Fourth Tai Chi Class of the Semester

Last week subzero wind chills convinced me to stay home from Tai Chi. This week my Tai Chi lesson began as soon as I stepped out the door. The predicted snow that we didn’t get last night evidently was instead light rain. A thin coating of ice covered the sidewalks. I had a hard time getting traction to walk the half mile to the bus. So, I lowered my center of gravity—which is a lesson that Bob, our Tai Chi instructor, has harped on for years—and barely raised me feet off the ground as I walked, a type of skating movement. Years ago I took a class on Ba Gua Zhang from Bob which used that same movement. It worked; I didn’t have an issue with slipping when I stayed focused on the movement.

The actual Tai Chi was very helpful too, as always. We again focused our attention on different things as we did the form: neck and shoulders, arm and leg joints, ligaments, shifting weight from leg to leg, the fullness of each posture, and staying in sync with the participants around us. I realized I don’t have a lot of sense of my ligaments. The tightness in my neck and shoulders are my bane. Sometimes when I focus on them they relax. Other times they seem to be giving me the raspberries: “Yeah, you just make us relax. Na, Na.” Anyway, I have enough old and new things to keep me busy in practice this week.

Making the Abstract Concrete

I always feel a bit better when I find other people who think like I do about learning. I have been reading Movement for Actors, edited by Nicole Potter. One of the essays is by Alan S. Questel who describes the work of Feldenkrais.

To make the abstract concrete is a kind of learning that is not prevalent in our culture. Most of our learning is informational—facts and ideas that we take in through books, lectures, and other media, where we listen to someone else tell us what we should know and understand.

Real learning, the kind we experienced as children, comes from our ability to make distinctions and create new relationships to the world we live in. Through this kind of learning, we can develop a sense of self based on an internal criteria and inner authority.

Multiple Intelligences and SYTYCD

So You Think You Can Dance helps make me a smarter person. It gives me a vocabulary for movement and emotions. Don’t get me wrong, I love the dancing. But what enthralls me is watching the judges.

After bumbling through assorted internal martial arts classes, I feel nourished by the discussions on different way to move a wrist or a knee, where the center of gravity is in a dancer’s body, the openness of a shoulder. I unconsciously find myself experimenting with a tiny movement as I listen. Sometimes when I practice Tai Chi later in the week, I hear a SYTYCD judge’s critic in my head, and I explore how to bring those ideas to my form.

So You Think You Can Dance teaches me about emotion. Coming from a strict German American family, emotion was discouraged. At best it was a sign of being undisciplined. At worse, it was considered blatantly bad. Watching the display and discussion of emotion is like a woman who has deprived herself of dessert for months finally having a slim slice of cheesecake. In two different seasons, Adam Shankman has asked dancers what they were feeling. And paused, creating a beautiful space. The dancer opened his/her heart. I was in tears. I could feel the currents through the miles or over the Television waves. There have been times when all three judges have broken down in tears when a performance has moved them. I begin to understand what it is like to feel art, with its beauty, joy, pain.

Fred Rogers would be so proud. “Today boys and girls we are going to learn about two motions. The first motion is the movement we do with our bodies. The second motion –emotion—we do with our hearts.” I am so going to miss the show when it ends next week.

Information

One of my goals this summer is to read the Hugo winners from 1959-1970. I just finished reading A Case of Conscious by James Blish. This quote speaks to my awareness of sometimes being information rich and wisdom poor.

This is not a question of information. It is a question of whether or not the information can be used. If not, then limitless information is of no help.

Mine

Lately I have been going through one of those phases again where I wonder how can I know so much and yet my life appear to be so screwed up. I like this quote in The Principles of Effortless Power by Peter Ralston:

A lot of people want to learn something, and simply study from someone who tells them to do this and that, and that’s legitimate….In my case, I wanted to make the art mine. And in order to be mine, I had to have the ability. I had to discover and understand it. It didn’t do me any good if someone said something and I believed it; only if I understood it, only when it was my experience and my ability, was it useful.

Icicle

These past few weeks I have been struggling with the idea of head knowledge verses applied knowledge. Some ideas make so much sense when I read them or think about them, but when I need to apply them to a problem in my life, I don’t feel very smart.

A tangible way to illustrate this is to talk about my experience trying to make a beaded icicle. I knew that I needed to gradually increase the circumference of the icicle, create some sort of spiral effect, and have variegation. After my first attempt, I also discovered that I needed to make my object stiff. Even thought the finished icicle is fairly abstract and freeform, I needed four attempts to come up with something that “worked.”

I am beginning to believe that much of life is an artistic endeavor. My parents were so hell bent on “getting it right the first time.” In truth, most of life is just stringing one bead at a time, with a few basic principles in mind, and seeing how our efforts turn out, knowing that we can try something a little--or a lot--different the next time.