The Human Body in Movement

Mary Wigman jumping, photographed by Charlotte Rudolph, 1920s.

Notes from The Human Body in Movement, written and researched by Jan-Gunnar Sjölin. Published online at http://bodyinmovement.se

The Human Body in Movement is a project concerned primarily with dance and physical theater, to some extent also with everyday corporeal expression, and with athletics where aesthetic aspects of body movements are important. In all ages, performers like dancers and actors have used their bodies as the foremost element of their creations. In contrast to painters and sculptors, they invest themselves in corporeal form in their work. The focus of the project is on aspects of principle concerning human body movements in the aesthetic field, not on the history of the performing arts or on individual artists’ manner of moving.

Chapter: Body Movements as Terrestrial Events
This text explains how I got the original idea for a study of human body movements, built on a few principles central to the American psychologist James J. Gibson. In its first version it comprised some 10 pages, written in short, forceful paragraphs in 1998.
[...]
There are two more observations initially to be made. In contrast to events in outer space, the events on earth are under the sway of gravity and other terrestrial forces. Man’s free will, as it is called, does not reach its goals through liberating us from mechanical forces reigning on earth like gravity, but through cooperating with them and making use of them. The same goes for man’s condition as a biological creature, a condition which we are bound to embrace. Even if it is possible to widen the field of body movements, these rest in the last resort confined by mechanical as well as biological limits.

However, it is not sufficient to define human body movements through their characteristic mechanical and biological status. When entering deeper into the history of different categories of body movements, it becomes evident that their mechanical and biological properties have often been linked to ideological questions raised through the centuries. Thus, what appears as a primitive inheritance from time immemorial is at the same time transmitting contemporary ideological messages, pertaining to political, scientific or aesthetic ideals. In this way, a dialogue is opened up with various researchers and choreographers from the last century, among them Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Laban and Erving Goffman.

Page: Translations and Rotations of the Body
[...] body movement cannot be studied in geometrical terms alone. It is a question of interaction between human bodies, between these and animals, between human bodies and inanimate things, and finally between human bodies and the whole surrounding environment. This is what Gibson calls ecological mechanics and defines as different from both celestial mechanics and particle mechanics, including thermodynamics (Gibson 1986:95-96).

Secondly, the definition is an abstraction in the sense that it does not take into consideration that body movements appear to us in two radically different ways. It does not distinguish between other people’s body movements and the movements of one’s own body. So, it is not possible within the scope of this definition to say what specifies the body mo­vements of others as contrasted with body movements perceived by proprioception. But all human body movements belong either to the first or to the second category, and they are specified in totally different ways to us.

Page: Movements of Joints and Body Segments
[...] biological and anatomical aspects bring us nearer to the specific character of body movement. There are preliminary aspects, however, in need of attention. Firstly, not all movements of the body are based on the movement of joints and the motion of body segments. Secondly, like the first, abstract-geometrical model, this one does not take into account the ecological aspect of human movement, the interaction between living bodies and the environment.
[...]
Within the frame established by the biomechanical view of body movement it is meaningful to consider a group of distinctions, proposed by Gibson. Whereas celestial events are perpetual, in any case from a human point of view, terrestrial events have a beginning and an end (Gibson 1986:10ff.). This means that there is a situation before and after, as well as different phases of the event, in this case the corporeal movement, to consider. Or rather, in the last analysis, there is not only a movement of the body but also a state of affairs, the body`s posture as a whole, or in the words of Gibson, “a general formula of nonchange underlying change” (Gibson 1986:101).

Another distinction, based on this wider perspective, is that between repeated and non-repeated movements. As regards pure repetition, exemplified by the rotations of the hands of the clock, there is none in body movements, since an organism is never quite the same as it was before, as noted by Gibson (Gibson 1986:101). In principle, every movement of the body is unique; it might be like another one and yet it is always unlike it. In practice, however, we need to be able to talk about such quasi-repetitions, which are very important in the case of body movements. When the word “repetition” is used in connection with these, it should be understood in the light of this reservation.

Page: Collisions and Other Mechanical Contacts
Another way to observe and understand body movements than that of biomechanics is offered by Rudolf Laban’s Effort Theory, elaborated during the second quarter of the 20th century. In its center is the individual, acting with clear attention, intention and decision. What does seldom enter into the equation of Laban, however, is the response, resistance or passivity of others, who are the objects of the individual’s ambition or effort. In a way, this is what can be expected from a man who was always a leader. Few people are known to have impressed him and influenced him. This might explain why the main object of his research is the independently acting human being.

