Chapter 10 THE DANCE OF LIFE by Lili Galvan (Peru) 1. THE DANCE OF LIFE “The Dance of Life’ is a methodology whose objectives are to recapture inner energles, to enrich our corporeal language with a repertory of ancient sequences of movements almost never used ~ releasing them from our memories and our psychological repression, To create an evolutionary dance, evoking the stages of our lives, as a prerequisite for artistic development. We must again become conscious of those stages. Foetal dance: from -9 months to 0 years Thists the recapturing of our life before our birth. It's a journey from conception to childbirth, crossing oceans, capturing the ecstasy of calm waters and the fear of struggling against torrential currents. The first routines of our lives can be expressed in verbs, like - to vibrate, to divide. to drag, to press, to transform, to expand, to sink. To be the same but different each day. In each stage of the evolution we sense textures - to be ciliated, tubulated, transparent. liquid, divisible, feeling the music of the mother’s heartbeat counterpointing the child's. Horizontal dance: life from 0 to 1 approximately Now on the outside and disconnected from the umbilicus, the connection is with the central energy of the earth. gravity - the horizontal life as a limit and as a passive reaction of the body. It gives a new perspective and another kind of energy to discover a new world. The new-born learns new verbs, like ~ to be relaxed, touched, rocked, carried, elevated, washed, crushed; new textures like —hot, wet and cold in genitals and legs, soft, mild, dry, oily, etc. The spine gives the baby, progressively, the motion of a worm - at first no independent motion, then initial efforts from the head to the spine, from the arms to the legs, struggling against gravity. Waiting to be attended, to be needed, to be observed so they can feel the rhythm of life upon the horizontal line called bed. Gradually the world is something exciting to be touched. Touching mild, soft, touching with their mouth, tongue, saliva in the skin, feeling hands one against the other. To explore the world through our mouth is the principal occupation and pleasure of this stage. 108The Dance of Life Vertical perception: from 1 to 2 years approximately Assuming active opposition to gravity is the principal challenge of this stage. Our spine develops, fortifies, impels. Our legs respond to the new spine impulses. From four feet to two feet. Change of position. Conquering motion and locomotion. Eyes direct body, with hands to balance. The dance of the legs is irregular, bendable knees, unco-ordinated and entangled legs, twisted feet. The risk of falling down is the continuous ritual of verticalisation. Persistence to succeed makes us to repeat new verbal routines, like - to impel, to control, {0 lose control, to fall, to cry, to resist, to repeat, to return to the beginning, ‘The world is dangerous, has walls, doors, stairs and precipices, has fences, nets, gaols, cages and corrals. Depending on the family, bables will have freedom to walk without help, with anxiety, fear and leashes. Vertical Perceptions are new, reality seems to be an illusion, confusing new relations appear, like ~ near/far, Uttle/big, appear/disappear, up/down. ‘Am I moving oF is the world?’ Unconsciousness of self-lmage makes the child feel, ‘If close my eyes, I disappear’. Animist dance: from 3 to 5 years approximately To reach is one of the principal verbs of this stage. To see what he or she wants {o see, to move whatever he wants, to touch when she wants to feel. Feeling himself, feeling the others is the meaning of life. She is the movement and the the new words dancing in his mind, moving ideas and creating troubles. Dispersion, expansion, corporeal communication. Contact with all the body, not only with the eyes or with words ~ with vitality, animism, spontaneity to live and love, Touching everything and everybody with all his or her body. Irregular development: from 6 to 9 years approximately Children can stay longer in limited spaces like chairs or desks at schools, but in compensation their mind has more time to develop and open without limitation. They create mental movements during their passive periods. ‘The World is static, I dream I'm moving.’ At school, they learn to look in front to the blackboard while curiosity teaches them to look backward, to the right or to the left. Sensory communication is changed to phatic and intellectual communication. Containment of energy by teachers’ control, so space-control and self-control become a permanent fight in their daily life. They learn to reject. corporeal language. There's a transference of the whole energy of their bodies to their hands which are demanded to move in extensive patterns all day. Hands dance with papers, making the longest choreography of their lives. Fine and co-ordinated movements, translating their corporeal language into controlled and intellectual process. Eyes dancing over the words, on papers, on blackboards. Disintegration in communication starts to become evident. Adolescent dance: from 10 to 15 years approximately Adolescence is a time of uncontrollable changes. Growth generates irregular impulses that make them lose their equilibrium. To touch becomes intimate, 109Lil Galvan tobe touched becomes a fantasy. Body stimulates their feelings, their thoughts, their fantasies. A new force of attraction and repulsion moves them. Something is missing. For the first time they perceive that independence brings loneliness, just when they have to choose between the repression of the social system and their own identity. World becomes dangerous, oppositional, insecure, uncaring. Parents become repressors. Parent-adolescent communication, especially corporeal relationships, become