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- The universe unfolds in the body, which is its mirror
and its creature. (Octavio Paz)
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- "A group of people sit in a circle, witnessing eight
people moving. The movers have their eyes closed. One
woman is curled up very tight and still. Another is
exploring with her hands, feeling tentatively the grooves
on the floor. A man standing very tall makes cutting
movements with his arms, rigid as they slice the air.
Another man beats a rhythm, with his fingers against
different parts of his body. A third man rolls on the
floor, rolls into the woman who is feeling her
environment. He stops, frozen. She feels his face
delicately, sensitively tracing its outline. He begins to
cry. Another woman has been swaying, her arms straining
upward. She softens her movement, and begins to stroke
her own arm. The drumming fingers find the floor, become
clawing, scratching movements. Someone crawls towards
him, starts clawing with him, at him. They hiss. Another
woman is standing very still. After a while she sighs
deeply, and begins to rotate her hips, letting out a
long, deep cry...."
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- Authentic Movement creates a space for the emergence
of a process through spontaneous movement. As a practice,
it bridges many traditions: therapy and meditation,
individual and community process, ritual and
improvisation. Deriving originally from the work of the
pioneering movement therapist Mary Whitehouse, Authentic
Movement has been extended by her student Janet Adler
into a discipline with an increasing focus on embodying
collective consciousness.
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- The Collective Body
- In 'The Collective Body' Adler writes about the need
to bring the fruits of personal development back into our
membership of a larger community. She points to the shift
in world culture within the last century, where "change
away from tribal living has accelerated dramatically. For
countless centuries preceding this change we belonged
before we asked "who am I"? We were born belonging not
only to a tribalbody but we belonged to the
earthbody."(1)
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- Adler acknowledges the importance of developing
individual awareness as a remarkable aspect of freedom,
of the need to throw off the bonds of religious,
political and familial rule. But, "This sorting through
the parts, a very Western way of understanding, has
offered a particular kind of learning, resulting in a
particular kind of self-knowledge." She suggests that the
loss of community, of the 'sacred circle" has
"contributed significantly to the creation of unbearable
rage, isolation and despair". The unprecedented task for
us now is to find ways to re-enter the sacred circle, to
come into conscious membership in the whole, and to be
uniquely ourselves within it.
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- "How we discover this is a great mystery. Willing
membership just with our minds cannot create the shift in
consciousness for which we long. The shift must be an
embodied shift [...] One by one knowing (and
knowing implies consciousness), knowing in our bodies
that we belong, creates a collective body in which life
energy is shared."
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- Authentic Movement, a practice which has evolved out
of dance therapy, provides one way to re-connect to a
conscious collective. As a place for individual process,
it offers safety to move spontaneously. Viewed as a group
practice, it sometimes features extraordinary synchronous
events - the coinciding and converging of people's
gestures and impulses. Authentic movement is both like
and unlike a group of people doing tai chi together. The
characteristic form of authentic movement lies in the
explicit structure of the process. There is the sense of
deep connection to one another. But the movements
themselves are unchoreographed, unpredictable,
process-oriented. And there is the dependence of the
movers on the relationship with the witnesses to provide
containment.
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- The Structure
- Authentic Movement has a formal and simple framework.
The group is usually divided into movers and witnesses
(later swapping roles) working either in pairs or with
the witnesses acting as a containing circle for all the
movers. There is no music, the mover has to listen to,
sense deeply, himself. With eyes closed it is easier to
focus inwardly. Moving blindly symbolizes the journey
into the unknown. Only if someone is moving very quickly
or with some violence, the eyes may be kept open to make
sure no-one is hurt. The time for movement may be short -
ten to twenty minutes - but the experience can feel very
condensed, like a dream.
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- Afterwards, the movers may draw or model with clay or
talk directly about what occurred for them. The witness
may respond in movement, or by drawing, or verbally. The
subjectivity of her experience is owned through phrases
like "I saw....I imagined....I felt....I heard". The
witness does not interpret. In the most formal version of
Authentic Movement, the witness only comments on material
that the mover refers to. In this sense it is not like a
psychotherapy group where a group member might go from
observing to dynamic interaction with a process. The
witness is active in her participation, but contained in
her response. The discipline of witnessing supports the
mover's drop into the depths of self.
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- Authenticity and the Emergent Self
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- "The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the
body (Jung, 1940, p.173)
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- Authentic Movement offers the opportunity to develop
a deep, self -sensing awareness. Authenticity is not a
goal to be achieved, but rather a constant process of
becoming. It is both sought for, through deep attention,
and waited for with humility. Each individual has to
discover it in their own way - listening, tuning into,
internally generated cues...a sensation, an image, an
impulse, a feeling. For some it comes as an urge to
embody a rhythm, and then the rhythm itself takes them
further into unplanned movement.
