Laban Resources
Warren Lamb
Interview in March 2010
Interview March 2010
Summary of Interview
Shadow Movements and Notation. There’s not much here that he hasn’t already said in earlier interviews. Again, WL relates that Shadow Movements can be useful in theatre. Fidgetting related to Shadow Movements. If you can’t see a movement confidently, ignore it. We can only work on the basis of what we can see. Polarities in Movement Factors (i.e. Direct and Indirect, Strong and Light, Sudden and Sustained) in Laban’s terminology and how they relate to WL’s MPA. How he gradually developed his own terms and why. Reference to Culver Barker, a Jungian psychiatrist who had a big influence on WL and his first wife, Joan Carrington. The relation between Jung and Laban.
The Interview
The first question I want to ask you is about Shadow Movements and Notation. You and Laban had clearly talked about this together.
Laban made a lot of references to Shadow Movements but particularly in his work with actors at the Civic Theatre. Later he began to talk about Shadow Movements expressively. When I was working with him in factories trying to observe people and we got from the observation of the bench to management, then Laban would often make reference to Shadow Movements. And these were, for example, I remember him saying, ‘Movements that flow across the surface of the body’ and he illustrated them very often by the flicker of an eyebrow, or a twitch of the check, or a wriggle of the shoulder. I was always at a loss to understand how first he could observe or notate them. I don’t recall him notating them. He often used drawings. He was of course a very competent artist. He used to say to me that if you were in doubt about how to record something, then make a drawing of it. I tried but I couldn’t be as capable as he was in drawing.
So, Shadow Movements were often depicted as those small sorts of movements that we often do which may have great meaning, but how they contributed to the work that Laban and I were doing in what was called industry at that time but grew into management, I was never quite sure how they contributed. And Laban insisted that they were in the category of functional actions, but functional actions he often described as if lifting arm movement, for example, had an object that was being lifted, then it was functional. If it didn’t have an object, a similar movement would be described as expressive. I could certainly understand Shadow Movements as being expressive. Indeed, I mean a very little flicker of the eyebrow can have momentous implications. But I couldn’t quite relate them to what was described as functional actions, and the difference between functional and expressive. Certainly they could be expressive, but expressive of what? This was my problem which really took some years to work out. And so eventually I felt that what was usually recognised according to Laban as Shadow Movements came under the heading of gestures. Shadow Movements can be regarded in my opinion as a division of the gesture category but how to notate it? I mean how do you notate a flicker of the eyebrow? Most Shadow Movements seem to have quickness as part of their composition. So it’s very difficult to notate at all comparably to a movement of the hand or a gesture of the arm where you can see something which is getting stronger or lighter, or more direct, or quicker or slower. You could see that in an arm, but according to Laban, a movement flitting across the surface is very difficult to describe. It could well be in time to come with sophisticated computerised instruments it will be possible to see lots more going than is detectable with the human eye.
Working the actors, for example, I have always tried to see how a Shadow Movement wherever it happens in the body, relates to other parts of the body, or the body as a whole. Because it seems to me that every movement must have a context, where it is happening within the body. An eyebrow movement happens within the face which is part of the head, which is part of the body. So that is a context, and the Shadow Movement can have a different meaning if the posture is a very closed one or if a very open one. I have always tried to teach people to look at the Shadow Movement as a gesture, and then if they can’t do it, if it’s too small to see, then to disregard it. […] I think it is a principle that applies in to the field, that if you can’t see a movement confidently, ignore it. We can only work on the basis of what we can see. However, if you are making a description, not for the purpose of really gaining a meaning, but you can give a subjective interpretation of what a Shadow Movement means, it may be possible to determine that it expresses a certain emotion. There are people that … psychologists who study the relation of facial movements, Paul Ekman, for example. He will look at what Laban would call a Shadow Movement which may be a little twitch of the lip and has categorised certain movements of the face as depicting emotion, particularly one or other of the six major emotions.
I think the concept of Shadow Movements can be helpful in that point of view. But there’s no reason why Ekman’s work, or other people’s work, on very small details of what you can see happening in a person’s body. David Milne is another person. He works at the University of Chicago, he goes into immense detail, particularly into fingers movements – what you’re doing now, just fidgeting. So, fidgeting is a Shadow Movement. However, rather than attempt to describe a fidget, just on its own, it needs to be related to something, to some context. There has been research that people who fidget more live longer, or something like that. Presumably, what constituted the fidget was classified for the purposes of that research.
Fidget isn’t a word that I’ve heard you use before.
In the manuscript of Effort and Recovery, Laban is writing in English, it is his handwriting, and he writes a lot about Body Carriage. It’s my understanding that he relates changes of Body Carriage to Shadow Movements. Could you explain what you think he means by Body Carriage and secondly the relation between Body Carriage and Shadow Movements.
I don’t know the difference between Body Carriage, a term that I don’t recall very much, and Body Attitude which is a term that I do recall a lot. Body Attitude very often is illustrated by Laban students as a fixed stance or pose, and yet I can recall actual occasions when Laban mentioned Body Attitude and he himself would always illustrate a process of movement going from one position to another position. The attitude was expressed in terms of movement not as a foxed position or pose. I think it was an unfortunate phrase because attitude can be understood just as an attacking attitude or militaristic attitude or sloppy attitude, and is not usually envisaged as movement. But for Laban really everything he did was in terms of movement. He was never interesting in anything that was just fixed. So I can only assume that what he meant by ‘carriage’ was perhaps the Flow of movement, it was the introduction of a Shadow Movement that a person might perhaps make into the Flow of how he was progressing.
I find the word ‘carriage’ such an odd word to use.
Perhaps he means that we carry ourselves. One can think of the body as an entity that we carry and on which we do Shadow Movements. He always referred to Shadow Movements as on the surface of the body. He very often talked about Inner Attitude. Perhaps Body Carriage was what happened on the surface of the body as distinct from a Body Attitude which has more to do with the inner attitude? The understanding that Shadow Movement can be meaningful certainly in the theatre and when working with actors, the slightest flicker of movement on the surface of the body could have immense meaning.
Could you talking about indulging in and contending with Motion Factors?
I recall in the 1940s there was quite a lot of discussion about the choice of words. Whether it should be indulging, yielding, or whatever, and the polarity of indulging relative to contending. Initially I think ‘fighting’ was the term used which was later changed to ‘contending’ because people had the image of fighting with people injuring each other. There was quite a lot of discussion about it and my first introduction to what Space, Weight, Time and Flow consisted of, really did consist of these two polarities of Effort, and very often one polarity was discussed or illustrated separately from the other polarity, something which I think now is not very sensible. I think that one polarity should always be seen in relation to the other. I tend to think, so did Laban in what he described. There was discussion of the polarity of Sudden as opposed to Sustained: sustainment in terms of duration as distinct from sustainment as being relative to quickness. I know right from those time, the connection of one from the other, and if you’re going to be quick you’ve got to start from a sustained movement. If you are going to be quick then there’s a limit. As you know, I eventually came to the point that it was better to use the terms Accelerating for Quick and Decelerating for Sustained. That only came about in the ‘50s, the late ‘50s. I don’t recall those terms in connection with the Time Effort ever being used, it was always just Quick or Sustained. I remember one of Lawrence’s consulting staff who took a lot of interest in Laban’s theories, a man called Burnham, he recommended that we should not talk about Quick but brisk! I always recall this man talking about brisk, and getting rather fed up with his insistence that this was the proper term to be used. He didn’t advance any opposite to brisk. Presumably it was brisk and sustained is what he really recommended. To sum up, the polarities of indulging and contending were used quite frequently. They were often associated with whether action could be just fighting. Of course when the fighting Effort polarities came together that’s how Laban got the basic Efforts (Floating, Punching, Gliding, Slashing and so on). It would be described, so for example, Floating combined all the indulging Efforts whereas Punching combined all the fighting Efforts. All the other basic Efforts had combinations of two or one indulging and one or two fighting Motion Factors.
Would it be fair to say in the proposition that there is contending and indulging, that proposition is about polarity?
That is certainly the conclusion that I came to. It is what I believe I observed Laban to do whenever he demonstrated. He did not jump on people in this particular case – as he did in others - when they spoke just of Quickness without seeing as having some sort of relationship to sustainment. When you are going Quick, Quick, Quick, Quick there has to be a momentary reversal of the Quickness in order to repeat the speed. Whether it’s close to the extreme of the Timing polarity or whether it gets closer to the sustained polarity, which would mean a longer acceleration, rather than a shorter acceleration – that was not discussed. This was something that really came out of my years of struggle to find out what it was that Laban was telling me.
In Effort and Recovery Laban uses very frequently the terms Feeling, Sensing, Intuiting and Thinking, although never a direct reference to the name Jung. Could you shed some light on Laban’s relation to Jungian thinking and to these four Mental Factors?
He certainly had connections with Jungians because he worked with a number of psychiatrists, and psychiatrists working at the Withymead community were all Jungians. There was one particular occasion when I must have met ten or twelve psychiatrists for a meeting which I addressed. Questions were asked as to whether Laban had met Jung. I think that he probably did but he never wanted to admit it. I would be interested whether in your research you have come across Laban expressing his debt to any mentor or person who might possibly have influenced him. I certainly believed then and have had to reason to change that since, that he refused to acknowledge any influence and that it was a weakness. Who influenced whom? Because Jung was certainly attracted to Laban’s work. I knew well, and worked with a psychiatrist called Culver Barker and he regularly used to tell me of his discussions with Jung whom he frequently visited, and how Jung was interested in Laban’s work and Culver Barker told him about work that I’d been doing along and also Joan Carrington, my first wife. She and I both worked quite a lot of Culver Barker and other Jungian psychiatrists. So there was a lot of interest.
I did not know or no information came to me that he had allied his Efforts of Space, Weight, Time and Flow with Thinking, Intuiting, Sensing and Feeling. I think that that has been done since Laban. A lot of people have come out with their own interpretations of how the two relate.
He did make the correlation in Effort and Recovery.
I hadn’t been aware of that at the time, only that there was a lot of discussion between Jungian psychiatrists and movement people, on what the relationship might be.
Interview on June 8th 2010
Morning Session
Summary of Interview
The first three pages are introductory. ‘In terms of our brief for today’s conversation we should look at similarities and differences in the two approaches, in what they set out to do.’ Terms: does one talk of action or movement? ‘One of the similarities is this idea of pattern, that we are looking for patterns, that we are looking for consistency in people’s behaviour over time.’ How to notate movement. The conversation should aim to offer ‘a record of how Warren developed his method, what prompted Larry to develop SPIFFER.’ Its broader aim is an exercise in, an example of cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Warren Lamb gives his presentation. How he gained the trust of ‘industrial engineers, accountants’. While Laban could gain confidence through force of personality, WL had to demonstrate through evidence, through observations. WL offers a concentrated account of how he developed MPA, beginning with bring Shaping and Effort into the same framework. A search for patterns of behaviour. What is meaningful in a movement? This question led him to Posture-Gesture Merging. This is the constant in a person’s movement pattern. WL gives himself as an example of someone who is more Effort than Shape in his initiatives. His explanation of MPA to LG is a useful summary of his approach, especially his account of why he changed Laban’s terms (Focusing instead of Direct and Flexible, Pressure instead of weight). ‘So in the Framework I introduced these present participle verbs because I think that they gave more sense of movement.’ Just as WL’s summary of MPA is a useful overview of his approach so Larry Goldfarb gives a helpful summary of the Feldenkrais Method and his SPIFFER.
Afternoon Session
They go into further detail about the nature of posture gesture merging. LG works his way towards understanding the concept. Both explore the degree to which their approaches can change a person’s way of moving. Neither quite offers a comparison of the two approaches: SPIFFER and MPA. LG offers an attempt to grasp PGM: ‘In a way what you’re talking is that in the moment of merging there is a kind of strange harmoniousness, everything is working together and that is also a definition of optimal biomechanics.’ Part of his biomechanical overview includes a discussion of degrees of freedom.
The Interview
Larry Goldfarb [LG]: When Warren and I were in the car together he expressed the relation between Laban and Feldenkrais almost in the same terms that I would put it. They were coming at it in the same context but were asking different questions. So that Laban and Feldenkrais came up with different models because they were looking at different aspects of the phenomenon of movement or action. I like the word ‘action’ better than ‘movement’ because a movement is not necessarily meaningful whereas an action is meaningful. But I can’t tell people that I’m an ‘action teacher’ because they just don’t get that. So I am reduced to say that I teach movement, but I am thinking action rather than movement. Here we are in a tussle with terms already.
Dick McCaw [DM]: Warren’s method was called Action Profiling until he had to change it to Movement Pattern Analysis.
In terms of our brief for today’s conversation we should look at similarities and differences in the two approaches, in what they set out to do. I see some major differences in terms of the functions of the two methods: Warren’s is about decision-making, Feldenkrais is about helping people who are fucked up.
LG: One of the similarities is this idea of pattern, that we are looking for patterns, that we are looking for consistency in people’s behaviour over time. I think in both of our ways of working certain aspects are not as developed, but we are seeing the same person.
DM: And notation?
LG: I don’t have anything great to say about notation.
Warren Lamb [WL]: Larry and I were talking about this in the car and Geoffrey Longstaff has written very eruditely about how Laban declared himself to be very unhappy at the way his own notation had developed in recording fixed positions, basically. Geoffrey has studied how Laban himself went into developing a continuous form of notation that could nevertheless be visible. At the moment in notation if I do this and this, it will be recorded as ‘forward and then upwards to the side’ but in terms of continuity there is probably a bit of lifting, a forward movement and maybe a twist comes in – there is a lot going on. Somehow I think that there’s bound to be some day, I hope fairly soon, some computer programme where you can see the movement.
LG: There is …
WL: There a number of computer programmes, I know. But how complete they are, I don’t know. So that’s what we were saying about notation.
LG: A couple of years ago I went to Brown University in the States and there was somebody doing computer representation and animation of movement. They had this little character who was running. They were trying to model running two-dimensionally – so there was no twisting involved in this! What you were saying about how complete the notation is, is very important: how one can have a complete enough representation that can capture all the important aspects – that’s really missing. For instance, in the example you just gave ‘forwards and up and to the side’, there is a twist. So you’d have to see the twist. It would have to be recorded along with the grander movements. It’s an interesting question. I think there are things like that, but they only answer the questions that you ask.
DM: Should we now have a record of how Warren developed his method, what prompted Larry to develop SPIFFER, how did you both come about your terminology.
WL: I think that you, Dick also ought to be called upon to talk about your own development. You might see similarities between Feldenkrais and Laban.
DM: Larry has already put his finger on it: Pattern. I’m not sure that my thoughts are that worthy of record very simply because I don’t have the depth of experience that you both have in this field.
LG: The other thing that is unusual is that I don’t think that these conversations happen across fields. Cross-fertilising, cross-pollenating – that’s interesting too. I think there’s something important to be learned there.
DM: What has always interested me is precisely those cross-disciplinary debates, and that is something that I am quite adept at convening. I felt that Larry was a possible ‘dialoguer’. If through this dialogue, we can think about generating more dialogues about movement…
LG: I have an Australian friend in the States, trained as a dancer and a Feldenkrais teacher has just finished his Laban certification in New York, and he works with me and for me - he’s called Anastasie Siotas. Nowadays he is teaching anatomy and kinesiology for the Laban Institute in New York, and he was saying ‘I want to go with you to London!’ if we can break some of the barriers down between the communities and give some ideas about how we can talk about this fruitfully, I think that would be great.
DM: If there are grounds for how we can talk together, what are they? More timorous people might say that the methods are too separate and would mean that we would have to learn too much. If we could cross those waters, which aren’t actually that deep, put down some stepping stones, then maybe, we can pave the way towards a more informed dialogue between the two communities and about movement in general.
LG: But also about getting these interests out into the world. I think we are allies. Often people who have different perspectives in let’s say in the same domain spend way too much time arguing, than working together and doing something in the world.
WL: I think one question worth asking is how much better off is the world for the existence of Feldenkrais and Laban at this point in time?
LG: I’m here to change the world, that’s what I’m interested in doing. There is one other thing that I’d like to put on the agenda, and that is getting rid of the word ‘brain’ and replacing it with the word ‘movement’.
DM: I think that sounds more like me, but I am interested in talking less about ‘mind’ and more about brain. After we finished With an Eye for Movement, we began reading more and more in the field of neurophysiology and although that feeds in Feldenkrais in a certain way (I don’t know whether his ideas have been tested out or not), but in the Laban world they don’t seem to be discussed at all. So Warren and I have been looking for fellow spirits. Alain Berthoz is fantastic in how he talks about movement…
LG: I went to some of his conferences on science and movement. I was with him in December on a conference on Aging.
DM: I feel that current research in neurophysiology could hugely inform or even create a foundation upon which people from the Laban and the Feldenkrais communities could have as a common factor.
LG: I am certainly interested in this. My background is as a scientist: I have a degree in psycho-biology which is the neurophysiology of psychological behaviour, a degree in cybernetics and a degree in movement science. My degree in movement science was in control, co-ordination and skill so it is more neurophysiological than biomechanical. That was a while ago and a lot has changed, so I don’t know how up to date I am. Let’s start and see how we go.
DM: Let’s go to the very late 1940s. You had finished your training with Laban in Manchester and you’re starting to set up your own business in industry. How soon did you realise that you wanted to make changes to Laban’s system? For example, your first discovery was that Shape and Effort should not be studied separately, and this was something that you discussed with Laban. How soon was it that you started systematising Laban’s unsystematic thinking?