In order to characterize the whole movement repertory of human beings, Laban identified four decisive factors. These he found in space, time, weight, and flow. To be clearly defined in relation to space, a movement must have a definite direction, that is to say it must follow a straight line. Then it is said to be direct. If, however, it is displaying several directions, it is said to be flexible (or in some sources indirect). In relation to the factor of time, a movement is said to be sudden when it occurs and is performed rapidly. The alternative is that it is slow in the start and goes on and on. Then it is called sustained. As to the third motion factor, weight, a movement is said to be strong (also called firm), when it resists or fights against weight. But if it is weak and yields to weight, then it is said to be light (also called gentle). In several texts, a fourth factor is added, which is no less important, namely flow. In relation to this, a movement is called bound when it can be stopped and held without difficulty. If a movement needs effort to stop suddenly, the flow is called free or fluent (Laban 1963:56-58)

So far, there is no need for Laban to assume anything beyond biomechanics. But he also closely relates the motion factors to “the stages of inner preparation of an outer bodily action”, namely attention, intention, and decision. For him, attention means to relate oneself to space and have physical mastery of it. Intention means to master one’s relation to the weight factor. Finally, decision means to be adjusted to the time factor (Laban, quoted in Newlove & Dalby 2004:251). The importance of Laban’s system is not least his insistence on the mental aspects of human body movements, providing a necessary complement to the biomechanical aspects. More than his singling out of specific categories, this transgression of the limits between physical and mental activity is the basis of his importance.

Page: Movements Impeded - Movements Regained
Approaching the phenomenon of immobile bodies, one might believe this to be an uncomplicated affair, in contrast to bodies in motion. However, we need only ask in what different ways a body can become motionless in order to begin to under­stand the complexity of the phenomenon.

The easiest case to approach is that of self-chosen motionlessness. A human being may lie down on a comfortable support and relax. Such a reclining person has no difficulty to stay more or less immobile and may even fall asleep. In both states, being awake or asleep, immobility is natural, but it is not absolute, and certainly not for someone asleep.

It is noted by Rudolf Arnheim that “a dancer stopping for a moment during a run looks arrested rather than at rest” (Arnheim 1974:382). When there is movement before and after, as in this case, every­thing happening seems to exist in the dimension of movement. In this case, motionlessness is perceived as active resistance to motion.

The question of the immobile body, especially the reclining one, comes to the fore when standing or sitting persons are contrasted with others lying on beds or on the floor. A ranking of movement potential is created. Of course, one can argue that a still photograph always illustrates movement arrested – the body photographed may be immobile or not. Still, the posture assumed by a person relates in itself more or less to movement. A standing person, to a higher degree than someone sitting, is immediately free to move around, whereas a reclining person has much less of immediate movement potential.

Page: The Stillness Filled with Movement
Another case of stillness that brings movements to the fore is that of still images: photographs, paintings and also sculptures. Here, I want to summarize the pertinent description of how we experience a real movement in contrast to movement in a still image, given by the American philosopher Arthur Danto in 1979: in real life, we see a body moving; in a still image we see that a body moves (Danto 2006:108-112). This may be thought of as another case where stillness prompts movements and impulses to move, albeit only in the spectator’s perception, at least to start with. This leads to the question of what there may be in a still image to trigger this. Suffice it to mention a number of possible grounds.

In photographs, movement may be alluded to through

a) blurred contours, due to slight movement of the body during exposure (fig. 17) – to be distinguished from unsharpness due to focusing;

Fig. 17 Minor White, Movement Study no. 56, San Francisco 1949.

b) body parts, elongated in the direction of movement, due to specific movements of the body during exposure (fig. 18) – to be distinguished from the elongation in the same direction of everything in a photograph, due to a camera moving at the time of exposure, even if this too alludes to movement;

Fig. 18 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Self Portrait. Changing Position, 1911.

c) dynamic composition, stressing e.g. oblique lines (fig. 19) – this is a conventionalized way to underline or simulate movements and not an index for its real existence;

Fig. 19 Siegfried Dietrich, Movement Study, 1932.

d) representations of moments which are not self-sustaining, and which refer to what happened immediately before and after the moment registered (fig. 20) – for instance an unstable posture which cannot be assumed for more than a fraction of a second;

Fig. 20 Charlotte Rudolph, Gret Palucca, 1924.

e) a sequence of two or more separate photographs, or exposures in the same image, representing a series of consecutive moments of a movement (fig. 21) – as in Muybridge’s famous photographic studies of animal and human locomotion from the latter half of the 19th century;

Fig. 21 Thomas Eakins, Jesse Godley, 1884, chronophotograph.

f) multiple contours, representing consecutive stages in a body’s traversal of space (fig. 22), produced through jerky movements or by means of multiple exposures;

Fig. 22 Svante Lundgren, Studying in the Holidays, c. 1950.

g) bright lines on a darkish background, representing for instance the bulb of a moving flashlight, or the traces left by it on the surroundings (fig. 23).