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- Mary Whitehouse described the core of the movement
experience as the sensation of moving and being moved. "
To feel 'I am moving' is to be directed by the ego. To
experience "I am moved" is to know the reality of the
unconscious. Ideally, both are present in the same
instant....it is a moment of total awareness, the coming
together of what I am doing and what is happening to me."
(2) Whitehouse was influenced by her Jungian analysis and
by the pioneering modern dancer Mary Wigman. The movement
critic John Martin first used the words "authentic
movement" in 1933 to describe Wigman's expressionistic
dancing: "Its externalisation...comes not by intellectual
planning but by feeling through with a sensitive body.
The result...is the appearance of entirely authentic
movements which are as closely allied to the emotional
experience as an instinctive recoil is to an experience
of fear."(3) In this sense Wigman's dance was comparable
to Method acting.
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- Whitehouse took this principle of "feeling through"
into her movement therapy work, deliberately discarding
the word 'dance' as implying a finished product. She
encouraged the development of kinesthetic awareness, an
embodied internal sense. She also drew on Jung's method
of active imagination to invite free association in
movement. This allows gestures, impulses and movements to
emerge from all levels of conscious and unconscious. The
body becomes both vehicle for expression and a sounding
board for a deeper sense of self.
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- For newcomers to Authentic Movement, a sense of
self-consciousness and inhibition may be overwhelming
initially. Some people find a way to embrace their own
paralysis, waiting in the deadness till stirred. Others
accept the mechanicalness, the difficulty with letting go
control, and then notice when a flicker of something
unbidden happens. Rather than being 'authentic' at each
moment, movers struggle with moving in and out of the
self. In this excerpt from The Diary of a Mover, there is
a sense of conscious effort, stiffness and fragmentation
in the beginning:
- To get started I focussed my awareness through
various body parts - noticing first the block or tension,
and then, as I tried to release it, connecting it with a
feeling or situation [...]
- pelvis - felt like a buzzing energy wanting release,
too inhibited to do anything, eventually put my feet
against the wall and pushed
- head - enormous head - weighing me down, very hard to
hold up, dropped to one side, sad.
- Stiff shoulders. Tried to loosen my right arm, found
my left arm covering my chest, protecting my heart.
- Arms cradling head, protecting, tender.
- My drawing was off a body with the lower half on
fire, and the top being protected.
- Next day I realised I always have difficulty sitting
up straight, and particularly holding my head up.
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- A few weeks later an image arises more spontaneously:
"a noose, something from above pulling out my heart,
being led by my heart. As soon as I started talking, I
knew it was about passion, the danger of being led by my
heart, losing my heart and having it broken or not
returned."
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- Witnessing: Conscious Commitment to
Another
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- Janet Adler took the Whitehouse approach to another
level. Developing the role of the witness, giving it to
the movers, not just the therapist, was a radical act. It
was the first step towards working with the collective,
and taking authentic movement out of the realm of
therapy. The words of body psychotherapist John
Waterstone, writing about witnessing in supervision, are
relevant here:
- "In existential terms the fact of being seen is
essential to the process of existence. The individual
ex-ists, ie. stands out via the dynamic process of
showing the self to the self and to others. The self is
defined (comes into being) [...] by being /doing
in the eyes of another, in the eyes of the self, and in
the witnessing of the impact of the self on the
other."
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- For Adler, Authentic Movement is as much about the
witnesses longing to see clearly, as the mover's desire
to be seen.. The witness learns to cultivate their
capacity to attend to the inner experience, as they are
stirred by what they see and feel. Through this
engagement, they are affirming the immanent happening in
the body. Adler speaks of herself in the witness role "my
intention is to practice towards an emptying of myself,
which paradoxically means entering the fullness of
myself, my feelings, thoughts, sensations ". Witnessing
is like meditation in that it aims for an accepting
awareness. But the crucial difference is that the inner
witness develops in conscious commitment to another. And
the commitment is
- reciprocal. Adler insists we need each other "in
order to stumble towards embodied wholeness....:Our
compassion completely depends upon our experience of each
other, our relationship to the whole."