Warren’s Presentation
Not until the mid-1950s. It was during the 1940s that I was introduced into the work. Laban regarded me as a potential observer of movement and that, I think, has been borne out. But the formative experience for me was in work with Laban which was given the heading Industry which makes it seem as if I was wearing a boiler suit all the time. Quite quickly we got to taking observation of managers and clerical workers and the management consulting firm of which F.C. Lawrence, who became a great friend of Laban, had set up. They introduced me into their company. I would take observations and he would look at them or he would come with me. The formative experience was that Laban was received as a guru. Whatever he said in his charismatic manner, it was accepted without challenge. Then Laban went away and I had to give advice and recommendations and would get asked, ‘how did you deduce that? What are the observations? Show me! What does this mean? I had a hell of time with the staff in Lawrence’s firm. They were industrial engineers, accountants, and they regarded Lawrence as ‘off his rocker’ – which was one phrase that was used – in having taken up Laban at all. The formative experience was that I gained confidence and it took two or three years to do so. I gained the confidence of all these people who were sceptical to start with. They became convinced and they really wanted me to help them. They would say, ‘I can’t do this assignment, I want Warren to make assessments.’ That was step one: gaining confidence. I still didn’t know what I was doing. Laban was a great mystic in some ways. He always had an answer and his answer would almost, without exception, appear to be significant and meaningful. It was never something that you could disregard, so you had to weigh up what he had said and what it meant. This went on for years, right into the mid-1950s. I was trying all the time not to be a mystic. My only way to salvation was to be practical, was to talk to these engineers in practical terms: This is what I have observed, this is how I have deduced the recommendations that I am making. I didn’t really get much help from Laban in that respect. What I got from Laban was more and more ideas, more and more wisdom, it seemed like, but not in terms that I, who was not a guru, didn’t want to be and never thought I ever could be, could present to these clients.
That led to two main steps. One, I can explain this against a model of decision-making. Laban had a line – one aspect of movement that he called Space. This was an indication of Laban’s loose thinking. He referred to Space effort – Direct and Flexible, or Indirect. When you see that a lot then that’s Attention. He originally came across this idea in the theatre. He advised actors: ‘If you really want to convey that you are an attentive person, if that’s your interpretation of the role, then you have to do a lot of movement that is Direct and Flexible.’ If you want to demonstrate Intention, he would use characters from the Commedia dell’Arte, and the Captain was declared to be a character who used a lot of weight. These were the terms Strong and Light – and that demonstrated intention. And then there was the Decision element – Attention, Intention, Decision – and that came from Timing. If you really wanted to show a decisive character, quick on the uptake, all ‘yes, no, buy, sell’, then you are talking about Timing, about Quick and Slow. I thought that maybe I can analyse my observations and find out how they match against a decision-making process. I applied that at a shop-floor level with the manual workers as well. Does this job need a lot of careful Attention? But primarily, it was the basis of developing the work into the management field.
Secondly, what I discovered was why Laban wasn’t teaching me to observe shaping of movement. He had two main aspects of movement that he was teaching all the time – called them with Choreutics and its synonym Shape, or Eukinetics which was the synonym for Effort. Here he concentrated me on observing only Effort. I asked myself why can’t I also observe the shaping? Then I discovered that Laban was and I thought, why isn’t he teaching that to me? Is it that he wants to keep this to himself? It’s like someone I know who is a good cook and everybody asks for the recipe and she always omits one special ingredient. I thought, is that what Laban is doing? Eventually, I worked a lot to put the two together.
So those were two steps. Perhaps the other main point that I discovered on my own was, What is meaningful? If we are really going into management and decision-making, there are obviously a lot of gestures which have a meaning in what is now called the body-language sense. Someone is waving goodbye, or someone is grimacing because they don’t like what they are eating: there are those sorts of movement, but there must also be some sort of movement which is significant. You mentioned, Larry, that we are all interested in consistency. I had a suspicion that there is something about the way that we move that continues, whereas other things change. I remember my father. Looking back now I can still build a picture of how he used to move. There was a characteristic pattern about how he moved which went on for all the time I knew him. I eventually got to the theory of posture-gesture merging and this has proved quite significant. A lot of people don’t fully understand it. People do recognise it. I often demonstrate this with waving goodbye. You can introduce a merger at the beginning of the movement, or you can introduce it at the end. You can see it, but it is difficult for observers to pick it out from all that is going on.
LG. One of the things that I loved about Posture Gesture was that distinction. In the context of psychology, where your work has been used, I thought, ‘What a great way to think about incongruency, when someone is being incongruent.’ Because it really means that it’s the opposite of Posture-Gesture merging, in a way. It’s such a concrete way of talking about it. Psychologists talk about incongruence. And I had a light go off when I was reading that a few weeks ago. Earlier, you said how you wanted to be practical, and that is very practical and observable. I love that.
WL to DM. Do you think that it is observable?
DM: In With an Eye for Movement I call the merger, ‘When the movement becomes personal.’ The moment you start shifting weight, when you start shifting gravity, from one position to another, you literally start shifting the whole of yourself in response to the event. You are giving of yourself. You are changing your whole postural attitude in order to include the event or person in your world. For acting I think this concept is absolutely essential.
LG: Jumping ahead, it may be interesting to look at the neurological basis of PGM. When it happens and when it doesn’t, and what changes occur. You (WL) are talking about it mechanically in terms of the person’s involvement, whether the trunk is moving with the limbs, and you (DM) are talking about it psychologically, and the implication of the person and the meaning of the action.
DM: Certainly one can talk about intention in the context of PGM. You can read the intention off me because I am coming off balance in response to an event.
LG: You have clues. I’m not much one for reading, but you can detect clues afterwards. But neurologically this is something that is interesting. Does something happen in the nervous system when a person is fully engaged in and when they are not? That would be very interesting to ask and that is a very askable question. That’s part of being able to go to talk to neuroscientists. What questions can we generate from the things that we are doing that they can then investigate? What detectable differences occur when someone shifts from gestural to postural movement? The most valuable thing I learned about getting a PhD as a scientist is about how to design experiments. I don’t like to be a scientist because I don’t like being in the laboratory, but I love designing experiments. I am a teacher, I want to be out there.
DM: I helped Brian Day, a neurophysiologist, design an experiment to answer the question, ‘What deep knowledge is involved in getting in and out of a seat?’ Together we created means of measuring the shift of weight from pelvis to feet, the shaping of the movement in the spine, and the timing of both the transfer of weight and shaping of the movement. When were there accelerations and unevenness in the shifts? I would think that there might be other people in UCL who might be interested in such a project.
WL: While I am interested in how the brain differentiates between a gesture and a posture, how does it cause a merging of one into the other? It’s not just posture that is indicative of the person. You can be trained to have a militaristic posture. The way they salute is just a kind of gesture. Whenever I had to salute when I was in the forces I realise now that I tried to bring about a kind of merging. That’s not acceptable. I was in the navy, but in the army it is certainly not acceptable. It’s how the merging happens, the quality of the movement in the merging. That is what tends to remain – we believe after thousands of observations – constant. There are other ways of being congruent, but the all-important aspect of the merging of a gesture into a posture, the quality of the movement as the gesture moves into a posture. I wanted to make that point.
LG: I want to return to what you were saying about Laban. That one of the things that you realised was that it wasn’t just Effort, it was Shape, and it wasn’t either Effort or Shape. From my exposure to Laban, when I read your book I found this a very different take on what Shape means.
WL: I say ‘good’ because LIMS has gone off on a wrong track as to what Effort and Shape mean. They have divided Shape and Space as two quite separate things, and they are not.
LG: Yes. How can you separate them? I have discussed this with Scott Clark - I was his first Feldenkrais practitioner. Turning to Effort, of course in SPIFFER, my meaning of the word is different to yours.
DM: Would Scott be a good person to invite to future discussions?
LG: Absolutely.
WL: I met him years ago when he was teaching at the Laban Centre.
LG: Would you now continue with your account of the development of your method?
WL: I think I’ve said enough.
DM: No you haven’t. To give a full account of the elaboration of your method into Action Profiling and then Movement Pattern Analysis you need to come a little further on in your history. We are still in the late 1950s.
WL: Laban died in 1958. It was about two or three years before he died that I came to him and said that I was not just confining my observations to Effort but that I wanted to bring Effort and Shape together. He didn’t disagree. I would have liked to have been a bit more forceful and ask him why he isolated Effort as being applicable to industrial work when he was actually observing Shape as well. That is obvious actually from a book that he published in 1947 – Effort - because he refers to Shaping in conjunction with Effort quite a lot. It is almost a deception for many people who think that Effort applies to industry whereas Shape applies to dance and everything to do with the cosmos and all that stuff.
LG: I know when I first started teaching this material, I really separated each layer out. I thought it was pedagogically necessary. We discussed the skeleton separately from the muscles, separately from how you are moving in space, just so that people could see that. What I have discovered after teaching this material for over twenty years now, is that although I start like that, I start to talk about these affinities. These things are related to each other and you really can’t separate them. One really needs to understand the relatedness. In my own work on this material, I came to this conclusion. I am second-guessing Laban, but maybe this is why he made the distinction? It might be easier to understand them separately before you understand them together.
WL: This gives me confidence that I might be working along the right lines. It is true that it is particularly difficult to understand these affinities between Effort and Shape, and because these affinities or disaffinities exist, you can call them harmonies or disharmonies. This had to be incorporated in the advice that I gave people.
In 1952 I got my first major client on my own behalf. This was quite an important company. I had previously worked for clients of Lawrence. This was an independent client. I was ask to advise about team relationships. When do people get on with each other? In recent years this has developed quite a bit. At that time the alignment that Laban had always preached – that Space-Effort came only from the Dimensional Scale. Direct and Indirect you did across, Light and Strong you either did up and down, and Quick and Slow you did backwards or forward. When people asked for justification he had some rather questionable theories about why this links occurred. But it made sense to me and therefore I developed the theory that whenever people were in affinity, primarily in respect to their Effort and Shape, then they created the sort of environment that was conducive to communication of some sort. And then it became clear that this could vary between the three stages of the decision-making process. So there were some people who were in affinity for the Attention stage, but in disaffinity for the Intention stage, or whatever. Then of course, later on, we got to more degrees.
Recently I have returned to the simplicity of this model because it is better to work with. If you get the environment that encourages this potential I called it communicativeness. I would like to give you an example that happened two days ago. If you are primarily in affinity in Effort and Shape at the Intention stage that creates more Presentation, and if you are in affinity at the Commitment stage then it is more Operation. These three terms got quite a following. My wife is a Counsellor, she has never studied my work, but she finds that very often when counselling married couples or partners that one might be primarily pursuing a Communicative pathway, wanting to talk things over, whereas the other partner might think, ‘Well if he or she wants to talk to me, what’s the problem? What do you want?’ Well, of course, the other person doesn’t know what he or she wants. That’s a typical example. The example I had a couple of days ago was somebody trying to make a rather important appointment. I know it’s my own tendency to create a disaffinity if I am protesting or demanding something. That is off-putting to other person. They get frightened. They get on the offensive. But someone who took over from me, the way that she said the words – she gave me an account of the words exchanged when she was trying to arrange this important appointment – and I described it as a persuasive communicativeness. She can be persuasive but in a very communicative manner. So we have now coined the term communicative persuasiveness. .
LG: That is also very me. But how do you describe what you do?
WL: Technically we would say that it is being private at the communication stage. All the people with whom I’ve worked say ‘we can’t communicate with Warren’. Others say, ‘He’s very easy to communicate with, you just have to make an appointment with him and establish what it is that you’re going to discuss.’
LG: So you are already going Operational, you are already at Commitment?
WL: It is more the Intention stage. But there’s a problem there. It can become complex because I do very little of the shaping that is appropriate to Intention, but do a lot of the Effort. There is very little to create a harmony out of. It’s like trying to create a harmony between two people when there is only one person. That is the problem. But in the total picture this has had a major influence and it has been at the root of the scores, the hundreds, of my team-building seminars in the management field. We have to make a differentiation between what I call identifying, which is usually understood as a sort of team spirit, as opposed to good communication. One has to think about what one has to communicate. ‘Let’s make sure that we understand each other’. This is the difference between what I call Identifying and Interaction. This has been at the root of the team-building work that I’ve done. It means that I’ve always said that people [who] hate [each other] can still be a good team – they don’t have to like each other. I’ve always been critical of the outward bounds approach to team making – taking everyone off on a wonderful trip, on a yacht or something. I would have love to have gone myself, but probably in terms of team-work it probably does more harm than good. With this practical, specific aspect of my work, I ask, ‘specifically what you contribute to this company. There is no good or bad about this, you are the person who you are, and you have a lot to offer.’ I take that sort of approach.
LG: There’s a similarity there in Neurolinguistic Programming in decision-making strategies and cognitive strategies. The idea is recognising each person’s strength. There is a time-line implicit in your Attention, Intention, Commitment process, but there is also a time-line in how groups work together in that you have to have a person’s skills in the right place in the process. For instance, at the beginning you want to come with ideas and if you have someone who’s critical too soon that’s going to kill the idea, but if you don’t have someone who’s critical somewhere in the process then you don’t have any way of testing the ideas before you act on them and so that same thing that you were just talking about – recognising each person’s unique contribution and seeing how it fits into the time process of what they are doing - there is an echo there. They are approaching it linguistically mostly, though they look at movement as well. This is part of my deep, dark past. I live in Santa Cruz which is where NLP was born and I studied Eriksonian hypnosis before I lived there and before the Feldenkrais training I did the NLP training.
DM: You (LG) asked a question about the distinction between Effort and Shape in Laban’s teaching. In his 1926 book Choreologie the two could not be separated out. But later in the 1940s he did start privileging Effort over shape in his studies of Drama and Industry. Only in the early 1950s did he start to bring them back together in his unpublished study Effort and Recovery. The problem now is that institutionally Effort is taught in drama schools whereas Choreutics is taught in dance schools – they have become totally separate.
The only thing that you (WL) haven’t talked about is your use of see-saws.
WL: Although Laban would say, ‘You are direct or you are indirect’, ‘strong or light’, it seemed to me he was always talking in terms of movement and would often describe movement as flux, and when it came to his notation he didn’t want movement fixed. In all the talks and in all that I imbibed when I was with him, movement was a continuity, a process. If you are direct, you start a process of movement that increases the directing from relative directing to direct and then unless something else happens you are stuck in a sort of immobile state where we are staring each other out, so it has to be reversed and it maybe renewed, so it keeps being reversed and renewed. That applied to all the efforts and also to any division you made of the Kinesphere and into different shapings. That whatever process you start there must be a limit beyond which you either get stuck or else you can reverse. So I developed see-saws, if you like. So direct would have an extreme, and I would give it a word, like ‘fixed stare’, and then in the other direction you would have ‘tying a knot’, so we have ‘fixed stare’ and ‘knot’. On the shaping side we have something which is so enclosed that you got into something that was almost like a self-inflicted straight-jacket and some people can’t move very much out of it. At the other extreme one cannot spread any more…
LG: Almost flailing …
WL: So there are two polarities, it is bipolar. I changed the terms. I asked myself. ‘What are we really doing when we are direct or flexible?’ Well, we are really focusing or not focusing. Not just the eyes but the whole body can be focused. I changed space to focus, to be practical. I changed weight. It still happens so often when people talk about weight, they get into sort of philosophical concepts of weight which maybe this is learned and helpful but for my purpose I had to be practical, so we stopped calling it weight and started calling it pressure. Because you can see when someone is using increasing or diminishing pressure. The word time seemed to be right but rather than quick/slow the actual process of movement was actually accelerating or decelerating. So in the Framework I introduced these present participle verbs because I think that they gave more sense of movement. I also defined extremes and related them to therapy, and that many people’s therapeutic problem could be seen in a tendency to go to some extreme or other. Quite a number of therapists have found that to be very helpful.
LG: Could you say that again?
WL: I found that many people’s illness is represented in movement by getting almost paralysed in some component of movement. If you know that then there are ways in which you can handle it better than if you didn’t know it.
Just one other thing. Laban talked about Flow as an Effort factor. There are still some people who still refer to Flow as just an Effort, but around this time I suggested that there was also a Flow of Shape as well as Effort. The Flow of Shape is that we sort of grow: we don’t just grow and stay grown, it has to be renewed, so we are growing and shrinking. We may emphasise, relatively, the shrinking, so we go around relatively shrunk, or we may emphasise the growing. But again, it’s a bipolar thing. And this may or may not have affinity with the Effort variation of Free and Bound. Also the Flow needs distinguishing on the different basis from Focus Pressure and Time. Babies flow a lot, they do both Effort flow and Shape flow. You see little children getting really very free and then they become rigid – they go from one extreme to another. As we grow, that gets less. There is a gain-expense ratio between the growth of Effort initiatives and the loss of the ability to flow. We become aware of what our body is doing with respect to Effort and Shape and what our particular pattern might be. And as all this is happening in childhood growth then we are losing some of the flow and it is the interrelationship between how we take Effort or Shape flow with the whole gamut of Efforts and Shapes. It can be extremely valuable being aware of this and explain much.
That’s about it. That we can observe movement against a model of decision-making and understand a person’s preferred pattern, that the movements we observe have to be posture-gesture mergers, and it is the merging element which is important. I translated this in my management work into a framework, and use terms like Instigating, Exploring. That has caught on quite a bit. Also the Flow aspect, which is another item. All the LIMS people talk about Shape Flow: some of them have a rather funny interpretation. I was at a conference when someone said, ‘When I do Shape Flow I feel so centred!’ I thought, ‘Whats’ she doing?’ But certainly it is accepted in America, not so in England. Then there are the affinities which translates into interaction. This offers what we call a framework of management action. Millions of these frameworks have been handed out to people and that’s what it says on the top – Management Action. It has become pretty-well understand around the world but the problem is that many people without recognising its derivation from movement observation and analysis. It just seems like a neat sort of list.
Of course there are many management techniques that use a decision-making model of some sort. One thing I do find, when I have explained to my clients my Framework of Management Action in which the Effort is translation into Assertion and Shape into Perspective, it’s really the same thing. People do seem to be able to latch on to these terms fairly readily. Some people are more assertive, other people make take action to gain perspective more than others. They relate together. Too much Effort without Perspective may mean a waste of Effort, too much Perspective without enough Effort may mean that you don’t really …
DM: The reason we are laughing is that we are both extremely Effortful people and do expend a lot of effort. Stepping back and getting things into perspective might sometimes save us a little effort.
LG: I have a hard time computing that into something that’s observable. What do you mean by effortful?
WL: You have a hard time computing it?
LG: I have a hard time understanding what I would observe, what I would notice, in order to make the observation that you are effortful, that you are more action than perspective-oriented. If I think of Effort it is including all these different elements. How is someone effortful? You’re always expressing something along the scale.