difficult, so they seek tenderness in their social relationships. They perceive invisible limits, dangers, unknown pathways, illuminated nights and dark days. They search loneliness and bustle at the same time. Debutants’ dance: from 15 to... ‘The door is open. They must get out, take a route and start a long Journey without looking backward. Big responsibilities and decision to confront. Their sensory communication is subjugated to convention. Body repressions are internalised and energies are sublimated through work. Corporeal relations are intimate, risky and difficult. Self-defence orders their relationships and limits their sensibility. Objectivised knowledge and existential research guides their lives. Adult dance Daily efforts to attain schedules, competence and defined objectives are the principal challenges on this stage. To succeed and feel realised or to fail and feel mediocre. Corporeal language is even more repressed and controlled in this period. Tension and repression make us intensify the search for formulas to expel our energies. Evasive and aggressive responses are useful ~ drinking liquor, smoking, eating with anxiety, sports routines or physical exercise, Disintegrated activity is common set periods to work and produce, to feel, to stimulate our sensibility and to rest. The organisation of organic needs depends on work. Intellectual work increases the deficit in corporeal language. Contemplation of the dance: the third age Integration of life through reflections and memories. Life 1s perceived in slow motion, time is longer and activity becomes more difficult. Muscles and bones tend to get rigid. Gravity demands that we offer it minimum opposition. While spiritual development is unlimited, corporeal development is finished. It's time to look backward, to accept our deficits, to re-integrate our lives. contemplate life as a concept, as an eternal cycle, to project to our descendants. To transcend, to be unforgettable, to be accepted are the preoccupations of this, last stage. 2, REDISCOVERING CORPOREAL COMMUNICATION In drama workshops with both adults and young people, it is very hard to let our body and our sensory awareness do the talking. The language of our body has been repressed, sending instead messages of the fear of touching and being touched. We have lost the confidence to share each other's impulses and 110‘The Dance of Life feelings and replaced it with the language of the intellect, and of the body under control. Our mind generates our movement, which is mostly passive, concerned with responding and with the functional. As we grow up we grow formal, straight ~ and we trust our intellect. Cognito ergo sum. The result of this is that we think before acting, which is fine in itself but it inhibits creativity. Full communication is an intellectual, affective and corporeal process. We can still restore this integration but it is not simple. One might say that our brain seems to be growing at the same rate our society advances, becoming the biggest part of ourselves to control our whole system. We are losing first our instincts and sensory communication and, worse, spontaneous empathy and the affective expression of our relationships. We fear the freedom to search inner energies in order to communicate in case we lose our self-control and our unquestioning, undoubting sense of direction in case it delays our growth. ‘The language of infancy ts affective, sensory and spontaneous. Infants have integrated expression; they exteriorise their movements, emotional thoughts and their whole discourse at the same time. When children are very young many of their actions have no obvious structure. There is organisation, but it 4s not operational - it is animistic and free. So they can express their reality in a sensory and magic way. We communicate well with children when we use flexible and intuitive codes with them. Some of us avoid children because we do not have strategies to control them. Parents confuse child development with the pressure to become adults. They use the concept of maturity to demand not to be childlike, associating infancy with weakness. This perspective doesn't encourage us to research into the history of our repressed body or in our sensible infant memories, because we try to keep them inside to protect them from adults. It's common in our society to say, ‘Don't be childlike’ and when we want to make someone ridiculous we say, 'You're like a baby’. However, whenever a child acts as adults do, the family reinforces that behaviour positively ~ rejecting our childhood. Our bodies do Jearn organically from the environment, but negatively, feeling stress; provoking ulcers, asthma, stomach disorders; promoting weakness, not physical sensitisation. But our role as human beings should be to join learning to loving-kindness. ‘Learning to learn, learning to love and to be kind are so closely interconnected and so profoundly interwoven, especially with the sense of touch.’ Therefore, when in drama, people start to express their feelings in a corporeal way and disorganised, unconscious or child-like sequences of movements emerge, they get discouraged, unable to interpret their expression and are afraid to be thought child-ish. Only positive attitudes from the students and positive reinforcements from teachers will stimulate them to continue to face the challenge of their body as part of the development of their identity. 