Interview

Материал из HEPTACHOR.

Free Dance and Musical Movement

An Interview with Dr Aida Ailamazian

Isadora Duncan’s major discovery is, as I imagine it, a new type of existence on stage, a live action of creating dance. She was not a “dance performer”; for her, it was neither a role nor a mask. Her deeply non-dissembling art may be called “dance-being”. The images she created are not like characters in a play; they are much closer to the elements, ancient gods, or heroes.

Isadora was not concerned with tracing boundaries between professional art and life. Where do these boundaries lie? Isadora considered them very loose, and she believed in art’s direct impact on life. For her, free dance was a way to free personality. She anticipated: “Yes, she will come, the future dancer. She will come as an embodiment of free spirit, which will live in the free woman of the future... Her signs are the most elevated spirit in the limitlessly free body”.

Yet, Isadora’s dance was only one of Heptachor’s sources. The members of the group possessed a solid, almost professional knowledge of antiquity, especially of sculpture; they studied folklore, music, psychology and systems of physical training.

Isadora’s art struck them and inspired their quest. With nearly scientific scrupulosity, the members of Heptachor sought to recreate conditions of improvisation: person and music, empty space, unplanned character of movements, unexpected encounter… What is the most important? For Heptachor, it is the process of experiencing, understanding music. And then comes a direct motor response to music; it gives the foundation on which it is possible to build everything else. This response needs to be transformed into a fully-fledged process of experiencing music, that is, into “musical movement”. This is the aim of our teaching, and this is the underlying idea of the Heptachor system.

According to Heptachor, movement and music are essentially connected: music already contains movement. Isadora Duncan also believed that the vibrations of music give birth to movement. The movement, which is contained in music, becomes explicit in music’s powerful urge, in its tensions and discharges, ups and downs, rising and lowering tides, in its spatial and temporal organisation. One perceives music’s inner essence by “guessing”, or seeking to repeat, its movement through the movements of one’s body.

The next principle of the Heptachor system is primacy of experience over reflection. Before reflecting on the character of music, one should listen to music, so to say, with one’s body. Cerebral responses should not substitute for direct experience. At our lessons, there is no counting of rhythms, no calculation of intervals, and no other “intellectual crutches” of perception.

Rational control of movement is also taken away: the performance of movement precedes any plan or scheme. For this reason, we renounce visual feedback, such as looking in the mirror. Rather than training movements in front of the mirror, participants are recommended to trust their inner feeling.

For musical movement, it is important to avoid one’s spontaneous, subconscious movements, which express one’s repressed emotions. Music should be the only guide of one’s movements; one should entirely submit to it. This principle is perhaps better formulated as follows: one’s dance should be expressive of one’s perception of music, and not of oneself in music.

The system of musical movement is incomplete without the idea of wholeness. In our case, it means that one should experience music by one’s entire body; each movement involves the entire body. The opposite is also true: the holistic movement determines one’s experience of music.

Another important principle that separates the system of musical movement from both classical choreography and the Duncan school is that we neither explain nor train movements outside of music. Movement is taught solely “through” music.

One more principle concerns the work with the body: it should become alive, sensitive and sensing. If this is achieved, movements flow uninterruptedly, alternating between tension and relaxation, but avoiding static postures.

In our dance, the centre of gravity is located higher up, in the solar plexus area. Each movement starts with relocating the centre of gravity. Also by contrast to ballet, the centre of gravity is dynamic, not static; the body is in a permanent state of falling towards one side or the other, or even in different directions at the same time, which creates dynamic balance. Walking and running are examples of such permanent falling. The power of gravitation therefore becomes an ally of dance: it does not counteract the dancer, on the contrary, dancers use it in their movements.

The process of movement is one with breathing. As S. D. Rudneva put it, live movement is holistic and spring-like; it breathes, it flies, it flows.

The participant should not think about achieving distant results; he or she should act “here and now”, be entirely involved in dance and enjoy it.

We chose musical material that is accessible for participants; we therefore take their age into account. Again, exercises should be easy enough to perform, that is, they should not require any special training.

This does not exclude, alongside the exercises with music, exercises without music, which aim at developing muscle sense, relaxation and special breathing.

At present, we work, above all, on the possibilities of the method, including opportunities of using musical movement for psychological development. As our experience has shown, the actual effect of lessons is much larger than the acquisition of skills. It brings about deeper changes in personality; as a result of the lessons, the principles of musical movement become internalised as a personal way to relate to the world. In some cases, individuals develop new abilities (not only for music or dance), that had been buried because of wrong education or low self-esteem. The method may bring out, we hope, the person’s creative potential.

Whether musical movement can be a method of education and psychological help, a method, which opens up intuition, sensitivity, holistic perception, is a question worth pursuing. We would like to preserve what has been achieved and, at the same time, to explore further paths.

Musical movement encompasses, as one of its aspects, what in other practices (psychotherapies or psychotechniques) exist as a separate technique. For instance, breathing and relaxation, which in other practices are often cultivated for their own sake, in musical movement are parts of the general process of experiencing music.

The Duncan movement gave birth to some extremely interesting developments. They revive the idea of the entire person, in whom reason and feeling act together. The underlying idea of the priority of direct experience over technical skills is of the utmost significance.

Our experience of teaching through music and dance demonstrates that this method is hard to replace by any other. Its uniqueness lies in its ability to bring one back to oneself, to one’s personal sources. The way to oneself lies through one’s emotional transformation, through overcoming inadequate responses and through widening emotional experience.

It is hard not to notice that contemporary choreography is overwhelmed by mechanicism. Having reached a high technical level, it ceased to touch our feelings, and it addresses mostly the superficial intellect. Indeed, the height of the jump and the sensation of flight may be far apart. Heptachor’s practice demonstrates that there might be other ways of teaching, teaching by developing the entire person. This, however, requires one to renounce the pursuit of a precarious professionalisation and of superficial results.

First published in Russian in Ballet, 4 (1997)

Translated by Irina Sirotkina