DM: Maybe if you could explain the percentages by means of which you create a movement profile? That might answer Larry’s question, what percentage of one’s movements one makes in shape initiatives and effort initiatives and which ones.
LG: You could do that, but I’ve read that. I am still at a loss. What am I observing?
DM: I think by looking at one movement you’re not going to get an answer, but you would understand it if you looked at how Warren makes up an entire profile. Possibly, I am being a little sloppy when I say that I am more effortful and less perspectival? Warren, might you explain how you arrive at the percentages of different movement initiatives?
WL: I’ll answer very quickly, since I’m aware that I have been hogging the limelight. We take a lot of observations just of the merging between posture and gesture. Take the example of waving goodbye: this is a gesture because it is confined to just the hand and forearm, the posture comes in at this point and perhaps with an acceleration, and with that acceleration it gets stronger. Now, we observe the acceleration, the increase of pressure, and perhaps the upward tendency is accentuated, and then goes to the side, changing the shape of the movement. Imagine the traces that the limbs leave in space. We observe all that, and it is in the process of merging, and then the arm goes on by itself and then we don’t observe that. We do that for a couple of hours until we have pages of observations in notation and we have ticked off what we’ve seen on a coding sheet. So, then we have something we can analyse. We just count up. We’ve seen so many accelerations, so many decelerations, we’ve seen a lot of increasing of pressure, very little decreasing of pressure, we’ve seen hardly any directing at all, or indirecting. So we do some simple arithmetic and then we can do some simple ratios. We can say of this person that the timing movements are a preference, they are dominant preference in this particular person. The pressure movement we don’t see much at all. We use percentages to make a simple ratio of timing is 28% and pressure variation is only 7%. We have found a lot of meanings attributable to that: people often like to lead with their predominant Effort and the shape that is combined with it. You can imagine that there are hundreds of deductions of that sort that can be made. We can question, examine and try to understand.
DM: So for example, in my profile I don’t rise very much, but I do increase pressure a lot. I don’t widen very much at all, I am more channelled. I don’t spread. I don’t advance with my trunk. I don’t take up much space, but I do make a lot of changes in my weight, varying within the increasing side of the pressure range. Most of my initiatives are in the Effort ranges of movement, and I shape very little, and then only in two planes: forward and backward, up and down: I don’t use the sides very much at all. I am a big sinker and I retreat a lot. Have you seen the DVD?
LG: No I haven’t.
DM: We should send one to you. In our next session, we should also look at how Warren’s work influenced the psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg and Irmgard Bartennieff.
WL: Irmgard herself was a very practised therapist. She did teach Kestenberg. [1.17.23]
Second Session
LG: SPIFFER is what I am going to talk about. I wrote down in my notes when Warren said that he wanted to be practical and this is probably something that we share. Early in my career as a Feldenkrais teacher I was working in a physical therapy clinic in Santa Cruz and we started see all kinds of people – chronic pain patients, people with neurological difficulties. A lot of people were hurt at work. I would call somebody up at the workplace and say, ‘We just saw the sixth person working in your company and I’ve just seen the seen the sixth person working at …. who has this same problem. How about I come a look at what’s going on there and see if we could figure out how to prevent it.’ I am a red diaper grand-baby, my grand parents were communists, and I inherited a little bit of that zeal. One of the reasons I worked in a physical therapy clinic is that I wanted to work with people who didn’t know what Feldenkrais was, with people who had more of an everyday life and who otherwise couldn’t really afford Feldenkrais because it was rather expensive. So the clinic gave a way of doing that. Then seeing what was happening with people on the job, that made me think. Even before that, while I was on my Feldenkrais training, while I was at university and had a job cooking, working in a café. I would get up at the crack of dark, take the first bus at 5.30 to university and make soups and sandwiches and salads and start baking and open the café at 7.15. Here I am in the middle of my Feldenkrais training in that half awake state going to work - I didn’t drink coffee at that time – watching the bus driver and thinking that this is an accident waiting to happen, looking at how he moves. At that time I was living in a household with some other few people and one of them was a bus driver; that was his job. So we were talking about this. I got it into my head that I would go and teach the bus drivers. This was 1984, maybe, and the word ergonomics hadn’t even surfaced. I wrote letters to the bus company. But actually I don’t have to tell you the whole story. I ended up working with the bus drivers and I didn’t want to go in and just teach ATMs [lessons in Awareness Through Movement], I had taught some lessons that were horribly disastrous, because I went in and said, ‘Now you’re going to pay attention to yourself’. I wasn’t practical at all. With the bus drivers I wanted to teach in a very practical way. One of the things I wanted to do was have them look at each other. I don’t know if you know what a Feldenkrais lesson is like. But historically, people come to a class they may be greeted by the teacher, lie down on the floor for somewhere between 45 and 89 minutes, they follow the teacher’s instructions. Somebody talks to them and takes them through a series of movements and guides them. The students don’t interact with each other, they are just lying on the floor moving. And then they leave. The teacher doesn’t demonstrate, the teacher rarely interacts directly with the student or isn’t supposed to – Feldenkrais said not to, but he did it all the time, and there’s no application. Feldenkrais said that you shouldn’t directly talk to them but he did it all the time. There’s this idea that you shouldn’t actually talk to someone or correct them, they should find it out by themselves by following the process.
Having been a former performer, having been a magician for many years, I would never perform some place without seeing the space – lines of sight make it very different. So I went to see the room at the bus company. I figured out an entire class for them, with people lying on the floor. This place was too small for them all to lie on the floor and do an ATM. The floor had not been washed since God took his very first day off. It was filthy lineoleum – horrible. So, I had to design the whole class sitting. I also had some ideas about this. I wanted to apply so that when I did the bus driving, the lesson about turning the wheel of the bus, we were actually out on the bus and everybody turned the wheel and they observed each other, so they could talk to each other when they weren’t in class. One of the things I wanted to do was to give them some ways to think …
WL: Were you conscious that you were going against Feldenkrais’ teaching.
LG: No I wasn’t. I was naïve. Feldenkrais talked about making things fit the people you were working with. I thought about it as more creativity than breaking the rules. Once I told people about it I realised I was breaking the rules. But I didn’t set out to do that. I have at other points in my life. There was no rebelliousness. The first course I did was such an abysmal failure. One of my friends who was a management consultant actually made me, encouraged me, as we sat on the steps of my house, made me read every one of the feedbacks that I got, and they were horrendous. He asked, ‘How do you respond to this?’ Him not being a Feldenkrais teacher and being one of my best friends, this is where these ideas came from. One of things I wanted to do was give my students some idea when they were observing each other about what matters, what they were looking at. The thing about movement is that there is so much to look at. How do we narrow that down and what questions do we give them? That wasn’t SPIFFER but it was a collection of things. Some of it was oriented to what happened in the lessons, and some of it was oriented to … It was kind of a mishmash. One of the clinics in which I worked in later, with the encouragement of the owner, I started teaching these workshops. These were three-day workshops where I would do ATMs and teach them something specific. One of the lessons was called ‘Pushing, Pulling and Lifting’, which I then abbreviated to ‘Pushing and Pulling’. One of them is called ‘On your Feet’ which is about walking and standing. One was called ‘Back into Action’, which is about how the spine moves. Wanting to teach therapists, though I can’t put them in a Feldenkrais class or training, so I went and observed, post-graduate physical therapy trainers. This guy who suggested I do ran these courses.
I had been to lots of NLP seminars and things like that, so I got to see how they presented. Feldenkrais’ training is about lying down, but they come in and sit on chairs, some with tables, does a lecture, gives them handouts, they do some exercise with each other and get some coaching. In order to understand how Feldenrkais works you have to be able to perceive, tactually and visually. You can make labs about that and give lectures about things to observe. That is what I want to talk about. That’s how it works in the abstract. But in terms of them going back to work and being better clinicians Monday after the weekend…
So I was teaching a workshop in St Agnes hospital in Chicago for the Physical Therapy department, mostly PT teachers, but a lot of Occupational Therapists in there, and one of my friends who was in my first Feldenkrais class was also there, she was studying to be physical therapist, her name is Nancy Annenburg, who is no longer with us. She was in the back of the room. I had these items on this board, exactly the same items as I have now, they haven’t changed, and that was probably the early 1990s, about 20 years ago. And she said, ‘SPIFFER – if you rearrange the letters, then it spells SPIFFER.’ So I can’t even say I came up with that, so credit where credit is due. It’s great because it was memorable. These things came out because I was trying to specify, really for teaching the Physical Therapists, what are the things we are noticing.
My delight in getting Dick’s letter saying that you wanted to meet… The roots of this lie in my Laban training. What I was looking for was being very specific about what is observable. Yes it’s subjective, but I think these are things that are shared experiences. Having trained Feldenkrais teachers for years, the thing that I find very interesting in other people is that people are rarely wrong about what they notice. They are often wrong about how they interpret it. But their actual noticing – we share a lot of that. You can get better at this. This was about being observable. One thing I like about SPIFFER is that ‘sequence’ comes first. The reason that’s important is that from Feldenkraisian perspective you can’t understand human movement if you don’t understand the skeleton. From a biomechanical point of view when we move we move the skeleton. We live in a culture which sucks up to the temple of muscle as if we were invertebrates, as if we were worms or something.
WL: You are emphasising skeleton with reference to Sequence?
LG: Let me tell you where it comes from in a way. When I, when Feldenkrais thinks about movement he says they are four things: the nervous system, the muscle, the skeleton and the environment. And the environment being space, gravity, things and organisms. Space and gravity is what he really meant in terms of the movement environment. My metaphor which is really horrid and really perturbs a lot of philosophers, which makes me very happy therefore, is that the brain is the puppeteer, the muscles are the string, and the skeleton is the puppet itself. The brain through the muscles moves the skeleton. There’s a big problem with that metaphor in that there are no strings coming from above, but we’ll get to that later. If you want to understand movement from the engineering point of view, one of the things is degrees of freedom. Have you been to Florence?
WL: Yes
LG: They say that Florence is the home of Pinocchio. And you can buy Pinocchios, little marionettes everywhere. So the really cheap ones, they are a trunk, neck and head – that’s one piece – two arms and two legs. If you want to spend a little more money you get elbows and a movable head. You multiply the number of strings to be able to control that. The complexity of the movement that the puppet can do is determined by the skeleton. The limitations and possibility of movement are determined by the skeleton. There are muscles there to control movement at every axial joint. Feldenkrais came to this as an engineer and as a martial artist. Thinking about how force moves through the skeleton is a way of concretising this idea of energy. That’s where sequence comes in.
As you I’m sure will understand sequence doesn’t have to be sequential, but it usually is. So the thing is, when I say sequence the definition here is the chain of motion through the skeleton. The chain of motion through the skeleton means that force is created by the muscles. We push against the earth and that creates this movement of force through the skeleton. The skeleton is the railroad track along which force runs. If I push into the table in such a way that the force goes into the joint rather than through the joint that’s the transmission of the force through the skeleton. When I talk about sequence, I am talking about three aspects: Transmission which is really the sequential part, Distribution which means how chunky is it? In honour of my communist grandparents I talk about somatic Marxism. What I mean is that every joint that could contribute, does. Somebody could turn their head by moving their feet across the floor and using their spine as if it was a solid bone, the backbone, or they could move a little bit at each of the joints. Feldenkrais called that Differentiation, I call it Distribution, because I like to think of differentiation as the sensory aspect, and Distribution as the motor aspect.
Interestingly, very little has changed over the years, but one thing has changed about Sequence. When I started teaching, I talked about transmission and distribution, and people would get so lost looking at the joints and trying to figure out what’s going on, and they would lose the big picture. What’s the big picture? I would say that when you change the shape you change the formation of the skeleton. I had to add Formation to the sequence. So the three aspects of sequence are transmission, distribution and formation. Formation is how the shape of the skeleton is changing as somebody moves. You were talking about retreating – it is about flexion, but you are also doing it in certain places. From an engineering point of view the thing that is interesting is the degrees of freedom. How many degrees of freedom are there? The more degrees of freedom you have, the more variety you have in expression, and the more complexity you have in terms of regulation and control. This idea of differentiation is really central to Feldenkrais. Where in the chain do you move?
I was trying to make all that very specific. Also it was very important when teaching the physiotherapists to see the skeleton. They saw in biology, that the skeleton has four functions. Protection, haemopoesis (the production of blood cells), levers for action. Nowadays, we add the fifth thing which is the storage of calcium which is important not just for your bones but for the health of nervous system – calcium is one of the main ions we use in the neurotransmitters. This is the list that people have when they’re looking at the skeleton, but what they are missing is the transmission of force through the skeleton. Whenever you move, when I get up or when I push, force has to go through the skeleton. If it doesn’t then I have to over-use my muscles. If I push and if my arm is moving and in my trunk there is no merging, then I am doing something to prevent the merging. The absence of merging isn’t an absence, it is the presence of something interfering with it. In organised movement with the force moving through the skeleton, you would have to have merging. Interesting. I’ve never said that before.
Path is related to Direct and Indirect. It is related to the trace-forms the trajectory. One of the students in one of my trainings as a homework assignment once said in an email, ‘I really enjoyed what we did in our last session on STIFFER’. She had replaced trajectory for path. Trajectory would be the synonym. Path is line that somebody makes in space. We could also say if the movement is one, two or three dimensional. There is slicing, carving and …. A one-planar movement is a line, and arc or a spiral. This applies to FIs [Functional Integrations].
WL: Bartennieff uses the term carving
LG: Carving is the three-dimensional … This has the function of making distinctions about path. Initiation is before the movement begins.
Foundation is about weight. It is about the distribution of the weight over the base of support. Also all of these things, they have to do with how somebody senses themselves. Some people could be weight blind. My favourite example is those people who are obese and uncomfortable. They stop paying attention to their weight because it makes them feel bad. I have a good friend with whom for years I used to do African dance. She was a great dancer, but she was a big woman and she feels her weight.
WL: We were talking over breakfast about people who just don’t want to know about themselves, but that’s usually regarded as being a state of denial.
LG: I would say that each of these aspects has a kinaesthetic modality associated with it. Sequence has to do with feeling force go through the skeleton. Feeling the skeleton or feeling the support that I get from it. Half has to do with what you would call spatial intention. Movement always has directionality to it. Some people really move in this way … Watching Scott [Clark] dance, he was somebody who really this… – the spatial pulls were beautifully clear, and his movement was so fluid from that. Same thing with initiation, same thing with Foundation.
FLOW. This is the later list because when I started to talk about flow, I talked about the quality of movement and basically over the years I have come to think that flow has to do with acceleration. When we talk about flow in the Feldenkrais Method, we are talking about whether this movement is continuous or whether it stops and starts. If it stops and starts then it is decelerating and accelerating.
WL: Free flow is actually falling, and if you fall then you accelerate, but you are not making yourself accelerate, you are allowing yourself to be taken over by gravity.
LG: In the Feldenkrais world flow is about speed and acceleration and about your attitude to this, the kinaesthetic aspect to it. Time and control. Feldenkrais put those together.
WL: When you mention control, then that’s what we call Bound Flow. If you allow free flow to happen there may come a point when you the extreme of abandon is reached. You actually fall.
LG: In Feldenkrais though we talk about almost all movement being fluid, actually almost all movement is bound. It’s incredible. We are asking people to move and to be aware, and once you’re committed to move and you’re gone, always you are being asked to be aware of what is happening so you could change your movement. This isn’t tense but it is bound.
WL: I think in the progress of civilisation that is a quite recent thing. I think back in medieval times there was a lot more flow.
LG: By which you mean free flow.
WL: Yes
DM: In his early writings Laban was very much for finding the swing in movement, the free flow of swinging movements. You could define bound flow as the ability to stop a movement at any point. Warren also gives an example of bound flow as the working of a watch-maker. You wouldn’t want a watch-maker to be free flowing – the movements have to be precise and controlled. We’ve come across Laban’s terms Attention, Intention, Decision in relation to Space, Weight and Time, but in relation to Flow he talked about Precision, and although it isn’t a term Warren uses, precise movements are very finely controlled.
WL: SPIFFER consists of seven elements. Do you see that people need to be treated more under one or other of the seven headings or do you look at all seven?
LG: Let me finish my account for the moment, and I’ll come back to that question. What I mean by Flow here is being terms of bound and free flow and to acceleration and deceleration. The person’s control of movement, their timing and the rhythmic aspect of movement: which is what I think we have come to mean in Feldenkrais when we say, ‘quality’. When I am trying to specify what it is that you are seeing when you are talking about this. I don’t want conclusions, I want clues; I want to know what you’re noticing.
Effort means patterns of muscular action and the experience of exertion: how hard you are working and also how your muscles are working. How your muscles are working determines in part how hard you feel you are working. So if I lift up this chair it can be really, really light, or it can be incredibly heavy, but the weight of the chair hasn’t changed. The organisation of my muscles and everything else has changed but I can describe that musculature in terms of whether the big muscles are part of the movement or not. In each of these categories there is a biomechanical optimum. In other words, unless you want to fall it is a good idea to keep your weight over your base of support. Feldenkrais talked about coordinated action where muscles work according to their cross-section. The bigger muscles make the biggest effort. The biggest muscles in their cross-sections are the filet mignon, the psoas, then the abdominals, the back muscles and the leg muscles. The idea is that the big muscles are around the centre of your body make the biggest effort and the smaller muscles are there not to create the effort but to guide the movement in its execution. This is thinking about effort.
WL: Would you say that if you study Laban you become aware of the movement and if you study Feldenkrais you become more aware of what the muscles and skeleton are doing? At my age, as for a lot of old people, we do have difficulty with balance. I sometimes find myself losing my balance, partly because older people don’t respond as quickly as when you are younger. It takes longer for me to recognise that I am losing my balance and by the time I have organised myself to do something about it, it has gone almost too far. I am aware of the movement, that I am pressing and shrinking, that I am trying to direct, if I am on stairs or something. So many people have accidents on step ladders. I do my utmost to prevent this but I feel quite often that it has already happened. I am aware of the movement and my shaping and so on, but maybe it would be better if I was aware of what I doing with some muscle.