111Lili Galvin In cultures where the notion of personal space and property is vital, organic ‘communication is repressed. This is unlike cultures where people have to live very closely, where they are accustomed to express organically with freedom. Organic expression involves sensory communication, feeling, smells, internal sounds, touching with kindness, etc. The acceptance of these primitive human contacts is one of the biggest potentials for direct communication that developing societies have. The communications we transmit through touch constitute the most powerful means of establishing human relationships. Proxemics demonstrate the relation between human communication and the meaning of the space in the interaction. As we walk around we hear apologies every time we run into people. Just shaking hands to get in touch is like trying to join sidewalks without crossing them, Politeness - the established code of accepted movement and social contact - maintains distance among people. For eleven or twelve years, young people have to received education from their seats, controlling their impulses in order to assure their mental development, reinforced in their passive attitudes or answering conditionally - exploding into movement each time they hear the bell ring to go out for a break. When they become adults they don’t run around in their breaks but recover energies by taking a coffee or eating a snack. The design of our environment, the social disposition of the elements in the space, controls our impulses and relationships. Furniture and square spaces establish limits flat and straight levels encourage us to walk in the same direction; closed windows and doors get us into a constructive convention. Recently, however, ecological designers are trying to change this panorama, searching for natural forms and materials in their compositions. As a result, organic cultural communication is not an easy process to get into. In theatre there is genuine interest in physical training but there is still distance between the physical training and the artistry of the body. In theatre we struggle with our self-defence system that controls our primitive impulses. Making love and fighting are forms of communication that liberate us from our self. True language of sex is primarily non-verbal. fluid, flexible and passionate, seeking to communicate with silent or noisy movements. In a struggle, language Is fluid, flexible, fast, direct and passionate too. In both, the necessity of touching is the same but with opposite intentions - attraction, repulsion. Even when we are playing drama our bodies are far away, like sleeping or slave bodies. These functional bodies only respond in case of concrete needs. The underlying structure of our corporeal thinking is abstract. Nevertheless, in practice it is different, it's very concrete. Our body becomes our slave and it loses energy. Then when we use it for creative expression it's only in a representative or symbolic way. Then, our body walks, runs, shakes hands, expressing solidarity, contracts with pain and expands with joy. Organic creation is not just a picture of our feelings, but feeling and thinking through our movements - the dance of fear, the dance of the nightmare, the dance of indecision, etc. - an inside sensitisation that produces movements 112‘The Dance of Life with inner energy, increasing the voice of the soul and bringing confidence through this integral communication. Corporeal expression helps young people to communicate their feelings and their perception of life. One of the principal objectives of our art is to discover the impulses, energies, motivations, limits of everyone in the theatre group. We believe, too, that in the study of their own history, they will discover the origin of their impulses and movements, perceive for themselves the gradual integration of their lives and their artistic expression. It's the only way to make them feel that their participation in drama is a personal undertaking. They must understand that an actor is not a medium to transfer concepts passively but is an active voice that makes explicit what is meaningful both for him or herself and for the theatre group. Oliver Wendell Holmes proposed that there are three versions of a fictional character. The character created by the author, known absolutely by his creator, is the ideal of the character, different from the character made familiar by the actor, and that seen by the spectator. In real life too, we have three perceptions of ourselves ~ our ideal image (who we think we should be), our Teal image (who we know ourselves to be). and our social image (who other people think we are). From this we can derive not three, but four categories of movement - ideal movements, daily movements, latent movements and rejected movements. Ideal movements We create an ideal perceptual image of ourselves. This image has everything we need. We use it on special occasions. In ritual sex it appears easily; in a confrontation too, we act superiatively. absolutely. People get tense when they are going to take a photograph because of the risk of looking bad. A photograph is a concrete image, so it must be ideal and forever. On the other hand, ideal moments are very short. We can't be ideal twenty four hours a day. When two persons meet for the first time, they show each other this image, but gradually their daily behaviour changes to accept each other the way they are. In creative situations, during the first stage, young people fear to show themselves because they don't feel able to perform in an ideal way. They have problems accepting their image. They need courage every moment to express with their own movements. Daily movements These depends on the kind of daily work people engage in, the regular sequences of movement performed in the ordinary schedule of their lives, repeated automatically and unconsciously. If they always take the elevator to get into the same building, walk by the same way directly to their own desk and chair, look just at the same people, they confront the same situations with the minimum of energy necessary to do what