Fig. 23 Herbert Matter, Photograph (Man changing his clothes in a dark room, a number of electric bulbs fastened to his body).

Still photographs of dance are often said to represent “postures”. In such cases, it is not really a question of freezing a movement but rather of a “passage through” in the words of Erin Manning, also sourced from Moshe Feldenkrais. It is not quite a displacement, nor an immobile pose (Manning 2009:44).

From a historical point of view, it should be observed that most old photographs of dancers and actors are representing immobile poses, a kind of idealized view of a posture. Even long after technical progress from about 1880 made possible instantaneous photography of dancers in movement, they continued to pose motionless for stills in a photographer’s studio up to around World War I. Such photographs certainly did not transmit the quality of a “passage through”, but they could yet suggest some kind of movement, like other stills.

A pioneer of dance photography, Charlotte Rudolph, continued to work with dancers in a studio in Dresden. In 1929 and again in 1930 she undertook to write specialized studies of the qualities of photography as a medium in relation to human body movements. Even today, these short texts are outstanding in their attention to essential aspects of the matter, as regards both photography and dance. She is working in an era when the dancer is no longer required to assume a posture and keep it until the exposure is done. Even so, photographers retained the habit to concentrate on the “principal” moments of the dance, for instance when the dancer performs a passage of greatest tension, or greatest relaxation or even of suspension in the air, which are the qualities singled out by Rudolph to distinguish such moments. To make photographs of them is relatively easy, but she makes exception for movements such as leaps and turns. But to Rudolph, stills like these did not yet qualify as “dance photography”, for this would require photographs to be taken during the very motion of dance (Rudolph 1929:82).

Such instantaneous photography even permits to catch the very change from one moment to another, what is called by Rudolph “moments of transition”. An obvious example is the transition from one movement into another. Rudolph also mentions taking out a moment from a leading movement or from a short rhythmic figure. Such photographs are more demanding to take, because it is not enough that the photographer closely follows every move of the dancer, it is also necessary to anticipate the dancer’s movements in order to release the shutter in time for the next move (Rudolph 1929:82).

According to Rudolph, many dancers with a propensity for monumentality focus their efforts on the principal moments of dance. The result is a firm, unambiguous movement, even if different dancers do it more or less imaginatively, simply, or gymnastically. As we shall see, this tendency also belongs to the core of classical ballet. But there are other dancers with a greater inclination for the “lyrical” qualities of dance, as Rudolph calls them, and these dancers tend to make more out of transitional moments. Here, the individual character of the dancer comes to the fore and is permitted to color the transition (Rudolph 1929:83).

There are innumerable examples of still photos, illustrating how a dancer communicates a definite meaning through a principal moment of dance. It is more difficult to find obvious examples of stills, illustrating the qualities of transition in dance, even in Rudolph’s own work. This may be related to the fact that her career culminated during the German “Ausdruckstanz”, which did not go for subtle expressions.
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In the history of stage performance there is a trend based on the motionlessness of performers: the tableaux vivants. In these, artists appear live on stage, but the audience can only get impressions of movement by implication, as the performers are motionless as well as mute. There were antecedents to this during the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, but the flowering of this kind of display belongs to the 19th and early 20th centuries. Theaters staged tableaux vivants with professional artists, photographers produced illusory images of such spectacles (fig. 25), and it was an appreciated pastime at social gatherings, where family members and friends performed (Gram Holmström 1967).

Fig. 25 Anonymous, Tableau vivant after Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, albumen paper, c. 1863.

The term “vivant” does not seem appropriate to the lack of movement in this kind of performance. It should be understood with the most popular prototypes for this kind of diversion in mind, namely well-known paintings and sculptures (in the latter case “living sculptures” was a common term). The staging of their subject matter by real people (fig. 26) was in contrast to the canvas and paint or cold marble of these works of art, which in comparison were found to be lacking in liveness. Commentators at the time, however, did not seem to miss the more subtle qualities, which connoisseurs found in paintings and sculptures.

Fig. 26 Olga Desmond in nude tableau, Berlin 1910.