LG: No, no, no. There, that would be wrong. What I am talking about observing how people move. I might with somebody who isn’t feeling where their weight is give them lessons and tune them into that aspect. I am still thinking about the movement as the whole action and having the person inhabit that movement in a sensorially different way.
WL: Is this just a different approach because I am aware of where my weight is by a sensitivity to the shape, as to whether the shape is disharmonious or whether it is harmonious.
LG: As a Contact dancer, somebody who did Contact Improvisation for a year. Have you seen the form? The idea is two people moving keeping a point of contact between them as they move. There’s a lot of giving and taking of weight and you have to know where you are in space.
WL: This is Steve Paxton?
LG: Steve Paxton’s invention. For me, Shape comes last, actually. I know where my weight is, I know where I am in space; but actually knowing what my shape is - that I learned much later. I think we could say in that way that people are aware of these different aspects. Some people come in and they’re not at all aware of their weight and they’re really up there and really, literally, not in contact with what you would call Pressure. That’s how we know where our weight is by sensing pressure. There is one Feldenkrais lessons that I am responsible for. You play around with the idea of your foot as a tripod – the heel, the base of the little toe and the base of the big toe – and you shift your weight between those three places. And then you connect that with legs and your pelvis and your whole body so that when you get up you start to feel where you are and all of a sudden somebody can begin to sense where they are in space and feel their feet at the same time. For some people that’s a really part of helping them with their balance, for instance. I think we think about movement but we’re solving different problems. It’s just different slices of the same phenomenon. In a lesson I might have somebody put their hands on their muscles and feel what they are doing. But I’m not trying to teach them to control their movement by feeling their muscles.
WL: You’re very succinct in finding terms …
LG: I have been accused of this before
WL: Could you succinctly say what is the difference? You say we are treating a different problem, what is the difference in the problem that we’re giving attention to?
LG: Let’s say that we are starting with different questions. If Laban started with the question, ‘How do I capture this?’ And Feldenkrais started with the question, ‘How do I change the autopilot?’ Those are really different questions. When you’re observing in the MPA the person’s ‘handwriting’, I think Feldenkrais used that word, their style – I think there is really similar to Laban. What I observe when I notice people is the uninvited guest, the thing they can’t stop doing that interferes with them being able to do other things in terms of their movement. I think that we’ve both gotten to observing something similar about that, about how the person expresses themselves.
WL: You say that we are observing something similar but we are applying it to different problems?
LG: In a different domain. I mean, one of things that I loved when I read the books you sent me, from my exposure to Laban was that place where there’s a connection between someone’s movement and their cognition. I learned about Laban as States and Drives. I think Feldenkrais is more interest in the person’s processes of movement and their sensation. There’s a perceptual aspect to what you’re talking about, in a way there’s almost a finer grain, but I think the biggest difference is starting out with the question, ‘How do you capture someone’s movement?’ and then going to the question you’re asking, which is ‘How does someone’s movement with the consistencies in their movement when they are in the Posture Gesturing moment, what do those consistencies tell us about their cognition, about their decision and thinking styles?’ Whereas Feldenkrais was looking at what are their consistencies in movement and how does that limit their possibilities and how the ways that they keep moving could create the problems that they have?
WL: You are very clear in how you describe Feldenkrais’ work that it is about how you overcome limits that people impose on themselves.
LG: There’s a big difference between the limits of my skeleton and what I impose upon that, between absolute and relative constraints would be the technical term for that. And so what we’re interest in is recognising people’s self-imposed relative constraints and helping them change those. The problem with changing those is that they are automatic, they are unconscious. A habit is something that you learn and forget that you learned, and forget that you forgot. And there it has entered into the unconscious. It’s a Good News, Bad News joke. The Good News is that we get to learn how to move, things become automatic and we’re freed up to contemplate, to imagine, to worry, to create, whatever. On the other hand, when we get good at something we’re stuck with it. When I talk to psychologists, psychotherapists, I say that I work as a Feldenkrais teacher I work with the physical manifestations of the unconscious.
I think that you do too, in a way. Feldenkrais talked about feeling, acting, sensing and thinking. What I love about your work Warren is that it’s connecting acting, feeling and thinking. I think Feldenkrais’ work is about connecting thinking, acting and sensing.
WL: Could you repeat that?
I think you are connecting thinking, feeling and acting. I think Feldenkrais is connecting acting, sensing with a little bit of feeling and a little bit of sensing, but it’s acting-sensing, the sensorimotor aspect that’s being emphasised.
WL: In the Jungian interpretation of sensing, feeling, thinking?
LG: Feldenkrais was more of a Gurdjieff-ian. He got these ideas out of that tradition. There are a lot of connections, even in this idea of habit that comes from Gurdjieff’s work, I think. I say that as a non-Gurdjieff-ian. I think that’s where he got it from.
Respiration is the final category. Here I mean the rhythms and the dimensions of breathing. Actually over the years I’ve realised that with respiration you can look at through all the other six. The thing about respiration, it’s something that we look in a Feldenkrais system, it’s something that almost every other somatic practice, breathing is a part of it. And some somatic practices are only working with breathing. It seems also directly related to the person’s state – how they’re thinking and feeling. And so in a Feldenkrais lesson there’s a point when you’re working with someone and they take a deep breath and you take that as a sign that they are integrating. This is the jargon.
These are the seven aspects of movement. I talk about these as dimensions of action and awareness. I almost want to say action, attitude and awareness. In all forms of somatic work people use some or all of these. What’s interesting about them is that I also say that they are the seven categories that we can use for observing others. They are the seven categories that describe how people sense themselves and, as Feldenkrais teachers, they describe the seven dimensions in which I can constructively interfere with somebody else’s experience of movement. In other words everything I do in a Feldenkrais lesson has to do with changing more and more of these dimensions. And that’s also become really useful because what it does is just like with what you were saying about counting the occurrences. I give my students highlighter pens with seven different colours and we look at Feldenkrais’ different lessons and they start highlighting them. That’s also really interesting because you get different kinds of things. Some lessons are tutti frutti – they have everything in almost equal proportions. Some lessons are lemon and lime, some lessons are forest fruit. It is really interesting that you get these configurations and now what I want to do next is to begin to create a database when we look at these lessons from these terms and start to see a structure. What is interesting is that he uses every one of these terms in his own descriptions of things at some point along the way.
WL: Feldenkrais himself didn’t talk of SPIFFER, that is your own development?
LG: That is my attempt to … my website now says Mind and Motion, Feldenkrais demystified. That’s what I’m after because I think that you can hide an incredible amount of lack of understanding …
DM: So you are both demystifiers!
LG: I want to answer your question.
WL: You were talking about how when Feldenkrais focused on one problem, whereas Laban dealt with a different problem. I didn’t quite understand what the differentiation was. Could you give me a succinct account: this problem Feldenkrais deals with, this problem Laban deals with.
LG: I would say that Laban started with the problem, How do we capture or record this? I think that the problem you’re interested in is, ‘How does the person’s behaviour tell us about their decision making strategies?’ I think Feldenkrais started with the problem, ‘How does the person’s movement relate to the problem that they have, the limitation that they have?’
WL: It does seem to me that as an engineer he was looking at particularly the practicalities of why people impose limits on themselves.
LG: He actually started as a Judo teacher. He would say what we could call in the medical field, neurologically intact adults, normal. One of them could fall to the left, or the other one could only roll forward. Whatever it was there were these things, and they were also these things as a Judo master, that they had these tendencies that they were stuck with.
WL: But he also seemed to be interested in babies and young children. He observed how babies very often lie flat with their hands like this, whereas adults never seem to do this. He advocated that this was a good thing to do.
LG: To have the freedom to do it is good, because the freedom is there structurally. We lose that freedom because something is impeding it. It could be some kind of damage to the structure, it could be that we’ve learned to hold ourselves in ways that interfere with us. If it’s the latter then it’s a relative constraint and it’s changeable. So it’s not that there’s a better position but keeping all the choices that your skeleton has. As a martial artist that means a lot because the more choices you have the better you can react. And he was interested in babies …
WL: I don’t know how extensive his research was into child development was.
LG: He was married first to a paediatrician and I think that they were both … it was in that period that he kind of explored that. And he kept exploring that in terms of the research. The time that he was doing that was right after these initial studies had come out looking at development and making these distinctions about different patterns about how different children move. I think he was influenced by that and by his own observation. But that wasn’t the question.
DM: The question was ‘Do people need to be treated in one of the seven aspects of movement?’ Might it be, for example, that one person had problems with breathing, with always holding in their breath?
LG: Let’s say that someone comes in like this – maybe they’ve been a dancer for too long. From the breathing point of view I might say that they are stuck in inhalation. In terms muscularity they are doing a lot of work in the middle of their back pulling themselves back, but also a lot of work in the front and in the back of their neck keeping their head up, otherwise they wouldn’t be keep in this position. I can see in terms of their weight, are they back on their heels, in front of themselves. I am looking at them and I want a thick description. Do you know this description? It is Clifford Geertz who is an anthropologist from Santa Cruz. In anthropology they started with this idea of the participant observer. In Anthropology you can’t be invisible, so you are a participant observer. What Geertz realised in a paper that he wrote called ‘Balinese Cock Fighting’ he realised that everyone involved in the scene has a different perspective. So he could observe, so he has his perspective. But if he asks the people raising the cocks he would have a different story from the people making them fight, people betting on them, people collecting the money, and the tax collecting, not collecting the money, animal rights activists, the wives of those people. He said that his goal was not to have this one perspective but to create a thick description from many perspectives. What I am after here is getting a thick description and also in noticing how the person is moving, creating a curriculum for what things they need to learn. I think about those things in relationship to these categories, but rarely do I think, ‘This person needs more flow.’ Though, sometimes it is that. One of my favourite students from many years ago was a male to female transsexual and she had a really deep voice and she also had very brusque type of movement. So if she was to visit a store she would walk up to the counter, ask for help, and the clerk who was looking down would say ‘yes sir’, before looking up and getting really confused and embarrassed. So we worked with her voice but we also worked with her movements and a lot of that had to do with changing the speed of her movement and also just making her movement more flexible because she was so direct all the time. There, I definitely thought about it in these terms, and also in the Laban equivalents.
WL: One way is to overcome the restrictions one person is imposing on themselves, another is just to extend their range. Is it?
LG: When I am first looking at somebody I am looking at making that person bigger. If somebody is stuck in this certain position, I am not looking for the opposite. If somebody has a scoliosis, I’m not looking for them to bend the other way or to be perfectly symmetrical. I am looking for them to find within the shape that they’re stuck in, or whatever aspect they are stuck in, to find a little more room to move. And eventually to be able to have different kinds of organisations. In terms of the scoliosis, the idea is to have not structural symmetry but functional dispensability. Not that I am perfectly symmetrical but that I can move as easily in any direction. That’s really the aim. So if I’m stuck in one place then I can’t do that. But the aim is really this ability - you have to think that Feldenkrais is this martial artist - move in any direction with equal ease and without hesitation. That’s what you want in the field of combat.
WL: That has a lot of practical value – driving a car.
LG: We were talking earlier about making these kinds of working and thinking accessible to people in their everyday lives, I think about Feldenkrais as the martial arts of everyday life. Of taking these ideas and bringing them into our life.
[53.24]
Afternoon Session
DM: I was listening to you both this morning talking about the range in which you can change. Although one of you suggested that it wasn’t quite like that, it does seem to me that you both are talking first of all about change, and secondly the degree to which somebody can change. I wonder if you could both talk about this as a possible area that you both have in common. You Warren, have said that although you give development lessons, you don’t think that there can be a huge degree to which a person can change. I wonder if you might start, and then Larry, can you comment on the degree to which somebody can change as a result of your interventions?
WL: I think at first it’s important to settle on the nature of the change. Is it change in temperament, is it change in attitude, or philosophical and religious change? All of these changes can occur and are of very big import to the person. Also, of course, we can change our gesture. There used to be an executive who gave a lot of his speeches and during his talk, and especially when answering questions, it looked as though he were picking his nose. So I told him and he couldn’t agree to start with that he could do something as uncouth as pick his nose. But I could easily prove it. I worked with him and it was a question of when it occurred and he could counteract it. I classified that as a gesture and any gesture which does not occur in mergers can be understood as just an acquired gesture or mannerism, something of that sort, which you can train yourself out of. Then it ceases to exist.
If people have some sort of habits like scratching, say a pimple and making it bleed. It is a movement that occurs and is coherent within a pattern, then it’s very, very difficult to get them… I used to try and experiment with trying to find an alternative pattern that they could do that didn’t hurt themselves. I’ve always been interested when these mannerisms occur as to whether they are significant or not, in the sense of whether they form part of the basic pattern or not. Therefore sometimes change which can be quite significant as in the case of this executive picking his nose, some change can be of value, whereas other change may be relatively insignificant.
I think it’s necessary first of all to get an understanding of the nature of the change that you want and I’ve always said that because it’s been my experience, especially when making profiles of people over decades of time, that you find that the basic pattern of preference in decision-making doesn’t change very much. So, having established that, then I would be all in favour of using movement knowledge to help people to get a change in their attitudes or temperament or whatever could be achieved. But if it is transformation which is some way linked with the MPA pattern, I think it should be understood that it may be attempted but the degree of achievement is likely to be small. So it’s in that sense that the degree of change can be worked out. If it is part of the MPA pattern then a small degree should be aimed for. If it’s associated with an isolated gesture then a big change can be aimed for.
LG: I think I’m in the business, when you say that, of helping people make those kind of profound changes. We were talking about habit earlier and I think that when people come to me with the limitations they are experiencing, I think I can help them to change those habitual movements, it can be very fundamental. However, I don’t think that makes a habit go away. We were talking about transformation before, this kind of deep, profound, fundamental kind of change. I told you about somebody I know who has had cerebral palsy for about 25 or 30 years…
WL: Are you saying that you don’t think that those habits go away?
LG: I was teaching a course for Feldenkrais teachers in Sydney, and advanced course. The floor was open for questions and one of the students, one my colleagues actually, didn’t ask a question but rather expressed a complaint: ‘I’ve been a Feldenkrais teacher for 12 years and I still have habits! That’s what we’re talking about. Habits return. Feldenkrais would say that when the lights go out you fetch the candles, so under stress habits return. You were asking me earlier about working with people over time. I remember seeing somebody who had been in a car accident and then 13 or 14 years later seeing the same person come in with a sports-related injury. But what was going on with the physical way that they were stuck was exactly the same. Their response was habitual. The glass breaks where there was a crack, despite that there was a different accident, the way that they responded was the same. I think that has to do with the habit, with the person’s unconscious response. I don’t know if you change it. I think you learn to deal with it. I was trying to find a good example of this when we were talking before.
Remember we were talking about our pedagogical approaches, and I said one of the places where we may be different. You are talking about adding vocabulary, giving people other options for their tic or their habit, and you’re talking about changing, about giving them different ways of moving that avoid it. As a Feldenkrais teacher the first thing I’d do is give them more of what they’re doing. Support what they’re doing. This is a great story about Feldenkrais the guy: he is teaching martial arts, teaching self-defence techniques, and he is realising that people have these automatic, reflexive responses. Some people, and this how I normally say it, but seeing you here I have a whole different thought in my mind, some people when you attack them, they advance. Some people move to the side, some people shrink, so he filmed his students being attacked and saw what their response was. Then he taught each of them a technique that was based on their unconscious response. The Eriksonian hypnotherapist would call that ‘utilisation’, engaging in utilising the unconscious pattern.
WL: What is the difference between a habit and a ritual?
LG: I don’t know what the difference is, but my difference is this. A habit is something that for me in this conversation, a habit is a behaviour that you repeat unconsciously, over and over. I am talking about habits that would fall into the category of mostly what you would call posture. Feldenkrais would call it ‘acture’ because he liked to get away from the static and go to the dynamic. We can say posture. Ritual is a social thing and it may or may not be conscious. It can be engaged in volitionally, or it can be engaged unconsciously. Psychologists have a different way of talking about that. The thing that’s interesting about habit is that habit has a behavioural and a perceptual aspect to it. Habit is what everybody else knows about you because you do it over and over again. Habit is a thing that you are least likely to know about yourself because you are habituated to it. As they used to say in the little town where I grew up in upstate New York, ‘you don’t smell the shit on the farm.’ That’s habituation. You are used to it.
Feldenkrais was interested in self image. He said that we don’t move according to our structure, we move according to our self image. Self image does not mean the psychological, about how good we feel about ourselves, but the intuitive, internal sensation, understanding of our body. The thing about habit is, if the things we do over and over again, drop out of our awareness, right through the process of habituation, that means that they’re the things that we’re least likely to notice. Our self-image or self-perception is distorted by the habitual nature of our behaviour. The things we do over and over again other people notice, but we they tend to drop out of our awareness. That’s what makes changing habits so hard. It’s out of someone’s awareness. Even when it is, it is still hard because the autopilot has it.
WL: Of course ritual is usually regarded as a group thing. I’ve played around with the idea that there is something that we can classify as an individual ritual because it has the same sort of – looking at primitive societies, anyway – has similarities of the same compulsiveness. It hasn’t rained and so they are compelled to …
LG: Psychologists have referred to compulsive behaviour as ritualistic. That’s what you’re referring to. Then there’s Anna Halprin, the American dancer, who talks about movement rituals. She is your contemporary. She has developed a whole way of … she talks about the way that she works as movement ritual, but this is a positive version of ritual. Habit is necessary – this being in the moment thing. You don’t want to get rid of habit. The automaticity of behaviour means that our mind is free to invent, to imagine, to reflect, to plan – all of those things. But it also means that things become hard to change, and you want that. You don’t want a nervous system that is labile. Both you and I live in California and there are people we know are workshop junkies: they go to a workshop and they delve into one world. They are fully in it, and in the next week they are fully in another world and there is no stability there. Constancy and stability are important for the nervous system. Habits are kind of the price that we pay for it. What we don’t have is processes for updating our habits. Part of updating our habits is having some way of waking up and beginning to notice that we’ve fallen into the automatic aspect of it. But I think that in some fundamental way my job is not to help somebody change their nature but it’s to help them recognise it, and to develop as much freedom as they can have.
WL: Not to change their nature but to…
LG: Help them recognise it?