is necessary. These conventional acts, operational and functional, limit our real possibilities. Through our theatre work, our goal is to create a consciousness of our daily routines. We 113Li Galvin explore a variety of reactions to noise and visual images, to the possibilities and limitations inherent in closed spaces and in open spaces, to the constructive elements in architecture, etc. Latent movement ‘These are movements that we never use, maybe far removed from our context of life, but that we can develop whenever we want. Extensions, equilibrium, acceleration, strength are only some of the skills that allow human beings to develop their physical and intellectual abilities. Rejected movements We reject whatever contradicts or clashes with our self-image. There's a continuous search for balance and control. We reject all the circumstances that question our ideal image. Then we select not only what we are able to do but what we are able to accept. When students confront the challenge of what they have rejected, they open lots of possibilities to create new strategies and perspectives of analysis and a new flexibility of response. People change their attitude of rejection when they feel accepted however they look, whatever they express. This is the first stage of daring to explore our limits. 3. POSITIVE ATTRIBUTES In working with young people to extend their repertoire to incorporate all these four kinds of movement, and to rediscover through theatre their corporeal ‘communication, a number of positive attributes are essential: Perseverance Often, young people give up before they have got a rhythm of work, Their motivaiion fails and they evade responsibility, claiming they weren't prepared. Exercises that confront and expose are a major cause of this. That is why, in choreographing drama, the director must start from where the students are - their reality, their self-image, their goals, their conflicts. It is a step from there to analyse the relation between their personal and social contexts, and another to empower them to see how they can transform their environment. Then they must understand the need for perseverance. Risk To risk is necessary to find out whether you succeed or fail. The confidence to do what you know you can do is very easy. It's a challenge to accept the risk of looking both for new possibilities and for ambiguities. Sensitivity and multi-sensitivity When young people seek physical contacts with people, objects and spaces, they are going out looking for stimuli anywhere. They find pleasure in the 114‘The Dance of Life manipulation of objects, getting in touch with people or discovering their limits in space. To learn and to answer to the different schemes of corporeal language ina theatre group, it is necessary for the leader and the participants to observe and study them, their shadows, their vocal impulses, as if they were reflections. To feel with our three sensory systems - externoceptive (the five senses), internoceptive (our internal organs), propioceptive (our movements) - we must awaken a consciousness of our senses and how they select information. Concentration ‘To control inner energies in order to express them artistically, to make known feelings or thoughts In organised and authentic sequences of movements, demands a discipline which young people find difficult, because they ‘communicate initially from outside inwards. How quickly they will learn to control their inner energies will depend on the environment and the group concentration. Young people expect immediate effects, which can exteriorise the performance. This is part of the process, and regular feedback about their performance will help them. Definition It’s a big task, defining detail in their sequences of movements. Nevertheless when they succeed, it gives them security in their dramatic expression. Don't eave details to chance, because it can mean they are not conscious about their intentions. In the definition of the form it is important to be clear in the formal and functional expression of the grammar of body language. Compromise Creative and organic dance works do not emerge from the director's mind, but are based on the actor's resources. Each movement is the result of an impulse, or of a personal exploration. Young people must be engaged with what they believe. Each person finds different ways to respond to the same stimulus, because there is no one Truth. The dramatic tension which this creates generates the compromises they must make. The mission of the director is to leave their personal styles in the configuration of the final choreography. even though ts hard to integrate differences. On the contrary, they will often force their rhythms and their energies inappropriately, making mistakes in the sequences because movements aren't part of their own schemes. To optimise potential and inner energies the director must sometimes forget his or her personal impulses and convictions. The richness of the direction will be shown in the ability to integrate these styles, not to impose imported sequences of movement, but to produce original and authentic expressions. Integration ‘This means for the participants to feel and express with their mind, emotions and body ~ dancing with the energy of their thoughts, painting sounds and music, dancing drama texts, talking in silence with their soul. It means magic relations, searching the animism in objects, in thoughts, in the interaction with 115Lil Galvén reality, flexibility between the abstract and concrete world. Then the process 1n the cycle of communication is: i i TO REACT «—— TO KEEP IN +—— TO RECEIVE ‘Through this cycle we can access the corporeal communication which leads to the discovery of the Dance of Life, and then on to artistic development. 116