Alignment / Body Nerds Unite! VOLUME 2 in D.A.F.M.O.D.Q.

Alignment in action after action after action in the studio

Hi! Here's Take 2 in in the dance writing bonanza. 


Dance A's For My Own Damn Q's
VOLUME 2:  ALIGNMENT / BODY NERDS UNITE!
What is your experience of alignment and posture? Where do these ideas come from in your history? Is alignment changeable?

Ideas of alignment are so ingrained in my dancing history that I hardly know how I would stand without dance. Since I can remember, being in dance class meant a longing for an unachievable up-ness. A noble pursuit, but for gravity. Jump up, head up, eyes up, kick your legs way up. Go for the superhuman. Teach a bear to fly.

My mother was always worried about slouching. We have a familiar, familial history of casual schlumping, and it even had a name:  the famously sweet "Benesch Slouch" on my mama's side of the family. No one was a hunchback by any means; I don't remember anyone really slouching. It was just a fear of slouching. Nevertheless, to her unending credit, my mom has done miraculous, heart-opening things in her yoga practice. Plus, her natural effervescence and buoyancy keep her perpetually youthful and up. It keeps me up, too.

Erika and I hang in the balance

A true, tactile experience of alignment (a stacking of bone, form as function, standing flow) didn't creep into my awareness until college. Then it began to simmer and steep during the magic of grad school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain. In my first week, Jan Erkert (who now heads up the program) was an invaluable guest artist for a workshop on "teaching dance." I wasn't yet a teacher. I thought I could be, but at 24, I hadn't really taught a soul. I didn't even have the confidence or courage to "audition" as a graduate teaching artist for my first semester, so I spent my grad assistant hours filing dance articles (probably reading them more than filing them). Jan has us do a simple walking exercise with a partner--walking and observing our partner in motion. What do you see? A simple beginning I've done in many forms many times over since then, but it was the dawning of seeing habits. Feeling them, really. Finding out what's been dormant or chronic or shining or painful. Who are we when we step forward? At the time, I was a young woman weeks away from a haunting hamstring injury that speaks to me still, 13 years later. Hello, body. Which foot is always first? What happens if the other foot is first. I didn't yet know.

Grad school was rich with...are there adjectives worthy?...outrageously gifted teachers. I received Laban and Bartenieff Fundamentals teachings from Sara Hook and Sara Lampert Hoover. I took Alexander Technique and Kinesiology with Rebecca Nettl-Fiol and Alexander and Ballet with Luc Vanier. I danced in class with Cynthia Oliver and Renée Wadleigh. I uncovered the joys of yoga with Linda Lehovec. I could go on. This is only scratching the surface of teachers and talents. I could write for years and never touch the knowledge I was exposed to or the gratitude I feel for being lucky enough to be there. Writing about it makes me little-kid wish with eyes squeezed shut that I was back in that wonderful womb of self-inquiry. It's hard to do on my own. But this post is a start, eh? We press on, aligning as we go. For a few different classes, I mapped my body, literally. A friend would help me crime-scene trace my outline, then I would color myself happy with crayons, adding emotion, injury, imagination, budding anatomical know-how.

(Side note...I am perched on the very edge of a cushion on the very edge of a chair that is too low for this table to write. Right leg is haphazardly over the left, half asleep. My head is in my hand and my spine, as is customary, is windswept to the right. Left-handedly I scrawl outside of every line. So...)

It may be as simple as saying "bending my knee changed my life." My experience of alignment (and therefore the world) has its roots in unlocking my knees. My hyperextension pushed my knees way back. I'm sure my whole teenage persona hinged on my precarious locked-back legs and swayed hips cocked and locked and ready for nothing. I even had a habit of snapping and jerking my knee back to get it to "pop" like a knuckle. Violent.

Thankfully, gracious and wise teachers have led me towards an ease in my joints, a softening to lengthen. Invite the "micro bend," as a true body nerd might know it. Now, alignment for me is like breathing before I speak. It's a fluid give and take, a kindness. It's sensual rather than stiff, a supple awareness, an ever-growing out to grow in.

Up to go Down

I like to say "hanging from the sky," and I do. More and more my movement images ingrain themselves in my psyche. What I tell myself I am. I am my alignment, an ongoing story. I like the stories that take me up, help me imagine, teach me to fly. My teaching language talks of puppetry, push-toys and starfish.

And, of course, we can't go up without down. Alignment is teeming with paradox, and as Parker Palmer would attest, we must hold the paradox. We need to unhook to connect. We need ease in our strength. We must breathe in to breathe out. We are many things at once. Alignment is how we are in the world, an everyday expression of who we are.

So is alignment changeable? As the wind. I have felt it bone-deep in my body and I've seen it in action in everyone I meet. But I know that alignment is a source of feeling stuck for so many people. They use the term "posture" and when I think of "posture" I think of stuck in the mud. Fixed. Born with it, deal with it. I hear so often, "I have terrible posture." It is what it is, yes, but then the weather shifts, your mood shifts. You hear good news, your heart sinks. Then we see who we are, where we are. How do you feel? How tall are you? Alignment isn't frozen. It's steam. It's water. It's so fluid it's happening right now. It's warm and malleable and meant to support you.

Try this. Melt your heels. Breathe in between your toes. Ease the fronts of your ankles. Unhook the backs of your knees. Suspend your pelvis over your legs. Fly up and away from your hip flexors. Your spine floats, curving ever up. Lungs expand in 360 degrees. There's a slow, helium-bounce buoyancy to your heart. Oh, especially the back of your heart. Yes. Underneath your ears you tickle with uplift, a secret, a sending. The back of your skull simply hangs from the sky. You receive it. Your eyes blink. Let go, listen in. You are standing grounded, moving every upward.

As changeable as the weather...strong as the wind