The Fortune of Musical Movement

Материал из HEPTACHOR.

What has happened to the groups committed to the plastic arts and choreography that appeared in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century? This article tells the story of one of them, named “Heptachor”; yet it is not only a history or a tribute to the past, as it is also about how this work continues today. In 1905-07 at the Bestuzhev Higher Women’s Courses in Saint Petersburg, seven young women met together. Their names were Natalia Ped’kova, Stefanida Rudneva, Iulia Tikhomirova, Camilla Trever, Ilsa Trever, Ekaterina Zinserling, and Natalia Enman. They called themselves, “Heptachor”, “the dance of seven”, in Greek. They were extremely serious and scholarly young women (studying archaeology, ancient history, philology, Egyptology, and chemistry), in love with music and art, and rich in talent and spirit. Inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy, Wagner’s music, the lectures of their idol, a scholar of antiquity, Tadeusz Zieliński (1859-1944), and Isadora Duncan’s dances, they began systematic work with movement. They wanted to answer to the question, how music and human movement are connected.

At first, they wandered in the dark, at random. It encouraged them to listen to themselves, to their bodies, to understand the music with the help of their bodies. They gradually realised the need to remove the mirror from the dance room, not to look at themselves while dancing, to shut their eyes. They discovered that, in the process of work, their vision was changing, and that they were acquiring a side vision and an ability to move around almost blind. Later in the 1920s, similar experiments were done with vision and perception, to control the convergence of the eyes and to enhance the perception of three-dimensional space and motion. What was important, however, was not the development of vision as such. Movement practices were gradually altering the core of the person, giving him or her a new identity, a new vision of the world and of self. The perception of motion deepened, making possible a sense of inner, emotional states. The perception of art improved too: it became possible to perceive a painting or a sculpture as a living presence, to vibrate in tune with the artist’s emotions, to feel the warmth which the creator had given to the work. The involvement of the entire body enhanced the response to a work of art.

Yet more important than the perception of art was a new way of seeing and experiencing nature, as if a wall between the person and the cosmos had collapsed. And after that, what a fullness of being and what opportunities of fulfilment; what happiness, purity, and delight! Hence the brave and unexpected title of Stefanida Dmitrievna Rudneva’s unpublished book, The Memoirs of a Happy Person. Despite the starving 1920s and the tragic 1930s and 1940s, despite homelessness, lack of recognition, and persecution, Rudneva’s entire life strikes one with its integrity, an incredible commitment to an idea, its spiritual clarity, and its endurance. A person of a systematic disposition, she collected, classified, and described a colossal amount of material – all the work by the Heptachor on creating the method of musical movement. Stefanida Dmitrievna (1890-1989) died when nearly hundred, and in her nineties she did not only theoretical but also practical work. Through a special training, the exercises created by the Heptachor, one feels energy rising from within, a return of original freshness, a child-like innocence, and the emotion of boundlessness. It is amazing, especially today: it is undoubtedly positive work, which helps a person to recover and stand upright, and which brings the desire and energy to live. The Heptachor’s photographs radiate with such integrity and inspiration.

Isadora Duncan could have had a similar impact on the young women, the future Heptachorists. She was genuine, and her enthusiasm and delight were genuine too; she ran because she wanted to; she jumped because she wanted to; she stood when she wanted it; she danced because she felt the music was immersing her body either in fire or in calm. Her arms and legs became instruments, messengers, vessels for a new life; they witnessed a divine beauty. Isadora unlocked the locks, she awoke and called people: take away the chains! out of the prison! you are free, find you true and sacred nature! And in her dances she tried to show how sacred oneself and one’s body could be.

Neither the Heptachorists nor their pupils studied with Isadora. They probably dreamed of it, but – thank God! – it did not happen. I believe that, were they to have studied in one of her schools, they would not have found there what they were looking for, and they would have left. They looked for a method of work, of teaching movement.

