philosophical dance & movement stuff

There tends to be one primary concept that keeps getting driven into my head for any given period of time. Like a temporary life objective, the concept for a year or several. I assume everyone else gets these, but they may not.

Lately (really for the past year or so, integration has been a thing for me. It started with work, actually, with a desire to not separate work from home (I think I've said that). It became a big part of the way I think about self and the things that I do. The things that I describe myself as are not independent, or parts of a whole or anything - just manifestations of my perspective/self/whatevah: take dancer actor feminist fat chick project manager daughter cat person as like prisms; I am the same throughout. That probably makes either no sense or seems really obvious, but it was not obvious to me say, two years ago.

So this is the lens through which I see dance. And all movement, really - the RMAX training is very deliberate about integration, and its influence is everywhere in the way I think and move (while I've only barely entered the martial side in the last few months, it's been part of my view of physical culture for a few years). I think I may be becoming a bit of a bellydance radical as a result. I see the dance form as all about integration: body-mind, dancer-self, dancer-dancer, dancers-music-costume, music-audience, floor-ceiling-walls [side note, there's an idea that spinning over the left shoulder is pointing downward to the earth while spinning right is to heaven, charming thought given our name and predilection for turning counterclockwise], personal-political, so on. Critical to that integration is the first part - the movement of the body is integrated, not isolated. Bellydance talks a lot about isolation, but what everyone should really mean by that is movement originates from one place at a time, not that only one part moves. If I'm not filled with excess tension, moving my head effects movement in my feet.

And moving one dancer effects movement in the entire room. One rhythmic shift slightly moves everyone. Et cetera. Movement of any kind continues on beyond where it starts, because everything is sorta part of everything else. [Which, aha! Is totally a Noh theatre idea, and therefore something I've been carrying around with me since high school because I am a movement nerd.]

A lot of this has seemed to me like ridiculously obvious things I could have connected ages ago, but the notion that my notions might be weird or radical hit me particularly today in light of two things I saw on online dance communities: one, people insisting that yes, all forms of tribal are bellydance because the movement is basically the same and two, a cabaret dancer I adore saying something to the effect of mid-east/bellydance being about isolation.

I don't believe (as I just laid out in rather grandiose terms) that anything about tribal bellydance is about isolation. Think about the most "isolated" seeming movement - let's say that flutters (fluttering the squishiness of your ab area using largely your diaphragm). In order to do that movement, you have to shift tension elsewhere to support it; I find that I create a sort of movement chain from my feet up through my back to do that - so it may look like an isolation, but it's not. In the same vein, even a tribal soloist is actually supported (perhaps invisibly) by every tribe she draws from - or she's not actually tribal. That's not to say cabaret dancers aren't also connected to each other, but that it isn't a fundamental concept of the dance; it doesn't affect performance, say (though it certainly could).

I'm talking about dance here, but you could get even more philosophical and easily extend that idea of integration to any movement, to music, to people, social change, on and on.