WL: But it seemed to me that you were talking about changing people’s habits. So it’s OK to change people’s habits but not to change them more significantly.
LG: Change their habits… That’s grandiose. I want to help release people from the utter compulsion of their habit. I want to give them more choices and variety. In my own personal experience, in my life, emotionally, movement-wise, intellectually, I am dealing with my own habits and how strong they are. I have a great respect for habit. You know what I think? We can change things, but it’s also … We were talking about transformation. You can go through a process and be somebody new. People go through a process and change their clothes, and they change the people they hang out with, they change the things they talk about, and they still do it the same old way.
WL: I’m just wondering whether there’s a distinction which could be made, helpful to me to know more about because I’ve played around with it for decades the distinction between a habit which can be fairly easily changed and a habit which has been compulsive, or there’s a compulsive element to it.
LG: The thing is I think they can be changed significantly, profoundly, for a short period of time. I think that that’s really important because it gives the person what it is not to be ruled by them. That’s the amazing thing about Feldenkrais. I can give someone a lesson where they can, in the Feldenkrais way, in a ‘no pain more gain’ way, feel they are no more in their prison. They could never imagine no matter how much they had dreamed of it. I know that probably won’t last very long but what it gives us is now they know that being different is something they can work towards. It’s not that I want to change them: I want to help them change themselves. I don’t think, as much as I wish, that Sigmund Freud was right. As much as I wish that it was true I don’t that awareness equals change.
WL: Oh, indeed.
LG: I think that awareness and accountability make change possible, but I think that change actually is kind of a long term process and it takes somebody on the outside to know what you’re not doing, and it takes some kind of practice to engage on this process because the habit is going to return. I have this argument with my colleagues these days because I think we oversell what we do. We keep telling people, ‘Come get a lesson and you’ll be free of your habits.’ Bullshit.
WL: Awareness doesn’t equal change but it helps. This man who picked his nose. He still had a little bit of a gesture but he would be aware when he was on a platform, ‘Oh my God I’m picking my nose again’ and eventually it just ceased altogether. So it doesn’t equal but it certainly helps to bring about.
LG: What I said was ‘awareness and accountability’ make change possible, they don’t make it happen.
WL: I find if the compulsive element is present very often with habits that are associated with the body and care of the body, maybe biological functions even. Let’s say in having a shower. Somebody likes to pick the towel up and will follow a particular practice of face first and then back, but to have disrupted really can upset people very, very greatly.
LG: But back to the hypnosis people, they say that it’s in the moment of disrupting, that very moment, that someone is also susceptible, in a way. In one of Erikson’s famous trance inductions starts with a handshake and letting the hand drop very slowly. It is an apparent handshake. With handshakes it is incredibly rude not to respond. If you interrupt that then that person’s system is jarred.
WL: Is that really a movement awareness thing?
LG: No is a hypnosis thing, kind of the opposite thing. But the thing I’m trying to say is that disrupting habits is disquieting. It can be very disturbing for people. But it’s also necessary. That’s the thing about Feldenkrais lessons; they do have profound effects on people’s habits and they tend to do it in a way that though it’s disorienting it’s not disquieting for most people, most of the time.
DM: But sometimes after a lesson someone might say, ‘Thanks for the lesson, now I can’t walk!’ or ‘You say that I am standing straight, but I feel as if I’m leaning to one side.’
LG: That has probably to do with something you did before the lesson started.
DM: But if they always lean in one direction, and then you get them standing on both feet equally, their previous image of themselves will make it seem as if they were leaning.
LG: Moshe’s thing was if you have somebody who was like this [indicates a posture] and you bring them straight, they are going to feel like they are falling backwards. That set point of what was upright is also habitual. What we have to change is not the person’s behaviour but that internal set-point and that’s the question: ‘How do you recalibrate the set-point?’
WL: I’ve just thought of the case of a woman who came to me for movement training, in a similar to what we [Dick and Warren] did. She said she was being driven round the bend by her husband. Whenever they went to bed he always takes the money, he always has coins in his pocket and he arranges them, and it was obvious that he did this with great deliberateness and probably with exact repetition from night to night. It’s like the compulsion that primitive peoples have: they have to do a rain dance otherwise the rain will never come – they have to do it. It seems as if he had to do it, and he had to get them precisely ordered. She had asked him why he did it and it seemed to upset him. But the fact that she began to talk with him didn’t seem to help at all but only increased her own irritation at having to witness, even if she went out of the bedroom, she still knew he was doing it. Maybe it represented to her things that she found difficult in her husband. It can be that sort of transition. How do you change that? I gave her some ideas of what she might say to him or do but it all failed. I could only come to the conclusion that it had become for him so meaningful that if he didn’t do it the world would fall apart.
LG: If somebody asked me that question I would have gone in a really different way because somebody comes to me, I cannot help them change somebody else’s behaviour. I would refuse the assignment. I would say that I could help how you respond to it. But he’s not here and he’s not asking for help, so it’s not in her control to change his behaviour, and that would have been the first thing I would have wanted to point out to her.
WL: Probably it was very wrong and misjudged of me.
LG: No, I’m just saying that my focus would have been on her. Why are you trying to change his behaviour, that’s not in your control?
WL: I’m mean why should he change, he wasn’t doing any damage or anything. She should have accommodated to it, I suppose. The thing is, when somebody asks for help, when somebody comes to me there are a couple guidelines I follow. What they ask for has to be stated in the positive, it can’t be a negative, it can’t be, ‘I don’t want pain.’ I want to be able to do this without pain – that’s ok. It has to be in the person’s control. Changing somebody else’s behaviour isn’t in their control. Those are the two things I look for at the beginning. That just comes from my training before Feldenkrais. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but these are the parameters I operate under.
DM: Could I suggest that your [WL] notion of a movement pattern as this ingrained way of doing things that really isn’t that open to reflection, but that a movement pattern analyst would be able to bring to attention, is really quite similar to a habit which you [LG] have described as a way of behaving, a way of doing. And that there is a degree of common ground between you, not only in identifying that way of doing things, but also in the fact that one can’t change it hugely. The only proviso that you [WL] made once was that if someone had had a profound trauma, a near-fatal car crash or something, that could change it.
JG: I would rather have someone with a severe neurological problem or incredible pain, than someone with a little problem. Someone with a little problem, they get up and they say, ‘Ah you know it’s still there’. Somebody who has an incredible difficulty in flexing their leg, a small change would make such a huge difference. And so I’m not sure I actually have the same scale. People come to me because they want these things to change and I think they do change. Does their fundamental nature or character change? In some ways no, but in some ways I see people make these incredible changes. They are still recognisable as them.
WL: I worked with a man once, William Sargent. He wrote a book on brainwashing and what happened to prisoners who were tortured and made to confess or make statements which were politically advantageous to the torturers. He had some interest in my work and we really came to the conclusion that this really did break the person’s movement pattern, but very often the person was broken and didn’t have the capacity. I’ve always seen this as a very extreme form of getting people to change. Whether their might be an element of brain-washing without the extreme condition…
LG: I think of that more of breaking their spirit than washing their brain.
DM: You are reducing their autonomy. They are no longer autonomous people.
LG: I think people have a great capacity to change, and maybe what we’re talking about is, within what boundary? There is a kind of promise that some people make that if you do XYZ you will easily in five steps become the person you always wished you could be. I think that it takes more than that to make changes. I think Gerry Carson who was one of Feldenkrais’ assistants and the person that travelled with him, said, ‘the Feldenkrais method makes people more who they already are.’ Sometimes people need to be different but I think there’s that thing of being in contact with your authentic nature and also not being so locked by it, having more variety around it…
WL: Would you say that a person’s authentic nature is described by the MPA?
DM: I would have thought that that was more a question for you!
LG: ‘Authentic’ and ‘nature’ are really difficult. Nature doesn’t exist until there is artifice, or until there is society to compare it with. So nature is not natural, because it can only exist when there’s something that’s not natural to compare it to. I think it defines where somebody comes from in some way. Feldenkrais talked about everybody having their own handwriting. I think there is a kind of qualitative signature that people have and I think that people can develop depth and variety around that. Our nervous systems, our experience, are somehow archaeological, there are all these layers and the older something is the more something else has been built on it, the more it’s part of that. In some ways those fundamental things are really difficult to change.
DM: When you talked about Warren’s MPA you did actually use the metaphor of handwriting.
LG: Moshe’s metaphor of handwriting.
WL: It is a good example because studies have been done of people who have changed very considerably in many respects and yet their handwriting is still the same.
LG: How about the contrary of that? How about someone who is a forger: does being a good forger change a personality? In a way we are saying that if you explore these other dynamics, let’s just say in terms of the MPA, does that change your hand-writing? Maybe it changes your ability to have more freedom. I think that still under stress it’s still going to look like your handwriting.
WL: But it all pertains to what truly interests me, whether we call it authentic or we call it the ‘real me’ or whether we say what is characteristic. I always use when people are challenging what I do, that what it is, is a pattern of preference for a decision-making process. But it does have significance. It does seem from studies that we’ve done that when people are acting more in accordance with their own MPA then they are perceived as being more sincere, for example. Quite a lot of work is being done in the movement world to try to detect liars. One woman is practising her ideas in the courts of law. This whole concept of calling it authenticity, sincerity, real me is obviously a big concern.
LG: There are so many things that go through my mind when you were talking. When I studied NLP the question that people asked me when I told people what I was studying, I was shocked, almost everybody when they heard my description of it, the first thing they asked, ‘Will it help you tell when someone’s lying to you?’ I was in my ‘20s and I thought, ‘Why would you want to know something like that?’ Now I know! That’s one comment about it. There is that interest. The other thing I wanted to say was about your consultancy work, helping people figuring out whether you should hire somebody, helping teams to work together better, and helping people to become more effective in their jobs which means developing more variety in their choices, does that really fit with you believing that people can’t change?
WL: Being more effective in their job means developing more variety?
LG: Developing more variety in their profile?
WL: Doesn’t it depend on the job?
LG: I’m going to give you a bit of a hard time. You’re being a little pessimistic about people’s ability to change their fundamental organisation. And yet part of what you told me you were doing when you were working with people is that once you’ve done the MPA to help people to develop more variety.
DM: To develop their range
LG: To develop their range.
WL: Training methods in industry used to be and to some extent still are ‘working next to Nellie’. Have you heard that expression? Well, Nellie is supposed to be a person who is the archetype who knows it all. So, you pick up the job by copying someone else. Whereas we mostly try to help people develop their own way and apply what it is like for them into getting the job done. I always quote that there are a lot of politicians after WWII who tried to be like Winston Churchill who made themselves look pompous and ridiculous. It’s better to find your own way rather than to model yourself on some admired person. It’s the same in terms of manual work. Rather than watching how somebody else does it…
LG: But this goes back to the way that we teach classes. We don’t demonstrate. It’s related to that same way, because if you demonstrate you either copy my mistakes or only copy what you already know, so the question is, ‘How do I help the student find their own way?’
WL: There are a lot of parallels.
LG: We’ve been talking about these fundamental patterns in terms of acting, sensing and thinking, but there’s the feeling aspect of it too and I think that seeing some kind of trauma behind everybody’s difficulty…
DM: I loved that slip of the tongue when you said ‘drama’ instead of trauma, because in a way it is dramatising oneself. To create a trauma for a difficulty is like putting yourself out there and having a reason to speak. The trauma validates the difficulty, makes it important and worth discussing.
The thing that Warren and I would like you to consider is the problem with which I started our book [With an Eye for Movement]: the correlation between the way someone moves, their deep movement habits and how they make decisions. Warren describes this as a correlation. It is this relation between how one moves and how one makes a decision, the relation between one’s cognitive preferences – you have used the expression - and one’s movement preferences. This relation completely dispels any notion of a mind/body split. I find it hard to talk to people about this because they will respond that the body does one thing but mentally you do another. What’s your reaction to that? Or is it so self-evident that you don’t see a problem.
LG: If someone does that I do my best to manifest hysterical laughter. I think that the best thing to do is to respond to them as if they were crazy.
DM: So to you Warren’s claim is self-evidently obvious?
LG: No, no. I think this goes back to the conversation we were having this morning at breakfast. I am paraphrasing, but Warren was saying about how he’s felt many times over the course of doing this work that the world was ready for it and it was about to break through, and it hasn’t. And we were talking about what that is so and I think that part of why that’s so is – and he we go interpreting - that in a way there is a great deal of denial that is going on in that person’s statement. When it comes to the way that I work with people, I’ve actually said to people, ‘I’ve done my talk about habits, the unconscious, Feldenkrais being post-Freudian’, and then people say, ‘Well you know I used to be like that, but I’m not any more.’ I would ask what they mean by that and they reply, ‘I used to be unconscious but now I meditate, so now I’m conscious.’ ‘DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT ‘CONSCIOUS’ MEANS?’ I remember this one guy in the day of the Sunyatsins, the followers of Rajnish. I was teaching a workshop in NLP for body-centred psychotherapists and body workers. He actually said, ‘Well I used to be unconscious.’ So I got him out in front of the group and asked if he would just watch very carefully while I put something in my hand and then made it disappear. So he is getting really annoyed as I put bigger and bigger balls in my hand and then tossing them over his head. Everybody else could see them but not him. But that’s the thing about the unconscious. I actually had an argument with a friend of mine who really believed that he was in total conscious control of everything he did. I mean this idea of the unconscious which now is conversational but was revolutionary with Freud, I don’t think really appreciate or understand what that it. I think we have to acknowledge how much is unconscious and out of our control and also acknowledging that there’s this kind of cultural assumption that these kind of things occur but when you talk to people about the people they know, their behaviours and let’s say their actions and their attitudes, not many people see that connection or they over-generalise it. They talk about it in imprecise ways. To disengage from thinking too much there are certain things I like to do, and one of them is playing solitaire. I notice in my solitaire-playing strategies over the years that I have certain tendencies. Sometimes I’ll play it on the computer. Certain games I will have spotted it too quickly, had I taken a moment to reflect, to gather a little more information, I would have done something differently. That’s pretty much describes me. If we’re going out to dinner and we’re going to split the cost of the dinner, I’ll figure it out before anyone else will. I’m fast, I’m not correct, but I’m fast. I’m usually in the ball park. But you know my decision-making style, my movement style, my card-playing style – I’m congruent across all those. Somebody says something like that and I talk about myself rather than about them, and then ask, ‘Does that make sense to you?’ and then usually they come up with an answer. I try not argue. I say this is how I think about it. But in the scientific world there’s this idea of embodied cognition or enaction that really has to do with things that perception is an action. That is really the fundamental notion and so …
DM: It is the putting-together of a whole lot of things.
WL: Would it be true to say – though this is hardly an answer to the question that you asked a moment ago – that you call it ‘Mind in Motion’: could it equally well be ‘Mind is Motion’?
LG: It could. It’s so declarative and final. If you put it that way most people would think, ‘Mind is only motion’, rather ‘is’ inclusively. I think Mind and Motion because mind appears in motion and mind is dynamic. One of my teachers, Herbert Broom, who was a musician/cybernetician, very politically-oriented artist, he used to say that we get into trouble when we ask the question, ‘What is?’ ‘What is learning?’ We should ask the question, ‘When?’ ‘What is?’ cuts it off. ‘Learning is developing new behaviours.’ Is that all it is? ‘When is learning?’ When can I know that learning is happening? What are the signs of it happening? That is such a better question. So when you say ‘Mind is Motion’, that’s kind of an answer to the question, ‘What is mind?’ ‘Mind is motion.’ I avoid the ‘What is?’ questions, I’m really more interested in the dynamic, ‘When is this happening?’ ‘What stops the action?’ I’ll demur from that.
DM: The funny thing with the ‘when’ is first of all it ask you consider the conditions of when this thing might occur, which means that you as a practitioner can maybe know when you can profitably intervene and when not. It is a more dynamic question.
LG: It’s a happening, it’s a process, there’s an ongoingness to that. It’s so hard not to nominalise, not to make verbs into nouns, not to make actions into these stop-action postcards.
DM: Looking at Laban‘s early writings, he was continually wrestling with the idea that we understand in framings, and yet the thing that we’re trying to understand is always changing. How to get an adequate number of frames? When we say, ‘I’ve got it’, we think of intellectual grasping in terms of capture of one thing rather than a series of things.
LG: One other area where we’re harmonious here is that when somebody comes to me I don’t have answers, I have really good questions. I can answer them and I know what to do with those. The process of observation you’re talking about is a series of questions that you’re posing. That keeps you from setting your understanding too soon because that is actually the greatest problem. When I’m teaching somebody to do this work I think the greatest problem that people have is that they stop asking questions too soon. Some people don’t know when to stop, but most people are so relieved that they’ve noticed anything that they stop instead of developing a fuller picture or representation.
DM: Remember you said earlier about one thing you still have, having been a researcher, is the ability to frame good questions. It would be great if we could think of some questions that we could ask fellow scientists who have all the equipment. What would be the questions whose answers we might want to know? Where do we want to shine some light?
LG: I’m going back to some of things we’ve discussed earlier. I’ve said some things in this conversation that I’ve never said before. I hadn’t thought of what you would bee thinking when I said these things. When posture and gesture are dissociated or not merged, from my way of seeing that, in order for the limb to be free the trunk has to do a lot of work to stabilise. So it’s not as if there isn’t anything happening, it’s not the absence, but it’s an active dissociation and so there’s a fundamental change from the limb and the trunk moving separately and then moving together. It is something we can observe, something that we can record. There are muscles working that may be statically or dynamically. What would be interesting is to get a PET scan to see that moment of merging. I’m curious about what you’re curious about. When posture and gesture merge what could we see that is happening in the brain at that time? I also don’t think that it would be causal but it would be correlative. What’s the correlation that happens in the central nervous system? I think that that is a really interesting question and I think that your intuition, discovery, realisation, of that being the moment to look at makes me really curious about what that would tell us about that moment in terms of … whatever. That would be really interesting. I also think in terms of a behavioural study if there’s a way in which that could be correlated with the question of whether someone is telling the truth or not. That would be really easy to … that’s not a brain study, that’s either having movement observation or movement tracking or having observers observing who are well trained and who would be able to tell whether someone’s lying or telling the truth. There’s this Australian who’s written about these basic facial expressions, I’ve forgotten his name.