The Heptachor’s search touched upon various fields, from the laws of construction and expressiveness of sculpture to different forms of gymnastics, including Emile Jaques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics. Dalcroze had an apparently similar project and offered a systematic teaching method. It seemed to some that the answer had been found: music and movement are linked by rhythm, and all one needs to do is to submit to rhythm. Prince Sergei Volkonskii, the apostle of Dalcroze in Russia, enthusiastically announced that the dilettantism that relied on intuition and the lack of technique had come to an end, and a new era in the development of the plastic arts, with the link between music and movement based on a solid foundation, had begun. He wrote about the opportunities for expression in the plastic arts:

In the ballet, the movement is added to the music, and not born from it… The forms of the plastic arts that were not devised separately from the music will demonstrate their potential for expressiveness and freedom. The body movements should not obey a pattern out of the choreographer’s head, which he imagines with his eyes shut. They should obey the pattern of the music, which itself has its roots in musical movement, in the rhythm. Like any material, in order to become art, movement should submit to a law. The law is to be found neither in our emotions nor in the visual requirements of the plastic arts. Quite the opposite: it will be found in sound, in the regularity with which it changes through the endless variety of speed, slowness, power, lightness, and heaviness. The human body should submit to the music.

Though the Heptachor rejected Dalcroze’s system, their acquaintance with eurhythmics had clarified their own intuitions. Musical movement is aimed at a holistic perception of the stream of music; it responds to the energy of music and does not formally anatomise and structure it. Music is not to be interpreted, that is, translated from one language to another (in this case, from the language of music to the language of the plastic arts); it needs no explanations. Music is life, reality. To be able to experience it as reality would be to respond to the music wholeheartedly, with one’s entire being.

Yet, intentionally to submit one’s movements to the formal rhythm would be to erect a wall between the music and oneself. Don’t beat the rhythm, otherwise you loose the opportunity to sing the music with your body, to perceive its inner movement. Thus critics have noticed – sometimes with surprise, sometimes critically -- that Isadora’s dance is not rhythmical. Volkonskii commented, “her arms are more rhythmical than her legs; but on the whole she is not very rhythmical, and this is especially clear in the slow movements. She often steps between two notes; she makes superfluous steps (in relation to the music); she starts a new figure in the middle of a phrase, and so on.” The matter is not, of course, that Isadora could not reproduce the rhythmical pattern; her dance was organised in a different way, in accordance with the endless, eternally nascent, uninterrupted motion reflected in the music.

Indeed, many of those who sought new forms of choreography saw, above all, a special plasticity in Duncan’s dance, a flowing, viscous character in her movements, an enchanting smoothness, as if the person is either asleep or floating on water. The observers, with their attentive professional eye, could detect the work of muscles behind the magic of the flowing dance. They saw how this smoothness is achieved, that technically it is at the command of relaxation. Through such means and observations, a new art of choreography emerged, with a new technique and a new repertory of movements – the modern ballet. But, imitating the surface of the technique, the pioneers, it seems, could neither hear the music nor understand what was most important. They had not perceived how and from which source this dance is born. Or, perhaps, they had perceived it, but did not want to accept it and to follow this lead?

And what about Isadora herself? All her life both she and, even more, her brother and sister, Raymond and Elisabeth Duncan, tried to establish a school. Isadora was more than an artist; she felt she had a mission to carry a message, to breathe a new life into people. The passion of her convictions was almost that of a prophet. Hence her persistent central idea, that many could not understand, of the necessity to teach children how to move; hence her life exposed to people, and her tragic death – a martyrdom in which she paid for what had been given to her.

The difficult history of her schools is well known. One of them was founded in Moscow in 1921. After Isadora had left Moscow, Irma Duncan, a student and one of her adopted daughters, headed the school. The Moscow school, later a theatre-studio, existed until 1949, much of the time touring the country. Its experience is unfortunately not well known, although some of the direct students of Isadora and Irma Duncan are still alive. <…>

Many people got stuck on the idea of dance improvisation. It has turned out (and Duncan herself commented on it) that to teach children to improvise is relatively easy. Children do it enthusiastically, catching some of the superficial characteristics of the musical tissue. They are less able, however, to experience music in depth, because, instead of perceiving music as a whole, they extract fragments and details. Without sensing music with one’s soul, the body, though moving all the time, remains unawake.

Contemporary choreographers, exponents of free dance, also subscribe to the idea of improvisation. But the notion of freedom is a complex one; it matters what exactly we mean by it. Isadora sought a secret spring of dance in order to find how to teach her art. Her advice about concentrating on the centre of the movement, which she located in the solar plexus, listening to the music, tuning one’s mind and body to the improvisation and dance, are fragments of a draft and the beginnings of a new approach. She was familiar with the teaching of François Delsarte, who formulated laws of emotional expressiveness of dance, such as those, which involve the relocation of the centre of gravity. Delsarte’s ideas merged with her own search for the origins of movement. She rejected the idea that movements are independent of each other by virtue of stops, or pauses, in the bodily motion, and she reflected on the way one movement gives birth to another and develops from the other movement.

