First Steps

Movement as pressure. Something jams. Joint compression as a leg first lengthens searching into a ground that gives. Then finds a stopping point. Fixes. Condenses. There is a thickening. A fitting of composite sheathes that meld- invade one another. Act as one. Hardness of the leg, it's bendability gone.
The iron of a rod. Locking, smashing into the hip that allows for this wedging then dips down, falls fractionally. A slippage like tectonic plates but the falling the sliding is modulated, eased into near smoothness as the fractional jumps slot into one another crossing these intervals- of no-man's land. The jump in associative binding. The gulf in which portions of the body dislocate, fly into one another from out of a clear divide. Touchability stressed, stretched, coming apart and sewn back together in the certain speed of it all. That at any other rate- if slowed down- would be a catastrophic dissonance. The dissonance is there. It is not in fact resolved but it is taken up in the speed of the push and pull of this traction that juggles arrangements. This is the shock absorber, this going in. But the shock is still there. Used in the violent propulsion of the turn that without that traction would be a rebuttal; an escape.

This catching and letting go. It's articulated in a slight containment and pouting out of the fascia of the abdomen. A release and aeration between the ribs- a lengthening up the sides of the body. A lessening of resistance through the arms- a tendril lightness in the finger tips. A widening of the chest; of the space between the shoulder blades. Fleshinness in the flanks falling in on itself foreshortening. And the body turns on the pivot of the drill-like holding of the foot burrowing through the mat into the hardness below where directions stop one another, fix and bounce apart.

A step. Crease of the limb. The knee bending as the weight of the body goes down storing energy springlike; waiting.The extension interrupted as bounce or recoil that becomes this turn. This jiggling of levels as they are happening. Planes on any given  measure, along a certain sequence of understood gradations now disappearing, melding into one another, creasing the straight line into a curve, a swivel. The buckling crease-like pile of laundry that suddenly swerves to a point of interest. Propulsion automatic- a twinge or jolt just like that. So effortless. This widening and lightening  and flaying apart in the ribs, the chest, the head and arms. Expanding where the lower body contracts, stabilises, sets in as a continuation with the floor. Diagonally there is a cross streaming between ground and arm, foot and sky that pushes down and pulls up in one pulsation, drawing the knot tight from oppositional directions. These work in tandem.There's a consistency of torsion working out from them even as they seem to be struggling to come apart. Siblings with a common parentage despite the bickering. It's the bickering which is the energiser.

A boy who stands up suddenly, takes a step or two, becomes aware of what he is doing and falls. He is too sure of what is going to happen. There is no uncertainty to ply against. No counter-weight. The shock of it jolts his body into a thrusting forward. Chest is high reaching upwards, doubting the ground. Arms that flounder, hands grasping at anything that comes their way. They grab hold of your hand any hand, that becomes a clasp which is treated as a life saver so that the body is let off the hook, turning into liquid and slipping away. Only the constant yanking of the hand against this overhead anchor reinvigorates the clasp drawing up this toppling usurped counter that never goes so far as to press into the floor. Never reaches that jamming point of a locked position. Continues then to escalate forward so that the body never collects in such a way so as to thrust back. Never even touches back to feel the inflexion of its own resistance. The interest of the shock goes unloaded; an interest carried over past any possibility of its own accumulated weight. So that falling out of its own leverage the body mass is carried into the flight of constant advance. It becomes an angel with no shoes on. There is no stop-over on this flight. No landing point.

How to articulate a landing? a binding? The glue of an ad hoc form is to be made there on the spot by the streamlined additive of weight and counter weight. This forms pockets or holdings. Enclaves which are uni-directional settings, focusing the joint, making it bounce or pop out of this ready-made socket. It is a touch-base that builds through the constraint into an elastic recoil of its own tendency- a tendency to go on and on unmediated that now comes up against something in which it meets its' own match. It's there in the settlement of that lock. The usability of that frustration. It's the shock of a resistance that makes us stand. That out of the sheer inertia that must come sooner or later, makes us punch out of that standing into walking, near falling. Somewhere between flight and collision;somewhere between the two; catching and falling.


So to envisage working up this lock by forging it out of the meeting of body parts:

The boy is on a low swing. His foot is cradled in your hand that wraps around it like a tight sock that gives in places. With his knee now bent and relaxed you align yourself through the coursing that runs through his hips into the thigh so that the gradually unflexing knee becomes the propellant of the push of surface to surface where the pale of his foot extends further into the palm of your hands. The palm is set rigid- a point of resistance- a stand-in for the hardened point sought out through the floor. The knee held with the other hand is set now with ever greater precision as the push increases into a unit of alignment in which the line of the body as it outstretches, acts as one. So that with the continuing pressure it does not flay out to crease at the hip joint and dissipate the force into a collapsing and subsequent bending at the waist but summons up that pressure right through the foot push, into the lower back and abdomen that gather and hold and flourishing up through the chest to create a single coursing and lengthening through the body against a point of immovable resistance.To push he must search out this running thread pushing through this entire ligament that his body has become.