DM: Paul Ekman?
LG: Yes. There are these basic expressions and then there is his idea of micro-expressions and whether they are congruent or incongruent. In the States they have built a whole TV show around it called Lie to me that’s really a fascinating enquiry, but that’s also people’s interest in this question. That would be interesting, not so much neurologically, but what we can tell from that.
WL: Of course if I do a sort of big gesture then if I haven’t stabilised my trunk then the gesture might take me with it. I can do the gesture and have the connection with my trunk so that I don’t over-balance, but if I’m holding the hand here that almost can be classified as a gesture of going against to prevent the postural movement occurring because normally a reciprocal movement. In Laban’s Scales there’s usually a leading part of the body there’s usually a symmetrical movement. Maybe you stabilise the trunk with the quality of the movement in the arms is different from having them stabilise the trunk. It’s not a merger.
You do understand me, which is great. But a lot of people whom I have talked to don’t really understand what I mean by a merger.
LG: It was so interesting to read that and then to talk about it today because for me it was more like something clicking into place that had been missing. So it was easy.
DM: So it’s a good concept for you?
LG: Yes. It relates somehow when we talk about Path we can talk about the trajectories. When you talk about Path you always have to talk about the ‘Path of’ some part of the body, unless you’re shooting somebody out of a cannon. When I turn you can talk about the path of my nose, and my shoulder turns to the left, but my pelvis stays there. If my nose goes to the left in relation to my shoulder then something has to happen in my neck. If my shoulder goes back in relation to my pelvis then something has to happen in my middle. My head and my shoulder moving together and my whole trunk is moving. But some people turn their head to their left and they bring their shoulder forward. Feldenkrais called that ‘Cross-motivation’, the trajectories are crossing. Within the context of merging there are mergings where things go with, and things go against: how does this notion of cross-motivation, of when I’m going against myself fit? Is that a merging, a lack of merging?
WL: It’s not a merging unless the quality of the movement, for example, if it’s a directing movement, unless you see the directing consistently in all parts of the body or at least going from one part of the body to another. Very often the sort of adjustments that you have described is not the case.
LG: The thing that I’m most interested is what we could see at the moment of merging and what that might tell us. I’m curious. There are certain diseases that interfere with this and in particular I’m thinking of Parkinson’s where people have gradient {?} kinesia where they have difficulty starting to move. One of the hallmarks of it is that they have this really decreasing affect. What you see is limited gesturing but you don’t see the whole self involved, that is, the merging of the rest of the person. It is remarkably absent in some ways in people with extreme or severe Parkinsons. At least I think that that is pretty much true.
WL: What is ‘pretty much true’?
LG: That the trunk is pretty much disengaged and that it is really hard for them to do that.
WL: Hard for them to engage their trunk?
LG: … with the movement of their limbs, whether it is walking or gesturing. So you get the opposite of merging with them. So I was wondering if there was a way to see what happens with ‘normal’ people when they’re merging, and compare that to the nervous system of someone with Parkinsons when they’re gesturing, would have totally disappeared? What is happening in the Central Nervous System? That is an interesting question, just off the top of my head…
WL: It is, but there are hundreds of such questions.
LG: … but from the neurological aspect these are some questions that we can investigate. The thing that’s difficult in what you’re talking about and what up until maybe 15 years ago was impossible to research … we can only ask questions that we can answer, so in the ‘50s there were a lot of measurements done because we can measure one range of movement, so looking at whole body movements and being able to tell these things which are easy for us as human observers to detect are really difficult for machines to detect. So if you had sensors on the top of the chest and the solar plexus and the pelvis and on the elbow and the hand you would assume that you would see movement of the arm and these would stay within a certain range fixed in relationship to each other and that would shift at certain moments. Well we could show doing that, that there is such a thing as merged and unmerged motion or action. What’s really interesting is then to find the correlates of what is happening in the CNS [Central Nervous System]. I am assuming that it would be reasonable to guess that there is something fundamentally different about this, like shifts of gears in the car, they are different organisations that people are shifting between and that should show up somewhere.
WL: Yes, mergers do exist. There was an experiment years ago at UCLA when a number of students had fourteen electromyography pads were put on different parts of the body and during a whole day I think it was, certainly a number of hours, recordings were coming in they actually produced, I don’t know if it was literally, but it seemed like miles of records, from these twenty students. You could see in one particular student there would be of a wobble in one of the …. And perhaps there would be three at the same time
LG: They would be mirroring each other …
WL: That’s right, there would be certain patterns. Every so often all fourteen graphs wiggled together and in all the twenty-something students that was the case. It never went on for long. When the fourteen graphs acted together that was a merger. Some people had more mergers than others but there was no student with whom it did not happen pretty frequently during the whole time.
DM: If I could interrupt for a moment, because I think that Warren didn’t hear something that you said concerning Parkinsons sufferers who become affectless – that is, they don’t have an emotional response.
WL: No, I didn’t catch that…
LG: I was saying that in Parkinsons one of the two symptoms is the difficulty for people to initiate movement and another thing is that their affect decreases. It is hard to read any emotion, it looks like they are very emotionless in their responses.
DM: I think in terms of the research question for our scientific experiments, this should be factored in. First of all, are they actually feeling less response to the merging movement…
LG: Let’s say that the students that you were studying have an average of thirty mergers an hour. What if we compared them to the Parkinsons people? What if they had no mergers? That would just be fascinating.
WL: It could be of course, this may not apply to Parkinsons people, but people who are disabled or who have had a limb amputated, then we just look at however much of the body is able to move.
LG: There are people who have chronic back pain who have all this muscular splitting and who don’t move their trunk because they are preventing it – do they have mergers? How do they appear? In a way what you’re talking is that in the moment of merging there is a kind of strange harmoniousness, everything is working together and that is also a definition of optimal biomechanics. Every part is playing its part, everything is moving together. In a way that is an aim of what we are going for, but is interesting about the experiment there is that naturally people don’t spend a lot of time there.
WL: [to DM] How much time have you spent with Marion North?
DM: Three hours.
WL: This someone who heads up the Laban Centre…
LG: I’ve read her book…
WL: She’s had Parkinsons disease for years but she seems better now than she was a few years ago. She seemed very, very frail and people didn’t think she’d last long, buy now she has rebounded and I’m told that it’s the result of some new medication. Do you [DM] get the sense that she does mergers? You were probably too busy interviewing her.
DM: What really came over was the affectlessness. She could ‘I’ve just scalded my hand really badly’ but without emotion. In terms of the level of the voice, in terms even of breathing, all the peaks have been levelled off. In terms of affect it is pretty much a plateau.
LG: a lot of people with Parkinsons have tremor. They have essential tremor which means that it is there all the time and in a lot of them they spend an incredible amount of physical and mental energy trying to control the tremor. That would also interfere with the merging, I would think. It would be interesting to look at merging also in terms of the idea of athletic performance, moments of flow when everything is working together, because that definition of flow is also a definition of merging – when everything is moving together. I think Feldenkrais lessons give people in some way the idea of everything moving together in the context of one specific action. That would also be an interesting thing to look at if Feldenkrais affected someone’s merging in their movement.
DM: … and then you’re coming back to your question, of when or under what conditions, or what are the optimal conditions for PGM; for then you are really starting to frame questions, aren’t you? I know this is repeating what you’ve already said, but it seems a really good framing of your question.
WL: Another project could be looking at children becoming adolescent. Up to the ages of 10, 11, 12, it may vary from different cultures, you can see different PGMs other than in flow. Young people will free flow and grow and shrink and you see that quite a lot, but as the Effort and Shape ranges develop first they are just gestural. I was just looking at a fifteen month old child over the weekend and you can see that it was flowing around very much, but when it came to pick up a toy or push a button or get a shape into the whole of the appropriate design the flow affects the arm and the fingers getting into the hole, but there is nothing in the body that will merge with that attempt to direct. Of course they can’t direct very well. Gradually the more the body becomes involved, until around about adolescence, and there is a full range of PGMs. We would never attempt to make a MPA with any indications until a child is about sixteen or eighteen or so.
LG: Back to the degrees of freedom situation. I was talking about how after somebody injures themselves they limit their degrees of freedom, they limp, they restrict their freedom of movement. There’s another time when people limits their degrees of freedom naturalistically and that’s when they’re learning new skills. Take me out onto the tennis court and there’s no merging, because I’m just moving my arm because I’m over-stabilising to make the movement problem simpler so that there is only one variant, so there is a way in which dissociating movement is naturalistically part of the learning process, so that you can build up to the merger. That’s what happens in Feldenkrais lessons. We de-compose, we deconstruct a lesson into the underlying relationships and let somebody play with them and then build up to putting it all together again at the end of the lesson. So that’s also a place where there’s a merging. It’s less cognitive and more functional – I think that’s fair to say – but I think about it less in teaching somebody about the variety in how they respond than teaching them how to put this action together.
DM: In the context of Tai Chi what you say is so true. In our first years of study we learn the segmental form and study the form segmentally, understanding how what part moves with what part. Only later on do you start to introduce flow into one’s movements. One part of the form flows and follows from the previous one, then you realise that everything is led by the pelvis. To start off it seemed to be the prefect way of demonstrating to yourself how much of a klutz you were because you see these different parts of yourself isolated and not working. When you start flowing the parts together there is such a difference.
LG: This kind of relates to people try to learn how to do an FI [Feldenkrais lesson in Functional Integration where the practitioner works with the student one on one.] The way that most people teach is as a technique: ‘Put your hands here, move the head his way.’ Then they say how you use yourself, how you coordinate yourself, then they pat you on your head and send you on your way. That just doesn’t work. Then, three years later, or ten years later, they have to learn self-use, the postural part, how you coordinate your trunk. Now the way I teach it, you start with self-use as part of technique which means it is much harder: the learning curve is really steep at the beginning. People begin to pay attention to themselves. Listening to what you were saying about Tai Chi teaching and how you segmentalise it, because there are a lot of underlying skills and the awarenesses that go with them that people have to learn. How to coordinate you nose and your belly – people just start to learn that. Once they know where their weight is, when they’ve done enough of that, they can put it together. It is a very complicated thing.
DM: You talked about Left and Right handedness and for me I really hadn’t known, although it was also mentioned in my Feldenkrais training, what was meant by the Centre Line. One thing neither of you have talked about, but which I think comes back to Larry’s statement that perception is work, it is a thing done...
LG: An action…
DM: An action, and actually I think that the different ways of looking that Warren’s Soft or Single Focus, the narrowing or directing of focus, or degrees of pressure, these are all means by which one can perceive, or gauge perceptions. You use the word ‘noticing’. People may say, ‘I didn’t notice that I didn’t even notice that’ and this is related to your struggle for finding the right terms, and the development of SPIFFER. Certainly without the very precise tools that you have developed for feeling that you have both devised, people would have no comprehension of movement, you simply wouldn’t be able to have this conversation if we didn’t know what increasing pressure or what the phenomenon of PGM was. The question of terminology for me is central to a discussion of perception. Both of you through creating certain terminologies allow somebody to be aware of movement, to know what movement is.
LG: To come back to the cybernetic aspect of it, most people are paying attention to where they are going and they are not paying attention to how they are getting there, so most people are aware of the aim but not of the means, of their voyage there. Part of what we’re doing is making the means the aim, rather than the accomplishment the aim. That’s a really big shift. There are lots of different aspects about how you are moving that you can notice, but that shift to noticing how you are moving, that I very substantial.
DM: I remember Warren talking about the notation of a movement between two points in space and Warren commenting on books about movement which aren’t illustrated with a succession of photographs, but one photograph with the caption, ‘This is the movement of raising your hand’, and the photograph captures the destination. As you’ve just said, the whole point is how, and that’s where you two come together. I still think there is a hell of lot of work to do to persuade people of this. Just look at the books of Desmond Morris where there is one photograph per movement. But it isn’t the movement, but rather the destination.
LG: But now we have the technology that we can record these things and more easily show them. We were talking about Sequence. When I watch somebody … When I teach I say that to become a Feldenkrais teacher you have to learn to fluidly hallucinate. ‘I see you sitting there with your weight on your left hip, I see the curves in your spine.’ It is imagined, I see that as you move, it is dynamic. I think that people who understand Feldenkrais have to be able to create those images for people to really see. So one of the things that I want to do is actually show what happens and help people see how in these lessons as we change the movement constraints different places are asked to movement which weren’t moving before and what the consequences are. I think we have a long way to go to help people recognise this. But I absolutely think people can recognise this. I was telling you at lunch how I absolutely love Posture and Gesture because you are talking about it, in modern parlance I would say, in such a down-to-earth way. There is no artifice, you use these great examples. I think the worst thing to do is to say to somebody, ‘This is really difficult to talk about.’ Either you are saying that I am stupid or they are stupid. It’s just a bad place to start a conversation, it’s much better to say, ‘Have you ever noticed’, or ‘Have you ever wondered’. I think these things are observable. I don’t think people are rigorous and people may not have a fine set of distinctions, but I think a lot of these things enter into people’s awareness.
DM: In part of your {LG} pedagogy you said this. You go to the pattern, to the habit, rather than saying ‘You’ve got this terrible thing…’
LG: Look, it’s a necessity. You can change something if you don’t know what you’re doing.
DM; Warren, could you as an example, tell the story of how you were at a station with a student who you had ask to observe and notate the movements of a particular passenger.
WL: This is observation practice, actually. I used to take students to railways stations and building sites, this sort of place.
LG: I like bowling alleys. You can eat pizza, drink beer and watch people do movements over and over.
WL: We were in Waterloo station observing people and then I saw a man who was obviously agitated because his train was still in the platform but they had drawn the steel gates. He could see the train still there but wouldn’t let him through the barrier. It is a safety thing to close the barrier so people don’t jump on to a moving train. So, anyway he was there protesting, and as soon as that started I said to observe him. So she got a pad and then burst out spontaneously, ‘If he’d only keep still I could observe something!’ That is one of my repertoire of much-quoted stories.
DM: I like that story because it demonstrates how people think of understanding in terms of stopping, rather than understanding the flux, the flow of a movement.
LG: This happens in a class. If you ask people to notice their breathing, the first thing that beginners do is hold their breath. ‘Can you notice and move at the same time?’ There’s a challenge there.
WL: I often say that people use movement terms to describe fixed positions, or they describe fixed positions as movements. Again, a much-quoted story, is about Martha Davis, who published an article where she described her observations of a patient, a client with whom she was working, giving therapy to. She gave fifteen illustrations under the heading of ‘movement observations’, 1,2,3, etc. At least half of them, seven or eight of them were typical of the one I always like to quote, ‘Hands held still be the side for long periods’. That is a justifiable observation in the context, but to lump it together with other observations as though it were a movement is a great mistake. Obviously, stillness does come into it…
LG: When I talk about this I define movement as a change in relationships over time. But a lack of change in relationships over time is also referring to movement, no?
WL: Of course, a lot of movement is going on all the time, a lot of it almost imperceptible, a lot of definitely imperceptible – breathing, twitching and so on. This was another thing that Laban tried to come to terms with, he called them Shadow Movements, like little twitches of an eyebrow, which can of course, depending on the context, be very significant. I think we really have to take into account what we are capable of, what the human eye is capable of observing, and hopefully one day there will be sensors of some sort or other that are capable of observing moving forms.
DM: Obviously there are moments of rest within the rhythmic pattern of movement, but simply to think of a body sign being movement, when in fact it isn’t. I like Warren’s definition of movement as being a process of variation, which is quite close to yours, ‘a change in relationships over time.’
LG: People want to take movements apart and end up with parts. From one moment to the next your parts don’t change, so it’s not about the parts changing but the relationships between them. That’s the systemic thing – to talk about relationship between parts.
WL: Of course there is movement going on internally which we can’t see, although we might guess that if somebody has their tongue within cheek. Some of these expressions in English are obviously the result of movement observation.
LG: There is a wonderful book in French called Mes bras m’entombent - My arms are falling off – which is a French expression for being surprised. It is a thick book which is a collected of all the body-related terms that this psychologist put together. It’s just incredible. You know there’s more of that in French than there is in English, because in English we have this huge vocabulary whereas in French you have to use phrases to say things, because they don’t have a word.
DM: Do you know Lakoff and Johnson?
LG: Not personally, but I know their work.
DM: Metaphors we Live By. A lot of Warren’s work can be understood or illuminate by the body metaphors which we use in everyday speech. Being backed into a corner, having no elbow room. Damasio comes into this as well, who describes an emotion as being a certain state of the body, it is the feedback that you get from your physical self, that’s how you know you are sad.
LG: When I get home I’ll send you the author and everything.
DM: We need something like that book in English because it would be a quite accessible way into Warren’s ideas.
LG: Elizabeth Berrenger’s husband, Raphael Nuñez is a student of theirs [L&J] and is a cognitive psychologist. He wrote a paper with George Lakoff about people’s experience of time. Most of us put the future in front of us and the past behind us, and in this article he talks about this group of Native Americans, South American natives who put the future behind them and the past in front of them, and how their gestures relate to them.
DM: They also draw on this in their book on Philosophy.
LG: Back to hypnosis. In hypnosis one of the phenomena they work with is this idea of time distortion, making time go faster or slower, and how that works. That might be interesting to explore.
DM: Do you know about Cziksentmihali’s book on Flow?
LG: Yes I do, I just can never pronounce his name!
DM: I was very interested in his account of the experience of time. This must be related to PGM …
LG: I think so too and this is what I was trying to say before.
DM: Your active and imaginative participation in an activity is such that time seems to stand still, and possible that is meant by the expression ‘the intuition of the present moment’.
LG: There’s the experience of the student in the class. When you’re learning time goes really fast, when you’re engaged. But when you’re not, when you’re bored, time goes really slow. When somebody comes up to me after a class and says, ‘The day went quickly’, I say thank you because that means that they were engaged, they were participating.
[1.33.30]
Interview on January 19th 2011
Morning
Summary of Discussions in the Morning.
This began with a dialogue between DM and WL about the difference between push and pull (a distinction that cannot be generated in Laban’s 8 Effort Actions). WL argues that it correlates with growing and shrinking of Flow.