But how to teach this knowledge? What should the result of such teaching be? It appeared that earlier teachers either misunderstood or ignored the connection between music and movement. Teaching methods consisted, on the one hand, of performing motor exercises that related only superficially to the music, teaching particular movements (a traditional method in dance teaching), and reproducing Isadora’s own dances (after learning movements without music). On the other hand, children were told to improvise with the music. As a result, children (and adults) learned to repeat Isadora’s dances (although it is not clear what this means or to what extent one can repeat the Duncan dance), but they were unable to create their own dance. Duncan dreamed of bringing up a creative person, but the way to creativity was not easy. Isadora, finally, was her own self: contradictory, tragic, spirited, both a daughter of her age and absolutely unfit for it. She danced the way she could; she lived in the dance, talked through it; her dance was her prayer, her ritual, and her magic. Any attempt to reproduce her choreography today is futile, because her dance had very little choreography, and the little that was there, has long been assimilated by ballet.

The Heptachor did not know the work that was going on in the Duncan schools, but they captured the spirit of Isadora’s own dances and almost instantly formulated their own rule, which would make their later search so unique and brave: in order to live in the music, to create a dance, one should not imitate and reproduce movements. Usually, students of dance train to do isolated movements or dance ‘pas’; during this process, the music serves solely as a background that organises the rhythm and tempo of the movements. Certainly, any teacher would say, how else? An alternative is to centre the teaching process around the perception and emotional experience of the music, and to make movement into an instrument for developing the understanding of the music. Movements begin to play a different role: they are neither performed as gymnastics nor produced to a so-called dance pattern; they help to concentrate on the music, to hear it better, and to experience it more deeply. Rudneva, when she spoke of a single music-and-motor process, had in mind this kind of interaction between movements and the music. It is important to realise that, in the case of the single music-and-motor process, listening to the music does not precede the movement. It is not what one customarily imagines, a process of first listening to the music, grasping its idea, and then creating in one’s mind a pattern or an image, followed by an appropriate movement. In contrast with this, movement should become a living perception.

If one succeeds in awakening in oneself such a direct motor response to the music, unmediated by reflection, fear, and analysis, then movement acquires new qualities and ability to reveal what is usually hidden. The body acquires a special tonus and dynamism; it breathes; it starts to live. The body begins to look for music, to grope after movement, literally to feel it by touch. Music is pouring into the body and flows inside, as if from one vessel to another. The process of entering into the music is in fact a complex and a difficult one, but this work brings out the impulses and emotional charges internal to the music.

This kind of motor and emotional response to music can be developed, and the Heptachor made the first steps. First of all, they designed a form of training to enhance the ability to listen and react to the music and to develop the motor and sensitive capacities. The idea that this enhancement should be a single process is the core of the approach.

Let us describe the training a bit further. The so-called exercises are specially selected musical fragments or short pieces, for which the motor form, or pattern, has already been found and given to the students to perform. So, is this merely a form of repetition? I will try to explain why it is not so (although one might do the training in the wrong way, that is, copy the movements without comprehending the real tasks).

Firstly, the movements are never performed separately from the music or in a partial and fragmented way; nobody counts the rhythm or musical time. Moreover, it is impossible to do these exercises without music or if one cannot hear or grasp the music’s content. To give an example, imagine that, pulses in the music push you to run. At the beginning, the movement is slow, constrained, but the fire rises from within. The movement becomes faster, exultation lifts up, comes out, and explodes with one jump, two… The tempo speeds up, rising emotions flow freely and powerfully in a passionate and wide running movement. Another sound, two chords repeatedly played… And they cause you to break at full speed, as if your running movement had hit an obstacle, as if the engine’s wheels had stuck in mud. Your arms and legs come against something and, with the last sound, stop. The teacher, after one demonstration, invites the students to perform the movement, in fact, to find for themselves the motor form. It works only if you can hear the music: then the legs adopt the running pace by themselves, change the speed and the width of steps on time, start a jump, push off from the ground, and land.

