• Stand, connecting to weight and space. Maintain a sense of back-space, supporting your depth as you look forward.
The pre-, pre-, pre-movement of dancing on the Earth is yield, connecting down toward gravity so you can push away and move through space.
TO DANCE
Familiar-Voice Dancing
10–20 minutes
Begin with what’s familiar: your idiosyncratic movement and heritage, your own dance vocabulary.
Start moving:
• Enjoy what feels good as you’re dancing: your unique sense of time, space, and dynamics.
• Notice your signature movements (those that show up in every dance).
• Dance long enough that you have to dig deep for endurance. Stay close to your true self.
• Find an ending or transition.
• If working in a group, improvise your familiar-voice dance witnessed by others. Form a circle and alternate who enters to solo; watchers stay open and ready to enter (1–5 minutes each). Explore improvising this voice in different places—for example, the studio, outdoors, and in your kitchen. Does place change how you move, how you perceive yourself?
TO WRITE
Personal Orientation
20 minutes
What do you care about, and how is that reflected in your work? Open your writing journal. Begin with “I care about,” and write for 10 minutes; then change to “I don’t care about” and continue for 10 more minutes. Fill pages. Write faster than you can think. Be open to surprise; don’t preknow the answer.
Hubert Godard teaching at Resources in Movement; Caryn McHose (facing)
Photograph © Kevin Frank
About the Tonic System
There are nerve endings in the soles of your feet, the palms of your hands, and the inner ear longing to orient you to the present moment. This is called the tonic system. These specialized nerve endings evolved to feed the movement brain, the parts of your nervous system that need information about context, answering the question, Where am I?*
*Kevin Frank writes in Tonic System (2004): “Tonic Function is the name for a model of structural integration developed by French dance professor, researcher, and Rolfer, Hubert Godard. Tonic function links structural integration to current scientific research and historical studies of movement and development” (16–18).
Photograph © Marilynne Morshead
STUDIO NOTES
BONNIE BAINBRIDGE COHEN addresses the distinction between yielding and collapse in this section of her article “Dancing through the Transitional Fluid,” published in Contact Quarterly (2009):1
Everyone has a different fluid-membrane balance [in the cells]—a basic constitutional preference that also varies from day to day. Many people don’t know how to maintain balance. Balancing involves flow toward the earth and/or space, flow coming back to self, and transitional fluid: flowing in or out. Flowing in gives the sense of more fullness of self; flowing out gives the sense of a release into gravity or space. Many accomplished dancers are most often flowing out. How do they perceive self-nourishing? For the dancers who are more inwardly focused, how do they perceive what other dancers and audience members are feeling/doing?
Distinguish between collapsing—letting go of the membrane so there’s flow only in one direction, toward gravity—and yielding, where there is reciprocity of fluids flowing into and out of the cells. Collapsing, you give up your weight to gravity, surrendering totally. Yielding involves release into gravity with rebound and resilience.
Collapse is not necessarily a bad thing; it may be the first step in recuperating. If you’re exhausted, it takes time to become activated again. Let go of the membranes until there is another kind of energy that creates a desire to move that is not connected to the will. If you are pulling away from gravity (holding the cell membranes so you can’t feel your own weight), you might need to collapse until you discover the relationship that goes both ways. It is only by giving your weight to gravity that you can perceive the weight itself and then feel the rebound. Feel the fluids flow through the membranes, finding the return to self and the release of self into the earth and into the universe. This cycling of the fluids is a natural phenomenon.
Exploring Collapse and Yielding
• Lying on the floor, explore the sensation of collapse—letting go of your membranes so you feel flow in only one direction, toward gravity.
• Explore yielding, feeling release into gravity with natural rebound (awareness of “antigravity,” that is, levity or support), where there is reciprocity of fluids flowing into and out of the cells. If you are fatigued, this may take time. Rest until you feel restored, with enough rebound/sense of self that you have energy for motion.
• Change—spontaneously move in space, yielding toward heaven.
• Flow into stillness.
• Change—again release and move into space. (Keep the moment of change spontaneous—faster than you can think. Then it goes wherever it’s going.)
• Flow again into stillness. (Never lose connection to the earth or to yourself; be comfortable while you explore.)
• Alternate between spontaneous transition into movement—yielding toward earth (gravity), yielding toward heaven (space)—and flowing toward stillness (self), feeling the relationship and rebound.
• While moving, transitioning, or being still, notice the fleeting moment of surrender that precedes change—of
