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For this last week of Body Stories, I decided to choose the chapter on Emotions. This chapter focused largely on the fact that motion forces the body to release emotion. I remember at the beginning of this course we talked briefly about the fact that dance can bring out emotions naturally. While true, I’ve also found that this is true in other movement patterns too. For me, exercise is a daily practice I’ve done for the sake of maintaining my stress levels. In Body Stories, this largely centers around the physical sensations of exercise, but chemically in the body there are also endorphins released as well. In the exercise about moving contrasts, I found myself very easily finding the difference between positive and negative emotions. While beauty and joy all manifested themselves in very flowy movement, depression became much less movement based. I found myself in a fetal position and on the ground a lot more, something which I definitely associate with depression in general. Rage, on the other hand, became very rapid and had very sharp movements. Hence, any extreme emotion ended up being at either end of my movement abilities. On the other hand, joy and beauty ended up coming out of my body in much more subtle ways. While this speaks to the way that I understand emotions in relation to movement, I think it also speaks to the way that I understand emotions in general. I’m not sure that I see rage on one end of the spectrum and depression on the other with joy somewhere in between. Rather, I’m not sure that emotions are on a spectrum at all. Perhaps they simply coexist and call upon different levels of energy depending on my association with them.

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For this week’s Body Stories chapter, I chose to do the digestion chapter. In class throughout the semester we’ve talked a few times about the fact that alongside the muscles we discuss weekly are our other organs and systems that keep us alive. I think it’s easy to talk about that in class, but in actuality I don’t really think about my body as a system. There’s something odd to me to consider my body’s spaces used to dance to be shared with that of digestion. Yet, in Body Stories I found myself questioning not only why I find that to be so odd, but also the role of my body as a continuous system. Body Stories asked me to consider the digestive system as a single tube, and in doing so also considered whether we can view the musculature of the body the same way. Though we’ve discussed how one muscle must relax for another to contract, viewing the entire muscular system as a larger system is an interesting concept to think about. The other thing that this exercise made me question was how much my digestive system must affect my movement patterns. I know that when I eat a large meal before dancing I tend to feel groggy, but I know this also is affected further as well. It’s just another thing to think about as the semester progresses.

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In this week’s Body Stories chapter, I found myself easily exploring the difference between function and structure in joints. There is a distinct difference between the function of my joints and when I feel them to be most used, however. Despite the fact that I know my joints are used in almost every motion my body makes, I most often consider them when they are absorbing an inordinate amount of shock. For example, jumping or landing hard on my feet reminds me of the fact that my joints are the things catching me when I fall. In this activity, I found it harder to locate the physical space around my joints. It’s easy for me to understand my hip joint conceptually. But when asked to bring my attention to the space between my bones, I found myself questioning how to access that space. To have that direct relationship with my body in such a concentrated space seems unachievable to me. Because of that, I wonder how it is possible for others and what leads people to be that in tune with their bodies. Body Stories asked me to consider the difference that focusing on joints versus the space between joints changes movement, and though I did notice a slight difference in the fluidity in my movement, it was much more of a conceptual movement structure than it was from a literal physical space in my body. Being more in tune with my body is something I’m hoping to work towards further, especially since questioning it so much in this exercise.

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I remember being in my dance class in eleventh grade when my teacher told us that most of us are probably standing wrong. I’m not sure what prompted her to do this. Maybe it was the fact that we all had crooked posture or maybe it was a planned part of teaching alignment. Regardless, it remains a core memory for me. In that class, I realized that I naturally stand on the arches of my feet, not the outer part which you’re supposed to. It’s interesting to think about this in terms of not only dance, but other parts of my life as well. Most days of the week, I run. In learning about the way that I run I’ve been told by many running store employees that I overpronate, and I even wear stability shoes to correct this issue. I think that my relationship to my own feet is one which I maybe should have considered earlier but didn’t. Instead, I ended up relying on my natural foot patterns and then re-examining them later on. In this exercise today, I’ve realized how this natural imbalance in my feet extends to releve. While normally this is a setback, in releve I’ve found myself easily resorting to falling inwards on the balls of my feet in order to maintain balance. This has led me to further question my relationship with my feet because rather than seeing it as a setback, I’ve found myself in a place where there are benefits to the very movement patterns that I’ve always seen as negative. Despite my lack of attention to this up until now, I know that this will likely affect my understanding of my movement patterns moving forward.

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The iliopsoas is a muscle which I’ve often neglected. It’s one which I know to be important because of past dance teachers, and yet I still find difficulty in working with it. In this exercise, I found myself at first struggling to find where my psoas is. It seemed to me that this muscle was lost under or around others, so while trying to access my psoas I ended up actually feeling things more in my lower abdomen in other places. Because of this, I ended up slowing down and repeating this exercise multiple times in order to figure out what the somatic sensations were. I think one of the most interesting parts of this exercise was about forming pathways. The book says “You may have walked one route for years, but once you learn the new one, it is there for your use” (89). This concept of route changing is particularly interesting in relation to the body because of the connection between neural pathways and movement patterns. While it may be a habit now for me to ignore my psoas and require extra time to find it somatically, the potential for new movement patterns is there. This has led me to question not only the potential for my own body, but also the different movement patterns that different people have. Based on where you were raised or what activities you did growing up, it’s natural to have different bodily patterns. That being said, when specifically talking about the iliopsoas it’s interesting to think about what types of movement patterns lend themselves to understanding the psoas better.

