Miksi mielekkäät liikkeet?

Sain taas eilen Lontoosta hyvin positiivista palautetta osallistumisestani Performing Self -kurssille. He olisivat iloisia, jos kuulisivat edelleen työstäni ja kirjoittamisestani. Olin jo ajatellutkin kääntää tuoreen opparini englanniksi, jotta pääsisin osallistumaan keskusteluun lasten Alexander-tekniikan opetuksesta. Aion kirjoittaa siitä tässä blogissanikin, nyt kuitenkin vielä ajatuksia Lontoon kurssin ajoilta

From my reflective journal (Performing Self, London)

What is flow? How is it possible that even when it certainly is you that are playing a piece of music there is no room for you to decide its course? There is a sense of inevitability, nothing can go another way than the way it is going. You do a crescendo where you know it is appropriate and you ruin the performance. But in the perfect performance there might very well have been a crescendo in that very same place - because the place was appropriate. How could you destroy something by doing the right thing?

In the first day of the Performing Self course John told about a Facebook Alexander Technique group he has created, the name of the group is Intelligent movement. The art of applied mindfulness was John’s subtitle and many other English teachers seem also to have taken that name for their use. Mindfulness is defined as ‘the intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment’. Adding movement to mindfulness is a good point and makes it more practical. Embodied Mindfulness is also a good title to an Alexander Technique course. And furthermore, ‘mindfulness in movement’ is more current than ’thinking in activity’[1] and it is easier to accept that learning mindfulness would be useful than accept that learning to think would be useful - even if you are told that it would be a different kind of thinking.  

Is there any other way to express ourselves than through movement? And can a movement, any movement, not to be an expression of ourselves?

During the three month course I spent some time finding out what would be a good name for what I would like to convey through teaching Alexander Technique. What words could carry my meaning? Our movements express what we have in mind, there is no movement if the brain doesn’t at some level send the order, whether the order is conscious or unconscious, reflex or voluntary. Fortunately for me, there is a perfect adjective in Finnish, mielekäs. ’Mieli’ is mind and when you turn that into an adjective it is literally ’having or containing a mind’.  But you use the word to mean reasonable, sensible or meaningful. What you can achieve by learning Alexander Technique is meaningful, reasonable and sensible movements, ’mielekkäät liikkeet’. And there is no separation of the mind and body.

What would be good for a performer to have in mind when performing? Obviously it would be good at first to clear the ground. For me a clear example of that was, when in a concert I saw and heard Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique played by a clavichordist. Before the player began, her body was shaped by the tensions she thought were needed for the piece and it was obvious that her first encounter with the sonata had not been with a delicate clavichord but with grand piano! And she never came to the present, found what was needed. There was clearly a huge waste of energy, Perhaps something else lost, too?

I found the games and experiments with actors very interesting. I hadn’t thought before what happens when an actor takes a role, a character. They made obvious how Alexander Technique can be really helpful in many ways. The better you can get rid of your own idiomatic characteristic features of moving and speaking, the more room there is for the character you are playing. Within that role there has to be place for the actor, too. They have to be able to move without hurting themselves and speak not only to convey the character but also to communicate it to the audience. But it was perhaps even more interesting to observe what effect losing the big picture had on performance. And also having the primary control going well or not.

Last autumn David Dolan held a course of improvisation in Sibelius Academy in Finland. He told about a study[2] where they put improvisatory elements into classical (written) pieces and how it heightened the experience both with the players and the audience. Audience members rated the improvised performances more emotionally engaging, more musically convincing, and more risk-taking than the non-improvised (regular) performance. There were also some different activity in the brain that could be measured. During the improvised performances, the musicians showed less activity in cortical areas associated with sustained attention and more activation of motivational area and areas related to free will as well as planning and coordination of movements. Improvised performances were characterised by a larger tactus and a more coherent phrase structure than the regular performances, which displayed a regular and somewhat rigid short-term pulse. The researchers thought that the data provided evidence that ‘improvised’ performances of the classical repertoire can heighten musical quality and audience engagement. Their improvisatory approach was defined as a frame of mind manifested in novel and spontaneous gestures which they seem to think an ’expressive performance’ has not.

True communication is always spontaneous, happens here and now. You can’t answer a question without hearing it or before you have heard it. You can’t continue a story if you don’t know what has happened before or argue against something if you don’t know what you are arguing against.

My piano teacher used to say that you should have the piece you are playing like a landscape before you. I liked the metaphor and over the years it has meant different things for me. During the course I enlarged its scope to all performing arts, to written music and drama and choreographies. You don’t really know where you are if you don’t have the overall picture. And can you be present without knowing where you are? Then, something becomes inevitable only when it happens, nothing is truly inevitable beforehand. The previous step determines the next step, you can’t know the next step before the previous has happened - or is happening?

The head of my Alexander teacher training school, an actor by former profession, used to say that often performers want to express something before they have anything to say. Many of the experiments made in the Performing Self course clarified that, e.g. the simple thing of experimenting what effect it made, when the readiness for walking was made by seeing something interesting and describing it.

To be spontaneous you have to be ready to do anything, otherwise it would not be a spontaneous act. And to be ready to do anything you have to be well organized, otherwise it is not possible to be ready to do anything.

Shaun Gallagher, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida, says that the sense of ownership for action depends on sensory feedback from proprioceptieve, visual and tactile sources and is generated as the action is taking place. The sense of agency, however, is based, in part, on premotor processes that happen just prior to the action. In this regard the sense of agency seems to depend on neurological events that we do not control, and that if they fail, lead to a sense that my body is being passively moved.[3]

Perhaps a hurrah for the failure?