Anna Halprin's "Movement Ritual and Dance Explorations"

This morning I began studying with Anna Halprin, the great-grandmother of West Coast U.S. contemporary dance. She is simply amazing. I've heard her say that aging is hard and I have heard that she has been ill, but she looked beautiful today, her movement supple and easeful.

I was floored (yes, that is a pun) to find that she does a long series of barefoot warm-ups. One of her first lessons to us was that wearing shoes and even socks is a bit like wearing a muffler on our feet. I wanted to jump up and down and scream "yes!" but I didn't, which was good, because we got to jump up and down in the next exercise...and skip and run. Ms. Halprin told us to let our shoulders move, to feel it coming from the feet and the floor. Before I knew it, I was doing the same thing that I usually do when I take a run through the Presidio, except that it included going in all directions, not just forward. It was great - both good for the brain and nicely tiring for the body. I can't wait for next week!

In fact, Ms. Halprin is so foot-centric in class that she asks all of her students to take off everything from the ankles down, including socks, and asks for pant cuffs to be rolled. I was excited to see that because I have, for a long time, gone completely barefoot in rehearsals, even in cold weather, simply because anything that separated me from the ground or the floor was too much.

So this brings me to a new point.

One of the first things that drew me to barefoot running was a video of a runner who was running a long race at a track with a bunch of other folks. The camera shot pictures of him running. His movements were light - not a prance, exactly, more like a sort of weighty skittering. His head never changed levels, his legs were very quick. Compared to the shod runners he looked incredibly graceful. One of the shots was of him and several other barefoot runners keeping him company as he circled the track over and over again. During the interview he said that he didn't feel as if he were running. To him it felt more like dancing. 

My sense is that when I take my shoes off and move, that I am dancing, not just covering distance between point A and point B. Or even if I am simply going from one place to another, when it's skin to the ground it becomes more than the sum of its parts. Although it's usually in minimal shoes, Parkour is one of the most elegant, efficient types of dance I've ever seen (not counting the egregious use of acrobatics, which is like putting cheap corn syrup frosting on the finest cream cake in the world). Another thing that I remember and again, I can't at this moment find the video - is an interview with Parkour expert David Belle who says that the less shoe on the foot of a freerunner the better. (I will do some searches and if I can find it again will link, I promise!)

Dance is just another way to get from point A to point B, to get that journey to mean more than the sum of its parts. This is why I tend to start from ideas rather than any particular dance vocabulary. To me, the definition of dance is just to engage ground reaction force, to see where it goes, and where it came from. It's one of the most beautiful forces in the universe, its four-dimensionality poetic in its complexity and perfection. 

When your feet talk to the earth in a way that allows the forces of gravity to spread up into the body, that's a dance. If you were lying down, on your knees or sitzbones it would be possible to find this same play of weight and rebound.

I think that people need to ground themselves and dancing does that. It's also a deep human need that like everything else, modern humans have compartmentalized and reserved for specific circumstances only to be done by specially talented and trained people.

That's certainly not true. Everyone can dance, which means that everyone can run. Which means that everyone can dance. Of course.

Judith Aston's Bicycle Dance

Here she is...the lady who came up with the Aston technique, using ground reaction force to dance on a stationary bicycle! 

She does have her shoes on, but she's got a sense of the earth, even balancing with one hand on the handlebar and one foot on the pedal. 

On Walking

Today I walked again.

It's not like I've not been on my feet and getting from one place to another. I've done that, with relatively little pain, but enough to know that I shouldn't do it for too long.

Today I rediscovered how to walk without a pronounced heel strike. I went for a barefoot walk to our neighborhood library, stopping and starting occasionally when my rhythm broke or when I lost my feeling of gravity. (It's possible to do that, especially when you're small!)

Something I've noticed is that even people who run barefooted still heel-strike when walking. I think it's because we've made assumptions about what walking means, what it looks and feels like. I remember reading posts by bf runners talking about how they were trying to learn forefoot or midfoot striking for walking gait and how hard it was.