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My body has been through most of the standard things that it must endure in order to be considered a trained dancing body. However, throughout my childhood of being a dancer, I was also a horseback rider. These two activities combined put my body under different kinds of stress, and I’ve noticed that as a result of focusing more on horseback riding than dance later on in life, my hips and in particular my hip flexors are extremely tight. Hence, when doing this exercise with the pelvis, I was hyper aware of my own tightness in my hips and their relationship with my pelvis. As a kid, I remember having the words “good turn out” drilled into my head for years in dance classes. Yet, I don’t think I connected the experience of turning out your leg with my hip socket. Instead, I was always taught that it was a connection from foot to leg and a rotation in your leg. I suppose that implies your hip joint as well, but it also disconnects the idea of turning out from your hip and therefore prohibits any reflection on the connection between the pelvis and spine. Now, having been in this class for half  of a semester, I immediately noticed a relationship between my spine and turning out my leg. When I slowed down this movement, I realized that my pelvis has mobility within itself while also being connected to the spine. Despite my understanding of what “good” turn out is, I now understand on a deeper level how it feels and where it lives in the body as well.

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While doing all of these exercises with the shoulder girdle, I’ve often found that my own ability to open up my shoulder joint is inhibited by my perception of the anatomy of a shoulder joint. In past sports, shoulder circles have been a regular warmup. However, it’s common to do lots of shoulder circles quickly, and I’ve found that in slowing them down I’ve learned that my shoulder is much less limited than I thought. In the part of Body Stories that says not to dwell on places of tightness, I was confused at first. It seems contradictory to avoid the places where your body struggles. I’ve always been taught to push through and fight moments of physical limits in order to push myself. Instead, by focusing on what I can do rather than what I can’t, I’ve learned  that the shoulder has physical capacity not only in a rolling action, but also with more subtle movement forwards and backwards. It’s interesting to me how quickly I was able to fight my body rather than agree with it and find motion within a space that is available. Too often, I associate my body as an instrument with which to experience or perform something rather than as simply myself. The connection between the shoulder girdle and the rest of the arm is one example of this as well. Despite my experience in my body for nineteen years, I’ve not noticed how difficult it is to move your arm without using your shoulder girdle. This lack of connection between different body parts is something that I hope to continue to explore and try to change.

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The importance of breath is something that has been drilled into me for as long as I can remember. Growing up, I did a lot of different sports that emphasize the importance of breathing. In particular, while in dance breath can influence your movement patterns to extremes, I’ve also been told that this is the same case in horseback riding and in running as well. In fact, when I was younger, I actually had a bad habit of holding my breath when riding horses and it affected me so much that it was noticeable to  my coach almost immediately. It makes sense in principle that our breath would affect so much of our movement. It’s such a fundamental piece to our bodily function. Without breath, we simply wouldn’t be able to live. In this exercise, however, I found it particularly interesting to realize the space that my breath takes up in my body. Most of the time, breath is involuntary and it is subdued to the point where I know how to avoid it. Yet, my breathing was located largely in the upper part of my ribs during this exercise, which is where I think that it is most naturally located. I realized during this exercise that my breathing patterns are actually very shallow. This surprised me because I always assumed that my breath capacity has been developed to breathe more slowly through dance and running and other sports. Yet, I found myself involuntarily questioning what my breathing is, and how it changes based on whatever activity I’m doing. This is definitely something I’ll be observing throughout other more physical activities this week, and see if my breathing changes as time goes on.

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This week’s section largely focuses on the spine and its articulation throughout. Despite our work on the spine from the beginning of this class, I always have thought of the spine as a single long piece of the body. This section of the book challenges that, forcing me to see the spine as a whole but also as a sum of anterior and posterior curves. When I went through the individual exercises from this week, especially the rolling down of the spine, I found it especially difficult to find these different kinds of curves. While I naturally have them in my spine and can easily feel the difference between each part of my spine when sitting, standing, and laying down, for some reason when movement is involved I lose the ability to articulate my spine’s parts. Upon further thinking, I’ve realized that part of this is likely because I have always either focused on spinal balance as an elongated part of my body in dance forms like ballet, or focused on individual vertebrae in order to accomplish a different goal in classes like yoga. This exercise made me question if this is an experience that only happens in my spine or if there are other parts of my body that I can move while focusing on one individual part or the whole, but not sections. This is when I realized that I focus largely on one bodily movement rather than my whole body at once. Hence, this experience extends to most of my body. A realization like this is one that I know I need to focus on in the coming classes, but it was a realization that I hadn’t considered before.