Now about the movement itself. It intends neither to be ‘theatrical’ nor to imitate ‘classical’ movement. It could be best described as ‘natural’. But what does this mean? Does it mean to walk, run and jump the way one usually walks, runs and jumps? In everyday life, however, our movements are often unnatural, and, of course, in everyday life we do not have time to explore in depth the opportunities for movement. What, then, is a natural movement? Is it something a person is born with? But if a baby is not given an incentive to get up and walk, if a special activity is not developed, it will not get up and walk. In this sense, a human being is not ‘natural’. Yet at the same time, the upright position is specific to humans in their healthy and ‘natural’ state. A natural movement therefore is a movement that expresses the human essence; without it, a human being cannot develop fully and achieve perfection.

A natural movement is one that one grasps instantly, through an insight, we may say, intuitively. It needs no learning through repetition and training; performing it, one feels liberation, clarity, and joy. Our jumps, swings and strokes, all these ‘push’ and ‘pull’ movements, ‘lifting-ups’ and ‘putting-downs’, ‘lashing’ and ‘pressing’, ‘spreading’ and ‘coming against’ – they are these kinds of movements. Even doing them for the first time, one often has a feeling of familiarity.

A natural movement is not constructed only with the front, oriented to the spectator, in mind. It is always multidimensional and can be looked at from every side. It is symbolic, having many meanings.

A natural movement is a process of construction and not a sequence of ready-made movements or acts. Born out of an impulse, a disturbed balance, it puts the entire body in motion. It happens in accordance with the law of gravitation, which never ceases to act, and through the interaction of all parts of the body. For instance, if the centre of gravity slightly moves forward, the body will bend forward too, as if falling. The legs will remain behind, as they are the last to become involved in the falling movement, and only at the end will they make a step. But the movement of the centre of gravity does not stop, the falling movement continues, and another step is made. This is walking, in which the body works as a unit and not bit by bit. The legs do not initiate the movement; they take it over. In its turn, the step causes the body to continue moving as if falling down. Each movement determines the other, there is no interruption, and it is hard to detect the passage between the stages.

Grounded in the principles of natural movement, such a training fosters the natural development of the body. A healthy body does not consist of big muscles and joints that rotate in any direction. It is a body which is permeated with mind, and which knows what is healthy and what is harmful. This body is your friend and not an enemy.

Our story about the Heptachor and its method of musical movement is of course a contemporary vision; it reflects our own search. It is not a literal account of how the Heptachor itself saw it. At the beginning, their task was not to reflect but to act; practice preceded theory. Later, they tried to describe their method (mainly the exercises) and to design programmes for children. In 1926, they published a joint paper, in which they formulated some principles of musical movement and described its organisation, the types of movements and the ways of performing them. It should be noticed, though, that these descriptions do not much help an uninitiated person to understand what this practice is in fact about, and even someone with some knowledge might have difficulties. What is, for instance, a spring-like character of movement, what kind of quality is it?

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Heptachor worked together with music scholars and psychologists. As a result, there were publications on the comparative analysis of the musical and motor forms of a piece of music (by Rudneva and G. Ilyina), and on the transformation of motor impulses into an aesthetically expressive movement (by Rudneva and A. Pasynkova).

Officially the Heptachor Studio was founded in Petrograd (before 1914, Saint Petersburg; between 1924 and 1991, Leningrad) in 1924. In ten years, it achieved a lot. Above all, this involved serious and, as we can see today, unique work on the method and many new exercises for children and adults. The Heptachor sought a special motor technique, studied a motor ‘reaction’ to music, performed in concerts, and taught. It is hard to mention everything they did. They lived in a commune, and their bright life radiating with energy and joy, full of colourful ceremonies and rituals, attracted people.

In 1934 – the year of Sergey Kirov’s death, which, especially in Leningrad, was followed by a devastating repression – the Heptachor Studio, which was sponsored by the state, was closed down. In the words of Stefanida Dmitrievna Rudneva, it was only thanks to the protection of the academician L. A. Orbeli that nobody from the group was arrested and persecuted. Rudneva moved to Moscow; she preserved the archive and continued working with two of her talented students from the 1920s, Emma Mikhailovna Fisch and Lydia Ivanovna Generalova.