So here's something to try today:

Take off your shoes and stand with one foot slightly behind the other. Don't try to point your toes straight ahead. Shift your weight onto the front foot and see if you can drop the back knee so that the hip releases and the foot glides forward slightly. You may find that it doesn't go anywhere at all, or you may find that the free leg's foot doesn't know how to leave the ground. When I first tried this walk, I couldn't get the leg through to the front without tucking the toe off the floor, tightening the ankle flexors and then the hip flexors (which may be in very different places but have a pretty strong connection, don't they?). Don't let the foot flex. Just keep releasing that femur down from the hip joint and allow it to slide it through by responding to gravity through both sides. Let the standing ankle really soften as the body moves forward, although it's easier said than done. The key is both ground reaction force and core work, of course - not clenching, gripping, six-packy wackiness, but motion all through the center of the body from ground to head that encourages the glide of the hip joint, softening of the knee and ankle joint. When it's right, the foot is just slightly plantarflexed as it passes through, with the ankle joint blissfully relaxed, toes rising just enough to clear the ground.

It started off mentally difficult with not much forward motion. It was very hard to get my working leg through without grazing the ground with the bottom of the foot, which is generally something to avoid when barefoot. I'm sure that many a motorist was wondering what the slow-moving, tiny barefoot lady was doing with her stop-and-start progress towards some good books and a turn around the neighborhood. (Do I dare wonder what kinds of comments I'd have gotten outside of the Bay Area?) They can think what they like.

Cogito Ergo(nomics) Sum (part 2)

So, there I was, with my little diagram, my measuring tapes, clipboard and the orders to get everyone ergonomically satisfied as quickly as possible. According to this model it should easy to put a worker's body into correct positions and have everything fall into place!

Nothing in my paperwork prepared me for how little my evaluations would be appreciated. One of the guys in the office started calling me "The Posture Nazi" by the time I returned from the ergonomics orientation. The manager told me to get it done and over with. I realized that I'd been handed this duty because the manager didn't want an outsider coming in and making any big changes.

The first odd thing that I found was that just about everyone had pain, even though, for the most part, they already sat at the perfect combination of ergonomic angles. Everyone sat for their entire day, both for work, then for commuting and for relaxing at home. I measured their workstations and ordered tray tables. Someone needed their screen raised. Another person needed it lowered for their bifocals. We got a roller mouse for one woman and a wrist rest for someone else. The guy who called me "The Posture Nazi" refused any changes at all, but I suppose that was his choice, despite the fact that he suffered from more pain than anyone in the office. I started to teach some of the Pilates basics to one woman with back pain. After about a month sneaking in workstation alterations here and there, the only person with improvement in their pain was the one who started to take short breaks to do the very easy Pilates I showed her - constructive rest, pelvic clocks, bridges, upper abdominal curls and prone extensions. Something clicked. It was the way they worked, not the sitting position.

Then there's this obsession with chairs. I did an image search for "ergonomics" to see what came up and noticed that most of them were of people or stylized models of a human form in a chair. Everything in the office happens in chairs, and as work hours grow and personal time shrinks, more and more time is spent folded in ninety degree angles.

It made me think of something that both one of my art teachers and a dance composition teacher said about the image of a chair being a stand-in for a person. The image is potent even without a person in the frame. Chairs are a way to think of and contain the idea of a person, which has its good and bad points.

Enter any office first thing in the morning and there will be rows or cubicles of empty chairs. The worker chooses their station and sits, conforming to the shape of the chair. Each worker has identical working arrangements.

Imagine, then, what it means to see all these empty chairs at silent desks. It's probably a familiar image. I've always had this feeling that a bunch of empty chairs is almost haunted.