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During the articulating the bones part of this exercise, I found myself engaging in something I hadn’t done before. There have been many times when I’ve been asked to move from an internal energy or even from specific muscles contracting before, but I haven’t ever paid special attention to the bones in my body as I move. At first, I found it incredibly difficult to locate the bones in my body and move from them. It’s much easier for me to think of my body as a cohesive unit, or even its individual parts as cohesive units. For example, thinking of my hand or finger as a part of my body rather than the bones in my finger. By focusing on the bones in my body specifically, I found myself engaging with my inner energy much more easily. Soon, I began to notice the differences between the way my body moved when I focused on the small bones like my fingers versus larger sections of my body, like my pelvis or spine. For me, the larger movements became more difficult because I found it harder to focus on a larger bone in my body all at once. When I was working with a smaller section of my body, it was easier to know exactly where every piece of bone was at any given moment. In the moving from bone section, this stark difference only increased, as I noticed a difference between connective tissue and bone as well. Moving from connective tissue made my movements much more controlled, whereas when I focused on my bones I found it easier to maintain that control without as much effort muscularly. Despite these differences, I found myself engaging with my body in two entirely new ways, which was definitely a challenge.

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This exercise of finding my postural alignment changed the way that I viewed my center in a new way. For me, I immediately noticed the difference between touching the center of my own head and how it felt when a classmate touched the center of my head in class last week. In that moment, finding my own center was trickier than someone else seeing my center from the outside, which surprised me. I expected it to be very easy to find my center but when looking at myself in the mirror I realized that my center wasn’t truly my center at all. In the past, I’ve been told by dance teachers and horseback riding coaches both that I tend to stand crooked and of course I believed them but I didn’t expect it to affect this exercise. Even when doing the identifying landmarks part of this activity, I found myself examining my body’s two halves very closely. Feeling the bones in my legs and where my joints connect allowed me to compare my body as a whole as well as one side and the other. In my “hang out” position, I found myself examining my body in this way even further. My landmarks for alignment differed in position not from side to side, but rather when viewed from the front or back. I believe that this is likely an old injury that has forced me to become comfortable in the fact that my body is uneven. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if this affects my landmarks for alignment in a way that makes them different from others.

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While doing these exercises and engaging with the vocabulary presented, I found myself especially questioning planes of motion and the meaning of a center of gravity. For me, this center of gravity is colloquially known as a centering mechanism of our bodies to keep us upright and balanced. Naturally, this biologically works with other parts of our bodies to maintain balance as well. In the context of dance, I’d always seen my center of gravity as the thing that is most trusted by the dancer. Even when going off balance purposefully, I’ve always been taught to trust that your center of gravity will come back to catch you. This book states that the center of gravity is behind your belly button, yet I know that this differs biologically between women and men. Pondering all of this made me ask the question of how dance differs on the different sexes, and how modern dance takes a different form on different bodies. For me, I’ve found my center of gravity to be something that I have a very strong relationship with. Throughout dance and sports I’ve done throughout my life, being balanced has become in many ways more of a conscious experience than I think it is for most people. While others can let this process happen naturally, I think that being a dancer has forced me to confront and grapple with the concept of my center of gravity. So, I suppose that it isn’t just what kinds of bodies interpret a center of gravity to be, but also how our experiences change that center of gravity. I find movement translated onto different bodies to be such a fascinating concept, and considering one’s center of gravity is a main building block in that study.

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From what I recall, my childhood was filled with jumping in mud puddles and twirling in the grass until the world spun. Even as a young child, I’ve always used dance as a means to express my emotions more accurately than I feel words ever could. As with my two sisters, my parents encouraged me to do dance classes as soon as I could. I’m aware that this isn’t a unique experience. Yet, for me going to dance class became a place where all of my energy could run free. Dance became a place where I found both my mind and body taking up space, something I hadn’t been able to find in sports I’d done. Maybe that’s why these dance classes ended up lasting through seventh grade. In between studio sessions in ballet, jazz, and lyrical, my movement came in pedestrian forms too. One of my core memories from childhood is painting the barn in my backyard with my older sister. With our hands covered in red paint and Taylor Swift’s “Picture to Burn” blasting on an old boombox, dancing was simply a release. Even after I stopped being trained to dance in middle school, I’ve always found myself seeking solutions to my problems through movement. In high school, my efforts switched to focus much more on horseback riding, which is the sport that had always existed alongside dance. Nonetheless, there were many nights that I improvised movements in the dance studio at my high school in order to release the day’s emotions. Soon, it became a ritual for me to end up in the dance studio at least a couple of times a week. In eleventh grade, I began the International Baccalaureate program and decided to do IB Dance SL as one of my classes. Honestly, it wasn’t much of a debate—I think part of me always knew I’d get back to dancing. For the next two years, learning about different cultures and their movement styles as well as developing my own skills as a choreographer meant that I was able to find a new way to love dancing too. Now, as a sophomore in college, I know that I’m definitely a little rusty on the technique side. I don’t even remember the last time that I’ve been in a studio. Somehow, though, I haven’t lost the living room dancing side of me—and for that, my love of dance continues.