In his discussion with Feldenkrais practitioner Victoria Worsley (author of Feldenkrais for Actors, 2016) WL gives another outline of how he adapted Laban terms to create his MPA. As with the dialogue with Larry Goldfarb this is an opportunity to look at both approaches through the lens of the other. One difference lies in the understanding of information: WL looks forward to a time when machines can generate a more accurate MPA where VW argues that the information she gathers about another person comes from her education touch. VW gives an account of Flow from a Feldenkrais perspective, the transmission of force through the skeletal structure.
Afternoon
WL begins: ‘In Effort it says ‘External movement is preceded by an internal one. That is, the physical act has been preceded by a mental one.’ I say, ‘No! it’s all one.’ He argues that there is no such thing as an ‘internal’ movement.
The Conversations
DM discusses the connection between Flow and Anxiety. These ideas can be found in both my books on the Actor’s Body.
Warren Lamb picked up on what I described as the productive ambiguity of Laban’s ideas, he suggested we talk about ‘creative ambiguity’.
Much of the discussion is about what DM had discovered about Laban through introducing and annotating The Laban Sourcebook. The conversation is vague and all of it is the Introduction to the Sourcebook.
DM tries to answer the question posed by Steffi Sachsenmeier (who translated excerpts from Laban’s German works for the Sourcebook), ‘What is Laban for?’ He had a very broad field of application, but there was no great clarity in his ideas. Maybe that was their appeal.
WL returns to his insistence that Laban’s ideas were also in flux ‘What he thought today would be different tomorrow’. His ideas about movement were always moving on. A memorable phrase: ‘Laban thought that movement was the philosopher’s stone.’
WL: In some ways, I hope it is not perceived as mystical, but I see a philosophy in which something of Laban’s view of the significance of movement, and how recognition will eventually influence some basic principles to which I do subscribe. In respect of my career I’ve tried to be practical and functional, but I also ask myself to what extent do I have a spirituality? If I can claim to spiritual in any respect does movement have anything to do with it?
DM puts WL’s ideas in the context of contemporary Dynamic Systems analysis. WL’s insistence on process is very much part of this change in thinking.
DM: distinguishes between Laban’s preference for the term Flux which he describes as amorphous, and Warren’s insistence on process which has a distinct morphology (or patterning).
DM gives a brief account of discussion of Laban’s concepts of Effort in the 1920s. All material in the Sourcebook.
A response to a question about Push and Pull (arguably the two fundamental movements of any organism)
WL: I think it is very important to study Effort Flow and Shape Flow together. Pull and Push may be the same in respect of the Effort, but you’ve got basically a directing and an increasing pressure and a decelerating. But how you do it with regard to the Flow, whether it is with a shrinking, or whether it is with a growing is a distinction that I think Laban often referred to. He seemed to refer to Inner a lot connecting it with Inner Attitude. We are trying to explain how pushing and pulling be the same Effort, but the distinction between them is one of Shape Flow.
DM: One of Shape Flow. I think it’s a master distinction relative to the human being. Things pushed away and things brought towards.
WL: When you are shrinking you are not bringing things towards yourself, but it is a useful term to describe your shrinking from. If you were a horrible person or smelt badly, or something, then I would be shrinking away from you, rather than bringing something towards me. Now it is the Shape variations that I think have the effect of bringing something towards or away from you. If I spread and grow I am trying to bring you into my space, and hopefully you would feel welcome. If I grow so that my kinesphere includes you, but at the same time I grow but enclose, then I am really growing to include you but I’m really only interested in what I can get. Whereas if I shrink but spread, it seems that I want to be in touch with you, but I want to keep my distance.
DM: It actually looks like a hopeless appeal.
WL: Is what I am saying relevant to you?
DM: It is completely unexpected and a beautiful account of interpersonal relations, but the action of pushing away and drawing towards in terms of basic actions like feedin, any basic relation between self and the world. They are such functionally different movements that Laban doesn’t seem to be able to account for. It is to do with feeding, with choice, with this being or not being part of my world. Laban really seems to have a created body and not an evolved body. His body and his psychology are based on a mystical conception of man who is and always has been in the universe. He is as he is. He isn’t as a result of adaptive changes that he has made. Do you understand what I mean?
WL: Yes I do, but if Laban isn’t succeeding, am I succeeding in giving some sort of distinction?
DM: If one looks at what Warren Lamb is for, then I don’t think this distinction has a bearing on what you are interested in.
WL: Indirectly. What we’re trying to understand is whether Laban could make a distinction between pushing and pulling. Now what you’ve demonstrated just now, when I push away now it’s different if you push away so that you are spreading and growing or whether you push away so that you are spreading and shrinking, it’s also different when you pull whether you are enclosing and shrinking or whether you pull so you are enclosing and growing.
DM: The problem doesn’t really occur for Laban.
WL: True that pushing and pulling are for me just convenient generalisations.
DM: What’s interesting about you is that you are bringing in different shadings. My action was virtually a gesture, not involving my trunk at all. When you were talking today that ultimately machines would be able to pick up some of this movement detail I think if such a machine could be developed it would transform movement studies. It would make movement study available to so many more people basically because most people lack that trained eye for movement. Just as most people haven’t the touch of a pastry cook’s finger tips or the palette of a wine taster. How many years to develop a master-wine taster’s palette? Just as long as to develop a keen eye for movement. And if that weren’t hard enough, there is the question of notation which needs to be done with such speed. But if some of this work could be done with a machine, then you would still need to interpret the data.
What would be so interesting is to take samples of movement after 30 minutes, 60 minutes and then 90 minutes and see how the socially-adapted movement gradually changed as the interviewee felt less on show, displaying less of an acquired movement behaviour (to impress the interviewer) and more of their habitual movement pattern. It would be interesting to note when the patterns changed, to see how the required behaviour began to drop, and the more enduring movement pattern began to manifest itself.
WL: I am still have a problem with what Laban called Inner movement and Outer movement. He told me that he used to do inner figures of eight in order to overcome some illness that he had. You can feel, you can think you are doing a figure of eight in your mind. Maybe there is marginal movement, but you can’t really observe it. But that is not necessarily what is meant when people talking of inner feeling. I keep annoying people by saying, ‘What is inner movement? How do you define it? Can you see it? You can see outer movement but not inner movement, so how can you refer to one or the other on equal terms? People relate it to what is basically the Jungian concept of introvert and extrovert. I think that they are really imagining what they see; it is so interlinked with feeling. Most of the LIMS people who have graduated from LIMS are working in therapy and doing very good work. In Germany too there is a lot of work. More people are coming into the Kestenberg work. That is the field, probably, from the Laban point of view which is most recognised as achieving something.
DM: What is Laban movement study for? Movement therapy.
WL: Yes. That could be the answer. That is basically the answer that people give who go to LIMS, they also answer ‘dance’ but that is really a subjective thing, whether you talk of movement therapy or dance therapy, or whether you talk of movement analysis. The analysis may often be workable and healthy for the work with the patient, like Peggy Hackney’s book. That’s a book used a lot by these people. I think they mostly do good work, but we can’t really collaborate on the basis of the MPA approach because we try to be objective and they try to be subjective. I think they will talk constantly, probably more about inner movement than outer movement and claim that they are analysing it. But what they see I struggle to understand. I am convinced that many of them do good work with their patients, but what they do would not be regarded as anything like as disciplined as what Feldenkrais people do.
DM: I don’t think many of us are aware of the greater part of our movements. Were you aware of the sequence with which you fingers left the handle of you mug? It was 3, 2, 1. When teaching people with strokes, I have to think of how complicated it is to do a simple movement like guiding your fingers around the handle of a mug. All this to say, most of the movements we make in everyday life we are utterly unaware of. Most of the movements you make have been prepared by processes of which you are not conscious. Maybe if we were walking across ice we would be very conscious of our movements, but even then there are aspects of movement of which we can never be conscious (e.g. the coordination of different muscle groups). We cannot smile through conscious effort because some of the muscles involved in a genuine smile cannot be activated voluntarily.
WL: Would breathing in be an example?
DM: When you are talking to me now you are not thinking of breathing. If had to, then it would be hard to think about anything else. Most movement is automatic, so that you can engage in thinking or doing other things. You can’t think of two things at the same time. The idea of inner movement is what dancers and actors engage in. A model of behaviour based on these secondary behaviours is after the fact. It is not how we react in everyday life.
When you talked about Laban doing figures of eight in his head.
[A demonstration using a map of the brain indicating how we simulate movements in our head.]
So you could see something when someone was simulating movement, but it would be on an fMRI scan, not in actual bodily movement. Maybe our facility for simulating movement is helped by internalising the planes of movement. We all establish the notion of position in terms of forward and back, up and down, left and right. The more clearly you can imagine movements the clearer, the more directed they will be when executed. Hence sportspeople visualising a track or a golf swing before running the race or taking the shot. In terms of movement training and movement imagination, they have done tests.
WL: So when Laban thought he got better because he was doing figures of eight in his head, it was imaginary?
DM: I bet you he had an amazingly developed kinaesthetic imagination, and I bet you that by such meditative practices, it would help you. It helped him.
WL: Could it influence the brain.
DM: It is an exercise of the brain. To be able to perform any specific movement activity you have created a specific neural pattern of pathways. If these connections are regularly made, then the brain strengthens those connections between neurons.
WL: Laban didn’t include the brain in his account of movement. Is there anyone who is incorporating this kind of knowledge?
DM: Lots of people. [There followed a discussion and explanation of a research paper published about how ballet dancers from the Royal Ballet recognise (parts of their motor cortex lights up) their specialised turns and Capoeira players recognise their quite similar turns, but neither recognises each others’. ‘Action Observation and Acquired Motor
Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers’ by B. Calvo-Merino, D.E. Glaser, J. Grezes, R.E. Passingham and P. Haggard]
A Conversation between Victoria Worsley (VW), Warren Lamb (WL), Dick McCaw (DM)
The conversation begins with a discussion of the precise meaning of terms, for example, ‘Weight’.
WL: Ann Hutchinson is campaigning particularly this issue of weight. I suppose it’s where you’re coming from, what your objective really is in using the terms, in what context and that sort of thing. I doubt if there will be one set version that will be accepted by all humanity.
VW: I think that’s fine. As a student of it, as it was all laid out I assumed that there must be a very clear thing. So I was trying to get at it. But now I understand that it’s not quite like that, I feel a little freer to think about it in different ways.
WL: The Feldenkrais work is fairly strictly defined, isn’t it? I don’t suppose people argue very much about terms and definitions?
VW: It’s not an analysis in that way. It is very functional. He wouldn’t have anything as delineated as you have. It is much more exploratory and related to the person than it is definitions of things, so there’s less to argue about.
DM: We’re very picky on what words we use in instructions. We would never use the word ‘stretch’, we’d say something like ‘extend’.
I would say that Laban does take a system approach rather than a functional approach. Both you (WL) and Feldenkrais were informed by function. How things are done, how things work, what is a functionally better way of doing something.
Consider how you have changed the names of the Motion Factors. Weight becomes an increase or decrease of pressure. You arrived at this term through practical experiment and testing, just like Feldenkrais. Unlike Laban who started with an a priori framework which he applied deductively. You started with the phenomena and worked inductively. When did you stop using the term ‘weight’?
WL: I guess it was a year or two after Laban died. Those years were particularly high pressure and fertile for me. Quite a lot of people were coming to me asking, because they believed that I had had access to Laban’s Effort theories in his work on Effort which was a later stage of his particular career and took a particular boost in England because he associated it with industry. Industry was his field of application as opposed from Dance or Theatre, Therapy or Education. I have suffered from that ever since. People expect me to go round wearing a boiler suit. A lot of the work was with workers and it grew from that. It grew very quickly, because Laban as a guru was constantly being consulted. I was working on the shop floor taking movement observations, but from supervisors, the managers, right up to the chief executive would be asking Laban advice and then telling him their own problems, and he would be advising them. I sort of had to take that over. Laban would be absent for periods, he was ill for quite a bit and this is how quite a lot of his students at that time were flung in the deep end. I was also sent to Hull University where I worked a lot in the adult education department, on movement and drama, running courses and so on, because Laban was ill and couldn’t go. I don’t see myself as ill, but I am old and I do intend to hand over to other people. So I was flung into the deep end with managers who when Laban wasn’t around would come and speak with me and then I would learn what Laban had told them. And I would think, ‘How did Laban deduce this? What does it come from?’ It was very difficult to find. I would take observations. I am just setting the scene. This continued for several years and they were torturous years for me because while Laban was accepted as a guru and everyone looked up to him, I was just a young character who didn’t have any sort of background and was constantly challenged, ‘How do you deduce that? What are the movements? Show me the observations.’ And so on. I had a very, very tough time. It did emerge after several years that they became impressed and sought me on my own basis and that really gave me confidence for the rest of my career as it has developed.
That is the context in which I did develop different terms from those that Laban used. I became, well, not critical, it was difficult to be critical of Laban. But I became questioning of Laban as to what did he really mean by this? I would be so presumptuous to say, ‘Can I improve on it?’ But in order to give answers to the challenges that are coming, ‘How do I be practical?’ I think that was primarily … because Laban could always relapse into mysticism. Terms like ‘space’ and ‘weight’, ‘time’, often assumed this mysterious, cosmos-related character. It suited Laban, but it didn’t suit me. I couldn’t get away with talking in grandiose terms about weight, space and time. It seems that Laban students still use the terms in this sort of vague parapsychological manner, so I’ve always made a point of … you say I am functional and practical. To give one example. Weight is used sometimes relating to Newtonian physics, sometimes it had to do with the body in terms of pounds or kilograms, sometimes it had to do with earth-boundness. And of course dance has always been a very strong influence. That’s what Laban really started with, that’s what his great love was. I don’t know if you know Mary Wigman, but her dance was very earth-bound.
This was a very critical turning point for me because it seemed to me that people were talking about weight in static terms. I thought that this is not movement. They did a movement to become strong and they are sort of holding, maintaining the tension.
VW: That looks more to do with tension than with weight or strength.
WL: Then they would say, ‘From being Strong I will be Light’ and they go into a dreamy state. But that’s not movement either because they are holding tension whether it conveys Lightness or Strength.
VW: It’s a performance of strength. I absolutely agree with you. I find that my students confuse tension and strength a lot.
WL: In my conversations with Laban, and here he always agreed with me, that what he was concerned with was movement. We were concerned not with this and then this [he is demonstrating Strong and Light movements] but the process of getting from one to the other. Now he taught this, it comes from Laban. I think this was very basic to him and is what he wanted to convey and have accepted. But he was tolerant of the sort of abuse that I have just tried to illustrate. When people say ‘Strong’ they conjure up the image of a macho man or a weight-lifter and ‘Light’ is always associated with a dream quality. The process of what we’re actually seeing going on is better [described as] pressure. If we increase pressure or diminish pressure – that’s what we’re really talking about, and that’s how it’s been ever since. There are people who condemn it because I am not being true to Laban by changing the terms.
VW: I do understand you. Even though I don’t teach Laban the boys want to be strong, and this is their idea of strength – tension. I do Karate and if you tried to punch like this it wouldn’t work because tension slows everything down. By talking about Pressure you don’t have to talk about strong or weak or light. I think in terms of gravity and anti-gravity, but I haven’t thought that through. I suspect that pressure could be a helpful idea there.
[Demonstration of punches, Karate-style and Tai Chi-style.]
WL: The pressure comes out through the Flow of the movement.
VW: Yes, the Flow.
[Discussion of Flow in Feldenkrais.]
VW: One see and even feel the Flow a movement through the skeleton, from the foot through the legs, the ribs into the arm. And one can tell where the Flow gets stopped, in the ribs for example. Being a physicist he thought at lot in terms of gravity.
[A discussion of how to roll. How to control movement through contact with the ground.]
DM: I think you would help Victoria greatly if you explained to her what movement is. You have described movement as a process of variation. These are variations of pressure, of focus, of timing, and of shaping in the three planes of movement, and variations of Flow both of Effort and Shape. This eight-fold schema offers a very subtle analytic tool.
There is no simple judgement about WL’s MPA. You are not fitting someone into a slot and saying ‘They are a Flicker, or a Dabber’, or whatever. Instead you are accounting for a unique manner of moving and being in the world. Movement is about processes rather than states.
WL: Laban liked generalisations and combinations [of the Movement Factors]. In the Basic Efforts [or Effort Actions] we Float or Punch or Glide or Slash or Dab or Wring or Press. These were very popular with actors, especially Bernard Hepton. That’s what he remembers. He learned these basic efforts. So people are categorised as a Floater or a Puncher or a Glider, and the rest. That’s useful, it’s handy, but I think if you’re trying to help people, trying to understand or to work with them, it’s too generalised and you need to be much more specific.
It’s part of my theory that it’s movement we’re looking at, so if somebody is not moving then my terms are not appropriate. For me it’s movement we’re looking at and every process must have an end; if you are accelerating there must a point at which you can’t get any quicker, and if decelerating then there is a moment where you will stop. So at these points where the movement cannot be continued then the person has just to arrest the movement at the point of extreme, or reverse. Now people do get to these points of extreme and this is useful in therapy. To get to an extreme is basically a paralysis. They get strong, then they reverse it, they renew it in order to regain the strength, but if you persist (he demonstrates) then you get into a cramp. You just can’t get any stronger. This is whether you are pushing an object or just something in your state of mind of whatever which is bringing this about, then it’s a form of paralysis which I always think is bad. So therapists try to help people avoid those states of paralysis which can’t be good.
[DM demonstrates how all exertion of Effort is accompanied by appropriate Shaping. He uses the example of shifting a piano.]
WL: I know that I can be accused of not moving sensibly. Once I wanted to open my bedroom door and it jammed against the carpet which had rucked up. Rather than examining what the problem was I just tugged away at the door. Finally, I had to smooth out the carpet and then the door opened easily.
VW: Shape and Effort reminds me a little of an expression that [Feldenkrais practitioner] Scott Clarke calls ‘Architecture of Strength’.
DM: Feldenkrais would call it organisation. There is also a Flow implication here that is associated with anxiety. The Flow binds (both in Shaping and Effort) as one reaches a state of paralysis. Only when one steps back and gets the situation into perspective (a Shaping initiative) does one see the offending carpet and smooth it out, and at that moment one relaxes and begins again to move with Flow. As my Mother gets older she rarely makes sustained movement, it is all over-directed, bound-flow and sudden. She stays in the zone of near-paralysis.