Then try this image on for size:

Imagine if offices had different areas and ways to work. The worker enters and sees two areas: a bright, open place where thinking on foot is encouraged and another section with seating and tables at different levels reserved for quiet activities. Balls are available, especially in the open area. In the quiet section stations with low tables which requires that people sit on the floor would be surrounded by low pads for knee and lotus-style sitting. A series of recliners where workers could read, view images or rest during breaks could be to the far side of the quiet area. There would be some ninety degree tables with chairs and some stations with tall tables for people who are standing. There might even be a platform and an adjustable table on a tall platform for those individuals who think best up high! Computing would be mobile, either with laptops or interchangeable drives so that a person could work in various places throughout the day.

The second office seems like a more natural place for free-flowing ideas to me, partly because people can simply be mobile and also because they can sit or stand in ways that support them as productive workers.

During that same year that I started on ergonomics I found an amazing book by Galen Cranz, called The Chair, which says that human beings are not ninety degree animals. Human bodies were meant for squatting and perching, and not designed to sit for long periods. She talks about the larger cultural picture of how and why people sit the way that they do. Ironically, she teaches in the Department of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.

Here's a terrific interview with her:
http://bodyconsciousdesign.com/uploads/interview_galen_cranz_portland.pdf

I began to rethink the idea of the seated workplace, in what now seems like a very unnatural position. We sit at computers for so long when we work. Our minds, forearms and hands are so active that it's as if all of our surface consciousness moves into those places. When we think hard for a long time we fall into gestures and patterns that come from a very deep place, like a favorite sleeping position that we only find when we are completely unconscious. Heads cock to the side, feet leave the ground and find perches under chairs or tables, or get propped up on the desk so that the chair gets pushed back into a lounging position. Our weight shifts to one sitzbone, causing us to curve to one side. We slouch, or we lean forward. I have caught myself in a twisted position with left foot tucked under the chair leg, toes turned under, the right leg straddling the corner of the chair, foot braced to the side as if I were trying to escape, all my weight on my right sitzbone, leaning forward into the computer as I typed, as if my body were making subconscious commentary on my commitment to a particular task.

Ergonomics, at least the flavor of it that was handed to me in that folder, had very little to do with the rightness of the body. It had everything to do with wringing the most efficient work out of a body in the shortest possible time with as little kvetching from the body's owner as possible. It was a way to conform the human being to their task instead of adapting the job to the person. "Posture Nazi," indeed.

Cranz talks about how the active body should lean forward, while the passive one leans back. My later training in Judith Aston's work also confirmed that, as did what I found over years of working with clients and myself. A slouch is not only a natural position, but also a correct one for certain tasks and states of mind. The problem is that the seated worker who uses a computer is a strange mixture of passive and active. "Sitting up straight," then, does not solve the issue and potentially creates more problems. Many of the other peculiar habits that show up are also important to a person's physical and mental function. In some ways those habits are ways to adapt to the unnatural position that the ninety degree chair forces the body to take, as well as the long hours spent in it. 

No matter what a person does, their body is along for the ride and is constantly in some sort of motion. Even asleep, every part of the body continues to move, down to the smallest fascial cells. If there is an answer to the question of how we change our working culture it may be to honor the human need to move and rest according to the needs of the body and mind. We need to get up, to think on our feet, to sit low and relearn how to squat or sit on the floor, to shake it out and bounce on a ball or to pace.

Another way to think of a chair (at least on this blog!) is as a platform for our sitzbones to be the primary receptors of gravity instead of our feet. (See? I did get there eventually!) In this case, a "supportive" chair is as misguided as "supportive" shoes.

Throwing away our ninety-degree office chairs is very much like getting rid of our shoes and touching the ground once more with our feet. It's another way to say that the ground is, in some ways, all we need to define who we are and where we stand...or sit.

(Chair image by Quinn Dombrowski.)

Daily dance

I was told once by a client that I was "The Mary Poppins of Pilates Instructors." I never quite got what she meant by that until now. As a teacher I give exercises and workouts, but my idea of a lesson learned is one that's internalized. You take it home, you play with it, you make it fun.

Now I get a dose of my own lesson, hopefully with a little something sweet to make the medicine go down.

