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October 02, 2006
Dragging My Feet
Not only am I moving slowly in responding to Stanislavsky's Plasticity of Motion, my friends also criticize me to dragging my feet when I walk. It's true, our tendency to walk is a rough and inarticulate form of movement compared to what the human body is capable of. There is a lot of truth in this article, but I also found it to be somewhat dogmatic.
What Tortsov taught Stanislavsky reminds me of what I was learned in Tai Chi classes this past year (there seem to be references to Chinese martial arts, Yogo and Pilates throughout this blog): that human movement is not between a series of set points, but rather a fluid continuos motion. This took me months to learn and only through practice before my movement ceased to be a series of short poses. Did anybody try walking the way that Stanislavsky encourages us to in this article?
The idea that I contemplated most was that "art itself originates in the moment when that unbroken line is established, be it that of count, voice, drawing or movement." While the notion was very poetic and romantic, I disagree entirely - there is equal beauty in plasticity of motion as there is in silence, restraint and contemplation. I've just returned from a series of sound art performances at Tonic where the improvising musicians tended to use a lot of silence and restraint: they took the time to listen to one another in performance. They did not hesitate to create spaces in the sound, just for the sake of continuity for the audience. In my option, that was a major part of the art of their performance.
But I do agree with Stanislavsky that we should have a greater concentration and awareness of our movements on a day to day basis. That should be extended beyond movement to other things: we also tend to ignore those things in our immediate environment that don't directly pertain to what we're doing (i.e. the buildings around us, other pedestrians on the sidewalks).
Posted by Jeremy Rotsztain at October 2, 2006 11:26 AM