WL: It’s interesting when the pavements are slippery with ice, I get concerned, and like many of my age am trying to avoid falling, because so many of my age do. It’s interesting listening to yourself as you get older because certainly balance is a problem. Now I don’t climb the ladder to prune that branch. When older people are on ice they get so anxious that they almost stop the Flow altogether. You can master your balance better if you understand the rhythm of being relatively free and then bound. (He demonstrates.) In every step there is momentary falling as you take the step and then a binding of Flow. Is that a good example of Flow in relation to Anxiety?
DM: This takes us back to Laban’s ideas about Flow in Choreographie (1926) where the polarity of Flow is related to Labile and Stable movement.
VW: If I am on ice I try to think of allowing my weight to go down into the ground. It’s a bit like Flow in a sense. To be bound Flow is to impede the possibility of travelling. So I would take small steps. I would not interrupt the Flow of my weight into the ground. I find this a lot with people whom come to me, say with arthritis. They pull away from the ground, and then their balance is a lot worse. A lot of it is about how to trust letting the weight go down and not to bind themselves in that way.
DM: was Weight the first Movement Factor that you [WL] changed?
WL: They happened more or less at the same time. I was playing around with different terms, and it was when I began to write, I suppose it would be 1952, a book on Movement Observation that Eden Davies is working on right now. It was all crystallised when in 1965 the book Posture and Gesture came out. Now, I regard it as extremely badly written and doing more harm than good. What is written there, although it is very clumsily written, has proved fairly sound after decades of use. I respect Dick’s views on definitions and theory very much because he’s come to the Laban school later in life and brought immense perception and intelligence to an understanding of the terms. I think you’ve [VW] probably come to the best teacher you could find.
DM: Geraldine [Stephenson] got me moving and then three years later [when she introduced DM to WL] you got me thinking about movement. It took a long time. At first I could parrot ‘Movement is a process of variation’, but I didn’t realise that, in a sense, your whole philosophy of movement is summed up in those three words.
VW: From where I am coming from, I like that. For me movement is a process, and I spend a lot of time with students who want to get somewhere but aren’t very interested in the process of getting and for me it’s all about the process of getting there. It doesn’t matter if you get there or not. As for variations I like the different possibilities, rather than ‘It goes like this’.
DM: If one is talking about choice then Warren offers limitless choices. Actors tend to latch onto generalisations, like people being Flickers or Floaters or whatever.
VW: At one of the schools where I teach I’ve seen the Head of Movement who is Laban trained take apart a text like [Patrick Marber’s] Closer. Where a Stanislavsky teacher would look for an intention for every line or part of a line, she looks for an Effort Action – that specific. It’s not that the character is a Flicker or Floater, but that they would Glide on this line and Flick on that one.
WL: What I think that I doing with my students right now will be regarded, I hope, as having merit, but will be deemed crude in terms of detail. I think we need to take much more detailed observations of movements and what’s going on around the body. Currently we rely on the human eye but there’s so much technology developing now that we should be able to get much more precise observation of movement through electronics.
[DM describes an experiment set up for Brian Day by DM and David Wolfe – it progressed the variations in weight-pressure and the shaping of the spine as someone gets up from sitting on a chair and then sitting down again.]
WL: There are such advances in the technology today that I think we need to raise the money so that MPA practitioners can take advantage of these new machines. I think that everybody has their own unique movement pattern and that rather than relying on the human eye, it can all be done electronically.
VW: Although it’s very useful to have that eye and touch skill. When you’re giving a class you have to see a person’s movement pattern dead quickly, don’t you?
WL: I am sure that electronic observation could be useful in detecting the minute muscular movements involved in the Feldenkrais Method.
VW: In the end, I would have to be able to feel it. But the imaging of it might also be useful. It would be another layer of information.
DM: I need to appreciate the meaning of the movement pattern to the client…
VW: Their experience of it…
DM: You are working with an experience, an awareness of their own body, that they do not yet possess. At the end of the lesson they feel different, quite often ‘not right’ because something has changed. You are moving from the posture that you don’t realise you have to a posture that is most suitable for your personal structure, and realising that it is more helpful. You learn to realise how you can use yourself more effectively. If someone had an injury in the left foot that has now healed you need to help them ‘remember’ that they can place weight on this foot again rather than limping.
VW: I find all information interesting and helpful. Having done quite a big study of anatomy now, now when I touch someone I can … my information is so much clearer because I can feel better was is going on underneath because I can visual and sense the structures because I have a much better understanding and surely that will only get better with more information? So I don’t know whether there is a world in which that kind of machinery would be in the room and I would use it. In the end, the touch and the communication of information to the person and enabling their experience is what it is all about. But hey, I’d love the information. How exciting.
DM: The huge challenge that Warren has and that we address in the Feldenkrais community, is the fact that how you move is very much how you are. I would say ‘how’ you are, rather than ‘who’ you are.
VW: Yes.
DM: The amazing thing with Warren is that after having made his MPA he then argues that there is a correlation with how you make decisions. It could be that you are more gifted in the research and information-gathering stage of decision-making. For example when Warren was trying to open his bedroom door he didn’t seek to find out what the problem was (the attention stage of decision-making where you find out what is going on), but tried to solve it through brute strength (an increase in force). The second stage is deliberation, weighing things up, figuring out how they can best be presented. The third stage is commitment, when a decision has to be taken.
WL: I’ve done many team-building seminars, and I always get the participation of the CEO on whom I have done an MPA and given him the result and talked about it. Then I’ve suggested, would it be a good idea to do what I’ve done with you with all the people who report to you, who constitute your team. Then we can get together and use the knowledge in order to harness people’s capabilities more effectively – however you define teamwork which I won’t go into. I’ve done many of those and when it gets to the teambuilding seminar, they’ve all received their MPA profiles and they are all willing and nobody wants it to be kept secret. We start of by saying that everybody is different, vive le difference! [He introduces the imaginary members of the team.] Now let’s recognise you as a team. There’s no group of people who create their dynamics as you do. They can look at what they’ve done right and where there could be improvements. I am giving this description because I wonder if Feldenkrais could be used in such a seminar?
VW: There is certainly the sense that each person’s movement pattern is absolutely core to Feldenkrais. Where it [the pattern] is helpful and where not so helpful and it could be useful to increase your choices. Maybe that’s where it could be helpful: where you could make another choice. You don’t have to only stick with the pattern. There might be the possibility of opening another choice and that would add flexibility or thinking or cooperating between people. That’s off the top of my head.
DM: It’s interesting that Larry Goldfarb’s answer to the question which you {WL} asked, was exactly the same. Both you [WL] and Feldenkrais look at a person’s characteristic pattern of movement. We might think in terms of habits which the person might find constraining. They don’t have to get rid of the habit but they will have to develop their range. They could not only have their habit but supplementary to that they do other things.
VW: This is why I like Laban. It is a great way of finding new choices. It’s a nice structure, or way, in addition to Feldenkrais, maybe to suggest new possibilities in quality of movement or direction of movement to people. It opens up the opportunity for choice.
DM: Warren and I know that we are both too effortful and occasionally I do stop myself and then step back and look at the situation or job, decide how I’m going to do it and then act.
VW: As I was discussing with Kirstie with whom I work in Oxford you don’t always have to go through all the possibilities for a movement, but they exist as possibilities that are available to you. You might just pick a way of doing without thinking in a way that you wouldn’t have picked it before. It is now part of how you are and you can pick from these different ways of doing without even thinking.
DM: One of the earliest neuroscientists, Hughlings Jackson, noted that when the brain suffers certain diseases or even challenges it is the most newly acquired functions that go first and the oldest that endure. In a state of anxiety I would say that we default to older ways of doing and thinking. So more newly–acquired habits will not function. There is a kind of loss-gain ratio here. I think therefore that the newly gained patterns and ways of doing operate best when we are not anxious or under pressure. The higher the pressure the further back we recede into our old habits.
[Speculative conversation about the neurophysiology of learning based on Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory.]
WL: I certainly recognise that I am getting more anxious about things than I was ten or twenty years ago. I wonder whether this has a connection with Flow. I postulated that the range of Flow diminishes during childhood growth, however it develops at different rates alongside the development of the different Efforts and Shapes. Some people grow up with a big range of Flow, from binding to freeing, shrinking to expanding. Other people use only a small range of Flow. But whatever we settle with I think it does tend to diminish as we get into old age, and I wonder if this is due to the tendency to become more anxious. I wonder if people with a large range of Flow whether they tend not to be such anxious people as opposed to those with a limited range of Flow.
VW: I did some work with Ralph Strab [spelling?] who is a Feldenkrais practitioner who deals with anxiety and emotional states. If you are a Feldenkrais practitioner you are inevitably going to be dealing with anxiety. He taught a lesson enabling the Flow through one side. Lying on the floor and turning the leg in. How does this affect the hip, how does it affect the ribs, the shoulder? So the effect flows through the entire side. In the process, that side lay better on the floor, because it wasn’t pulling away from the floor and it loosened and lengthened, and everything moved through every joint freely. At the end of the lesson we went to the other side and it felt tighter, more held, away from the floor, shorter. He also asked us to bring up something that worried us and to think about it on one side and then the other. It was so dramatic. On the more constrained side, I felt a more worried and anxious person, the problem seemed bigger; there wasn’t a problem on the other side. On that side there was no impeding of the breath, there was no resisting the floor. Anxiety was very noticeably reduced. It’s partly to do with safety. I come back to this in my work over and over again: does the person feel safe? The fundamental thing that I find: maybe you can think of it in terms of Flow, or support from the ground and allowing it to happen. If there is a place in the ribs where the movement can’t flow then that person hasn’t got free Flow.
DM: For me Flow is about allowing a transmission of force through the boney structure of the body.
WL: I think that ‘allowing’ a movement to happen is definitely connected to Flow. We all have tensions that inhibit Flow. How can we teach Flow in a class?
DM: I think one can experience freely flowing movements in swinging.
WL: Can I tell you how I teach Flow? I get them to line up one side of the room and they move diagonally across the room. I stand in the middle of the room and when they reach me I say that I am going to blow them across the remaining part of the diagonal. I have seen people coming down a narrow street and allowing themselves to be blown by the wind and enjoying it. They really are losing control and they fall eventually. Obviously in the exercise I ask them to apply the brakes when they reach the wall. It’s fascinating what they do in this process. Some wave their arms around, some fix, some enjoy it. All sorts of things are demonstrated. You have to be careful that nobody gets too free and bashes into the wall. I did this myself once. I was trying to teach with blood streaming down my nose. I think this works with the imagery of a strong wind. Of course the legs are operating out of the rest of the body. They do get a feeling of what Free Flow and Bound Flow is.
DM: I am interested in your image of taking the brakes off and putting the brakes on. People who don’t allow Flow are putting the brakes on. I think those brakes is muscular tension. Again, you are impeding the transmission of force. Could one say that Flow is about transmission? Is it about allowing the transmission of force through one’s structure?
[Discussion of involuntary and voluntary innervation of muscles. Why we can’t smile on cue. Damasio explains in Descartes’ Error.]
DM: Coming back to Warren’s description of walking on ice, I increase the areal contact of my foot with the ice. Also I move in the Saggital plane (sliding forward), not in the Door plane (side to side). While Laban didn’t create the planes of movement, he defined them in a homely way. But he also looked at solid forms – the Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Icosahedron – and saw in them patterns of human movement. It’s a weird way of starting a study of movement – with solids – and it messes up so many people. They don’t realise that he’s not thinking of points in space, but that they help you articulate your movement, your phrasing of movement, rather than visiting those points.
Afternoon
Eden Davies (ED), Warren Lamb (WL), Dick McCaw (DM) at Brecon Place, London
WL: Shall I just go through my notes and then you can write me off as having completely gone round the bend! I did a brainstorming so some of it may truly be nonsense. In traditional brainstorming you ask people to come up with ideas and then there are stages that you go through. You try to say something good about every idea. Sometimes that proves very difficult.
‘In Effort it says ‘External movement is preceded by an internal one. That is, the physical act has been preceded by a mental one.’ I say, ‘No! it’s all one. Movement of neurons in the brain in a continuous process of movement throughout the body. The total pattern varies according to where the emphasis is. There are minute microscopic neurons whirling around in some sort of pattern and that pattern is transmitted through the body and comes back to the brain. There is a continuous connection between movement going on, and of course different patterns of movement originating in different parts of the brain. So when the part of the brain we were talking about is prodded which causes your nose to twitch, the neurons start a different pattern, and that pattern is maybe almost simultaneous with the pattern of movement around the body.
I think talking about a physical act being preceded by a mental one, or even talking about mind and body as separate things is made out of date, or will be when movement study is more recognised and measured. You say it’s true of many movements in sport which requires the player taking aim, whether it’s a rugby player taking aim to convert a try or a darts player going for a triple twenty and so on. I don’t think that there’s any particular difference from what I said earlier. Taking aim is a pattern of movement, kicking a ball is where the pattern changes or a new pattern is merged with it or it’s transferred to a new pattern of movement. There are of course different levels going on simultaneously, so it’s not really correct to think of any one particular layer. When taking aim one may ask what makes one person able to concentrate better than another?
This is talked about a lot in tennis as you (ED) know. Loss of concentration, really all the top players suffer it from time to time and really work with psychologists to get concentration. But concentration is not just a fixed, stable thing, it is a very labile thing. Maintaining concentration has to be labile and maybe a tendency to regard it as fixed may be counter-productive. I have always worried about how we define consciousness. Consciousness is really just the feedback from the movement. We can do a movement which is very unharmonious and one that is very harmonious; the feedback from the movement and the quality of that feedback can be understood as the consciousness, so lack of consciousness is basically lack of movement awareness, not that we necessarily cultivate it by doing movement in a classroom. I do agree however that the forebrain, or wherever does deal with consciousness, takes over the monitoring of the movement. I think it has been monitoring movement all along, continuously.
Of course, Laban did talk about Effort factors that were missing and so on, but I really think that no one Effort can be completely missing. In Movement Patterns we never put 0%. If we can’t really see anything we put 2%, because theoretically there must be movement going on in these things all the time, otherwise we’re dead. I think about much that Laban said, for example, that a person has Transformation Drive, ‘She has a hypnotic timeless quality, always so passionately involved that she didn’t hear me enter.’ So this is spaceless, weightless. I think these are good ideas, so much of what Laban taught I think will never be scientifically proved or substantiated, but they are very good creative ideas for artists. When only two elements are present Laban called them Inner Attitudes or States. States never seemed to me the right word because there is no movement. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a useful category. Inner attitudes I’ve always had trouble with. What is an attitude? You might tell me what Marion North thinks because she talks a lot about Inner Attitudes. I haven’t really commented on the Drives or Inner Attitudes but I do see them as valuable for teachers and possibly for therapists, to a certain extent. I think you can use the concept to understand what is predominant, but try to use it and interpret it in the context of a movement, and particularly in the Flow of a movement.
For me, problems have arisen when Flow is treated the same as Weight, Space and Time, because I think Flow is of such a different nature that it has to be treated differently. This is why I suppose people go for them. It is an oversimplification. But there is nothing wrong with oversimplification; it certainly has some merit because people can see them as something they can work with. What we do seems to people coming new the field to be so complex. It depends to an extent who they have been trained by. Movement observation and analysis can be very complex. But much of what you (DM) say in this paragraph, that Laban’s approach is deductive, I think is absolutely right. He is interested in the generative capacity of the system. That seeing Time as a rate of change is something I think that he did see. Of course, the terms Acceleration and Deceleration are terms that I contributed. All of this… because his entire system, and it is a system. Since the fundamental elements go on to generate the further terms and modes of relations between those terms is based on general rather than precise terms. It cannot be said that they have more than general applicability to the field of movement. I think that that is a profound statement. [He has been paraphrasing something written by DM.] Then you [DM] mention that Choreutics is even more deductive. Both are deductive, certainly. I think it is desirable to keep that constantly in mind when trying to understand Laban. He is lacking an accurate description of the function of the human skeleton, musculature, brain and nervous system. [Again from DM] That is quite a big lack.
ED: These things are too down to earth for Laban.
DM: He did do anatomical drawings but they had lots of inaccuracies.
WL: I’ve put a note here that Laban should have collaborated with Feldenkrais. I felt that particularly this morning when Dick had a Feldenkrais student [Victoria Worsely] who was with him and who is interested in movement. I felt after this morning’s meeting that the two could actually complement each other in many ways.
ED: All those people were working at virtually the same time: Alexander, Pilates, Laban, Feldenkrais. They all had an interest in the same thing. I am sure that the war meant that they didn’t have a greater collaboration.
DM: Both Laban and Feldenkrais were working in the War Effort.
WL: I don’t think it was the war that inhibited Laban. I don’t think he had any inclination, and if he did meet people he didn’t really acknowledge it. The one meeting that I know took place was with Matthias Alexander because I went with him to the meeting. I know that he had not met with Alexander before and there was only that one meeting. Alexander seemed to be disposed to have more contact but Laban never saw him again.
DM: Laban did a public lecture with philosopher Ernst Cassirer who was one of the foremost intellects.
WL: So when you [DM] say that he never questions the parameters of the system itself, because it is based on general rather than precise terms, and that he is equally reductive in Choreutics – all of this I think is spot on.
DM: I think it’s theatre-speak to talk about inner impulse preceding an outer movement. It’s taken from artistic thinking. I think it might be a useful myth in artistic thinking, especially in acting. Certainly, not only is there no inner impulse but most movements are not preceded by a thought. However actors are taught that an impulse precedes a movement. Stanislavsky taught that. It is a useful myth for acting. In terms of conscious mental activity accompanying a movement, I can only think of example like a darts player consciously aiming for a particular number.
Concerning Attention there is a famous experiment where subjects are following one team in a basketball match and so wrapt is their attention that they completely miss a person walking onto the floor waving their arms about for thirty seconds.
[DM talks about attention and how this features in his teaching. These thoughts are better expressed in his two books on the Actor’s Body (2018, 2020).]