I went back to the doctor a few days ago. He and his assistant seemed very surprised at my recovery so far. I think that it's partly that I'm a trainer, so I tend to be fit. I've also learned a decent amount about nutrition, cook and eat well (for more on that, check out my other blog!). I am a novice in the art of homeopathics, but am discovering that they are potent and useful. In addition to all that, I am into gravity. It's my friend and I use it. I don't fight it. There's nothing that can get a person to stand up better than being on speaking terms with what my daughter calls "the force that makes you fall down and go boom on your tushy."

This is how I got both of my drains out after only one week out of surgery, I think. I am still extremely limited in what I'm allowed to do, but I did discover that I can sweep the floor thanks to a little footwork.

(Yes, if you were wondering, I am standing on one foot while taking this pic with one hand. That's just how stable I feel now without the extra hole in my middle!)

So, the thought for the day is to check out gravity and how it works with the body. You don't have to be an athlete or even especially fit, and although it's a nice thing to do, you don't even have to make a special time or space for it. Gravity is everywhere and suffuses everything we are and do. See what it does and play a little. 

A new blog. A new post.

This blog goes along with a journey I've taken over the last year or so when I started to take off my shoes. I was one of those kids who was taken to what my mother called "The Orthopod" at a young age. The doctor always looked alarmed before he prescribed some correction - bars for my turned-in legs, big, clunky, protective clown shoes for my very flat, pronated feet. As a result, my legs and feet did not develop correctly. I found some help through ballet and eventually danced professionally, even after arthroscopic surgery on a chronic sprain which probably could have been avoided with better foot and leg development.

When I went back to school and stopped dancing constantly I had foot pain again. I visited Dr. Valmassy, a podiatrist at St. Francis Sportsmedicine. His response was to laugh at my feet and exclaim,

"You're a dancer?"

He made what he called my "skis," which cost about $300, then clapped my feet into supportive, cushioned sneakers that cost about $100. As a result, my feet hurt even worse whenever I'd take my shoes off.

I developed a long term back injury that lasted about a decade, which I can now directly trace to a lack of tone and efficiency in my foundation - my feet and lower legs. My knees always felt like they were on the verge of pain because my lower legs would go into spasm.

I became a Pilates instructor in 2003 because it was the only thing that seemed to help my pain. I continued to dance and choreograph.

Pregnancy and motherhood are always big shifts in mindset, I think. In my case I believe that I became a more independent thinker. I've always been a problem-solver, but felt as if I had to keep up with what everyone else was doing around me. In the isolation of early motherhood groupthink became much less important to me. It's never something I've been good at, anyway. So why bother?

Way back in the early years of my back injury, my first Pilates instructor, Elizabeth Larkam, gave me a series of exercises that mobilized my ankle joints. Back then it made no sense to me to connect my core and spinal functionality to how my feet worked, but after watching how my feet loosened and became stable, adaptive platforms during pregnancy, I took another look at those ideas. It was especially interesting to me because all my back pain actually disappeared during those nine months, while the ligaments and muscles release to accommodate the changes that happen during gestation.

Five years later, I've left all my supportive shoes behind and spend a lot of time toning and releasing my feet, ankles and lower legs. After years of hearing doctors say that my flatfootedness and pronation were irreversible, I now have strong, flexible arches on feet that stand securely in neutral.

I am creating a movement practice that connects the feet and how they interact with gravity and the ground to the core and the rest of the body. I recently completed a mentorship with Elizabeth which explored training people out of their shoes, and into a healthier gait. Workshops and writings to come...here's where I intend to think out loud and perhaps to hear what other people are thinking about. It's an odd feeling to go off on my own and to find out that plenty of other people are now on that same path.

I'm also a barefoot/minimal shoe runner, which is another amazing topic for another time.

So, welcome.

If there is anyone out there interested in this same topic, who manages to find this quiet place in the din of the blogosphere, please feel free to share your own experiences here.