And so it happens. And as it happens and he does push, the swing goes back you following and keeping to this engagement to follow the contactability of foot into hand right up into the highest angle of the backwards tilting swing. His leg lengthening becomes one continuous thread with your hand, like a rod that you balance  between you by putting your bodies in synchronous alignment with one another. So even in the swaying tilting movement of the swing- indeed because of it- your bodies are tracking, probing searching and running into various creases and extensions out into the extremities of the room with the high up window, the tree outside, the music flowing over from the classroom next door.

Then as the momentum of the swing pulls him back down the knee automatically folds. Again on reaching that point of resistance in your hand, it pushes back out lengthening against this immovable stoppage, following that resistance back into the high tilting of the swing that you and the boy keep up there in that impossible placement. By constant modulation you together are lingering on the duration of that hold that keeps that intractable line through your body and his body jamming the swing up there into place until again it is let slip and the resistance folds with your hand following back through the swift bend of a knee and the downward tumult of the swing. Keeping hand to foot, foot to hand the glue bond is now thin like a stretched out transparency about to burst but maintained. But only just. And so the boy is walking.

_____

Later play with rocking. Falling forward and backwards together. A human seesaw, rocking machine. His back pressing into your front, then that being ejected and rolling forward as you both come up from this fall. This upwards, downwards seesaw that now begins to swivel too as it changes speed.

Then on a rolling sausage cushion, his stomach and chest rolling like dough over the cushion, his arms outstretched so that his hands collect into the running motion of the floor that he travels above than reverses over, taking his arms upwards and off the mat. As you help this rolling by shifting him forward at his hips he also times it by the impact of his hands on the mat; how they thump down to slow him, rise out to increase the speed. Now you lift his hips off from the rolling cushion altogether so that it is his chest pressing down and his hips are swivelling as you create gradations of lift and drop, gradually lengthening out and taking hold of his thighs, his legs his feet so that he is now swivelling, snake-like through his body over the cushion, driving and fine tuning it with his hands on the floor but creating the contactability through the body weight in his chest, trunk and hips.That will create a sense of lightness in the upper body that is reliant upon this downward weight of the hips and sacrum that keep an ongoing contact over the rolling cushion that gradually plies him forward and backward like a wave turning over itself.

When again he is on the swing pushing against your hands through one foot and then the other, the bend and thrust is strong coming from a strong centre that he is feeling and modulating against the restrictions that you play out. Constraint is the enclave for the torsion and traction right through bodies, surfaces, objects running through them like fault lines that are unstoppable; that are sketches that have a life of their own. We are combined through these fault lines, our bodies only taking shape, acquiring momentary solidity around these tendencies of direction, resistance and push-back that become irresistible. Out of which the very idea of doing and so of holding oneself erect whilst allowing oneself to partially fold in, arise. A composite is something evolving that cannot be taken apart.

____

Therefore you do not work a pattern of movement by bending and lengthening a leg in order to practice the right motions necessary for walking. For walking is more than this. It is the specific local dealings with questions and difficulties of direction, stoppage, continuity and shock. You create an enclave of resistance, than wait for the impulse to counter that resistance in a lengthening that then patterns itself into a fold and bend in order to search back out that intrigue of lock and resistance.We are dealing then with conundrums that come out of and are dealt back through practical situations. Not holy or moral laws.

Bodies assemble and work into endless potentials of lengthening, foreshortening, and swivelling. They do that through intrigue, expectation, delay, disappointment, reconstitution, invasion, turn around. You do not work  on sequences that lead to preformed shapes and ideal patterns. You work on the shock points and fault lines that make one tendency reverse into another. Only that can build up patterns and feedback out of specific affects that lead to dilemmas that are only ever partially and momentarily resolved. Activation and rest becomes the pulsation that challenge nerve endings, bones, flesh and sinews, to compose on and off one another as stand ins for and in conjunction with objects, surfaces, textures of hardness and softness. It is the conditions for these affects that must be sought out and in novel ways, and bolted together in ad hoc but workable jointings. This is play. Quite different from the serious obligations of patterning advanced in regimes of body techniques and exercises tailored to deliver particular functions. That is more a form of body control and dictatorship and can never be generated out of the changing circumstances of our own modulating interest and attention that is co-dependant on everything that constitutes us and so keeps us reconstituting one another in a wider and more intensive admixture than is ever just you or me.