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- In our culture so much looking is mere scanning -
seeking the highlights. A longer look is often
objectifying or voyeuristic. Just as we may overeat
because we feel empty inside, so we often greedily
consume images without finding resonance with or
satisfaction in them. Our eyes may be become weary from
too much looking, too much stimulus,. We forget how to
soften and relax the eyes, to receive images and let them
touch us. ' Witnessing' deriving from the old English
word 'wit' encompasses the sense of knowing and
affirming, as well as humour, seeing unexpected
connections. Bearing witness has a vital function going
beyond simple acknowledgement. It gives meaning to
experience. The witness in authentic movement receives
the mover. She then gives back to the mover the
impression, the effect on her of the movement, not as the
truth but as a real human response.
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- Elaboration, Creativity, Meaning
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- The reality of the body is not given
- But to be made real, to be realised (Blake)
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- Participants in Authentic Movement come from all
walks of life to engage in exploration. Authentic
Movement is not therapy but it can nourish and be
nourished by a therapeutic or creative process. Every
shape or gesture is a seed, suggesting a new possibility
of being or making. It is the gift of space, time and
attention that allows the seed of an impulse or image to
be elaborated freely, without pressure or goals.
Elaboration is allowing the body's wisdom to take you on
a journey. Material is often primitive, and yet intricate
and subtle in its emergence. As when we explore a dream,
even a small fragment can harvest a wealth of meaning.
Some times, it unleashes intensity, buried passions and
visions. Sometimes it allows the joy of play to well up
and take form.
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- Two contrasting entries from ' The Diary of a
Mover':
- "Found myself in a foetal position, and then suddenly
swirling that was chaotic, turbulent - kaleidoscope of
colour - loss of control.."
- "K and I played playful cats - the contact and
immersion in fantasy was great. Then pushing and pulling
against each other. Then I turned round and sat in her
straddled legs. We did rocking, pulling oars and made
wind sounds - boat journey. Sound "wee ahh!" became "we
are" to me, with wonderful feeling off union. Then K lay
back and I was born out of her, sitting, but with legs
and arms floating in joy and freedom. Felt calm and happy
even when I sensed K getting restless and angry. She
moved off and let out an extraordinary ROAR - I was
thrilled, startled, frightened by the depth of it."
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- The attention given during and after the movement
process allows for the image to continue reverberating.
The group acts as an energetic web as well as some kind
of container. Adler comments, "When each individual does
as he or she must do, regardless of content, we notice
that the group as a whole seems to be in synchrony".
Stories unfold of conflict, loss, separation, birth,
passion, meeting, dying - with links to each individuals
personal stories and to archetypes and myth.
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- The Embodied Collective
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- Adler's development of Authentic Movement has shifted
increasingly towards an emphasis on the collective, with
both political and spiritual implications. Her work has
been associated with nonviolent community action, with
ecology, with Zen, and with the transpersonal. She evokes
the idea of the body as a collective, millions of one
cell units forming clusters which create organs, bones,
muscles. She asks "How does the human body, as a
collective in itself, mirror the collective body ? In the
collective body we can see the intrapersonal work of each
person, like each cell doing its job. We can see
combinations of two people in relationship, the
interpersonal connection, like two cells working
together. Now, like a cluster of cells creating an organ,
such as the heart, we can see clusters of people some
small like the family and others including more people,
like a village. Just as many clusters of cells create a
whole person, many villages create counties, states,
nations, the whole world."
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- The collective becoming conscious must prepare to
safely hold that which is too great for an individual to
hold alone. There is plenty of evidence for the hunger
for an embodied collective experience -whether it be to
mourn, to celebrate or to create something new. "We need
our tribe desperately. We need to feel membership,
especially in relationship to the mysteries, the unknown,
the ways in which spirit moves."
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- Roz Carroll is a body psychotherapist (UKCP reg) and
a trainer at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy.
She has twenty years experience of working in groups with
movement. She studied Authentic Movement with Anne Hebert
Smith in the U.S. and with Linda Hartley in the U.K. For
details of her Introduction to Authentic Movement
weekends and on-going group, email thinkbody@lineone.net
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- Notes
- (1) All quotations from Janet Adler are from her
essay, 'The Collective Body' in Authentic Movement:
Essays by Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler and Joan
Chodorow Ed. Pallaro (London, 1999) or from her interview
with Annie Geissinger 'Toward the Unknown' in A Moving
Journal: Ongoing Expressions of Authentic Movement Vol 5,
no 3, Fall-Winter 1998
- (2) Mary Whitehouse Physical Movement and Personality
(1963), p.3-8
- (3) In Dance Movement Therapy: A Healing Art Fran
Levy (Reston, 1988)
- (4) The Diary of a Mover (unpublished)
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