There was a frequent use of paintings and sculptures showing naked bodies as prototypes for tableaux vivants. Nakedness was usually not allowed on stage, but an exception was made in certain cities, for instance in New York, for suchlike in the tableaux vivants (McCullough 1983). There are, however, important differences between a naked body in a static pose and moving on stage. The view of a naked body in a painting, a sculpture or a tableau vivant provides information about both the surface and the threedimensional form of the body. The view of a naked body in movement, however, may reveal both the differing resistance of the body’s superficial layers to changes in posture and the existence of bones and organs deeper inside it. This is probably why a moving body in the nude appeals more strongly to the tactile sense than static nudes. The indecency of the former is much to do with the heightened liveness of a naked body when it is in movement. Examples in the contemporary press show that the short moments when a static group of figures in a tableau vivant was transformed into another tableau brought special notice (McCullough 1983). It is possibly no coincidence that the heydays of the tableaux vivants coincided with the invention of early cinematic techniques: behind both is the same urge for liveness.
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Duncan’s tale of all the impulses she felt in her body was meant to draw attention to the origin of dance in the body and in what she calls “nature”. As she expressed it: “And this dance will have nothing in it either of the servile coquetry of the ballet or the sensual convulsion of the South African negro” (Duncan 1927:265). But she thought that one could find her ideal realized in Greek Antiquity. It is interesting that a near contemporary of hers, Rudolf Laban, regarded her “valuable dances” as “for the most part the expression of our time”, and added that they had only external resemblance to the movement forms of Ancient Greece (Laban 1963:5).

Duncan’s ambition to find the origin of the new dance in nature seems to be a weak point in her argument. Not only are bodies differently shaped, but man’s concept of nature shifts from one culture to another, from one period of time to the next. The words “nature” and “natural” have been used and misused both to defend and to attack different kinds of movement in dance. If Duncan’s dance has its origin in “nature” and in the body, this goes as well for those ethnic forms of dance which she so despised.

In one respect, the dance of Isadora Duncan was certainly at odds with classical ballet. The central events of the latter are postures, ornamented or varied with motions like lifts and pirouettes. They are what Charlotte Rudolph named “principal moments”. The dancers remain more or less on the same spot while performing them. Between these highlights, they move with varying techniques from one spot to another, where they may form new constellations with other dancers. Still, the emphasis is mainly on the postures. These are worked out to be impressive; it is because of them that theaters are crowded.

Several factors contribute to the fact that such summits are easy to describe, to recall in memory, and to represent, for instance in photographs or in drawings. One is that they are isolated in space from what happens in other areas of the stage, and in time from what happens before and after. Another factor is that they may be analysed as combinations and developments of only five basic positions. These moments are highlighted in the photographs, but not the stretches of transport between them.

What then about the dance of Isadora Duncan, seen in the same perspective? It certainly contains static moments, but what is important are its movements from one position to another. It has been said that the model for her dancing was walking. This characterization has two aspects. One of these refers to the spatial translation as such; the other to a specific way of moving. At this point, I have grounds to endorse only the former one. It appears in this respect to be the opposite of classical ballet. In the extension of Duncan’s actual manner of dancing, one has the premonition of a continually evolving dance, without static moments.

The subject of the project is the human body in movement. But when we try to mediate a visual-temporal impression of it, in practice we most often resort to still images, displaying the moving body as immobile, or, in the best case, suggesting the quality of movement by any of the means used in photography. Even when a body movement is caught on a film or a video, this is physically speaking a series of twodimensional still images, which are interpreted in perception as representing one continuous movement of a threedimensional body in physical space. How do we know that no essential qualities are lost in these optical and perceptual transformations? First when we have approached the phenomenon from several aspects, using different strategies, we might get a more secure hold on it.

Image References
Fig. 17 Minor White, Movement Study no. 56, San Francisco 1949. From Jan-Gunnar Sjölin, Studier till bildens och konstens historia, Edition Arcana 2007, p. 226.

Fig. 18 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Self Portrait. Changing Position, 1911. From Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light, McGraw Hill 2000, p. 218.

Fig. 19 Siegfried Dietrich, Movement Study, 1932. From Sprung in die Zeit, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin1992, p. 83.

Fig. 20 Charlotte Rudolph, Gret Palucca, 1924. From Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film, 1925.

Fig. 21 Thomas Eakins, Jesse Godley, 1884, chronophotograph. From Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light, McGraw Hill 2000, p. 167.

Fig. 22 Svante Lundgren, Studying in the Holidays, c. 1950. From Ulf Hård af Segerstad, Bildkomposition, 2. edition, 1953, p. 103.

Fig. 23 Herbert Matter, Photograph (Man changing his clothes in a dark room, a number of electric bulbs fastened to his body). From Ulf Hård af Segerstad, Bildkomposition, 2nd edition, 1953, p. 32.

Fig. 25 Anonymous, Tableau vivant after Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, albumen paper, c. 1863. Collection of Michael and Jane Wilson. From Jan-Gunnar Sjölin, Studier till bildens och konstens historia, Edition Arcana 2007, p. 226.

Fig. 26 Olga Desmond in nude tableau, Berlin 1910. Photographer unknown. From M. Andritsky and Th. Rauthenberg, ”Wir sind nackt und nennen uns Du”. Giessen 1989.