In the new political situation, the work with musical movement was limited to maternity schools and kindergartens. On the one hand, this made sense: the child’s psyche, which is not yet familiar with clichés, and in which words, feelings, and acts are not yet separated, is the most open, promising and rewarding for this kind of work. Observing children’s movement and improvisation suggested new kinds of movement and ways of performing them. But, on the other hand, children cannot concentrate well, and their motivation does not last. The ‘children’s material’, accumulated by the Heptachor members, was published, and today it can be found in nearly every book on eurhythmics, rhythmic therapy, and children’s dances. It is popular among music teachers. Unfortunately, the exercises described in the books are not used for the purposes for which they were designed; at best they are used in games with music.

Generalova was the first to systematise the teaching experience with children. She achieved concentration in the lessons not by disciplinary measures but through the children’s involvement in the music. Children were asked to find where the musical piece begins, changes and ends. She and her followers devised a special style of communicating with the children, and they created many techniques for working with the music, which stimulated the children’s emotional response. The teacher, of course, remained central to the lesson; without her or his, ‘here and now’, complete involvement in the music, the method did not work. This is a very serious demand on the teacher. Another one is the ability to understand the child’s state, to see him or her ‘from inside’.

In the late 1950s, with the political thaw, the situation in the country changed, and musical movement came out from the underground. Emma Fisch organised a studio of musical movement (1957-70), which performed in concerts. The official authorities kept criticising the studio, indignant about their dancing barefoot, their dirty feet, or their ‘petty bourgeois aesthetics’. Constantly attacked, Emma Fisch had to pay a high price for the opportunity to work legally. Her dances and compositions are very expressive, unrepeatable, and highly individual.

In contrast with the stage-oriented Fisch studio, another student of Rudneva, Olga Kondrat’evna Popova, continued the teaching side of the Heptachor work. A highly experienced teacher (of pre-school and primary school children), she became a recognised ‘master of the lesson’. She achieved striking results: looking at her lessons from outside, it was impossible to understand how she succeeded in maintaining an awe-like order and achieved such depth, freedom and relaxation in the interaction between the children and the music. Ol’ga Kondrat’evna went further in the direction taken by the Heptachor, trying to awake an inner response to the music by creating special conditions, literally ‘putting together’ bit by bit the necessary emotional state, tuning the psychophysical apparatus. Working intensely with the training, she revealed its possibilities as a form of psychotechnics for personal development; seen from the outside, her unconventional lessons had little of traditional logic.

Today, the students of Emma Fisch and Ol’ga Popova continue working on musical movement. They have to find the way along which to proceed. The experiment, which was started ninety years ago, continues.

We don’t want to give the reader the impression that everything is easy: just listen to the music and respond with movements! As a matter of fact, the process has to be specially organised and developed step by step; without this, neither improvisation nor free movement can occur. This work requires years for a ‘new’ body gradually to emerge. This work has its stages: from awakening the feelings, through a continuous liberation from any constrains and obstacles to an attentive perception of the music, towards a clearer and freer experience, open to the blessed experience of the music.

Speaking about the method, we consciously called attention to the ‘non-technical’ points, points that are nevertheless essential for the approach and basic to the method and techniques. These points are an informal approach to the music; no movement without the music; music is the content of the movement and not a background. What is the difference between the lessons of musical movement and the traditional teaching of dance? In contrast with traditional choreography, which is primarily a training of movements, the Heptachor worked with the person’s state, with his or her ability to experience music. The result of musical movement lessons is therefore unexpected and not typical for dance as an ‘entertaining art’ or ‘art for the feet’: it is an impact on personality.

by Aïda Ailamasian

From the article originally published in Ballet, no.4 (1997): 20-23. Translated by Irina Sirotkina

Bibliography

• Duncan Isadora, My Confession (in Russian). Riga, 1928.
• Ilyina G. & Rudneva S. On the mechanism of music perception (in Russian) Voprosy Psikhologii, 5 (1971).
• Raevskaia E., Rudneva S., Soboleva G. & Ushakova Z. Musical and Motor Exercises in Primary School (in Russian), 2nd ed. Moscow, 1969.
• Rhythm and Culture of Dance (in Russian). Leningrad, 1926.
• Rudneva S. & Pasynkova A. The experience of work on the development of aesthetic activity with the method of the musical movement (in Russian) Psikhologichskii zhurnal, 3 (1982).
• Rudneva S. & Fisch, E. Eurhythmics: The Musical Movement (in Russian) Moscow, 1972.
• Volkonskii S. Artistic Responses (in Russian). Saint Petersburg, 1912.