Inside/Out: A Return to my Body

Inside/Out: A Return To My Body Sue Heinemann Another term we used a lot was "kinaesthetic awareness." The kinaesthetic sense has to do with sensing movement in your own body, sensing your body's changing dynamic configurations. But it's more than that. - Simone Forti, Handbook in Motion

I remember my first class with Elaine Summers, a New York dancer whose teaching focuses on kinesthetic awareness. As I lay quiet on the ground, eyes closed, Elaine led me on a journey through my body. Can you feel your toenails? Your metatarsals? Knees, thighs, on up through eyebrows and hair. Amazing how much of my body I couldn't feel —no sensation. As if parts of me had just disappeared. No calves, no armpits, no eyelashes. And wonder how many of us really sense our bodies as integrated with our selves. Do we only acknowledge the body when "it" hurts, when something's "wrong"? In how many ways have we learned to disown our bodies?

I think of how we tend to enthrone our minds, all-knowing. The body as a tool, only necessary to get work done. Or the body as an object, to be looked at, admired, displayed. The body remains an accessory, not integral to our definition of being. Just to speak of body sensations, of how emotions are felt located specifically in the body arouses skepticism. And I wonder if it is even possible to convey what "listening" to your body means to someone who has not experienced it. The difference between knowing something intellectually and understanding it through your feeling in your body.

Just as someone who has never seen the color yellow has no way of conceiving what that color is like, people bound into specific body controls cannot experience the vivacity of bodily freedom until they break those controls. 1

Summer 1975. I went to California to participate in Anna Halprin's dance workshop. Anna explains:

In our approach to theatre and dance, art grows directly out of our lives. Whatever emotional, physical, or mental barriers ... we carry around within us in our personal lives will be the same barriers that inhibit our full creative expression..... I work with the notion that emotional blocks are tied into our physical body and mental images..... When a person has reached an impasse we know something in their life and in their art is not working. What is not working is their old dance. The old dance is made up of imprints imbedded in the muscles anc nerves that is reflected in behavior patterns manifested in the way that person participates, interrelates and performs their life and their art.2

Each morning we performed "movement ritual," a series of exercises through which we listened to our bodies, "hearing" how we felt. According to Anna, "Daily movement ritual is a way of becoming aware of self, of your body and all the spaces and areas of your body, what you feel like and where your mind is."3 One morning at the end of movement ritual, Anna told us just to let our bodies move themselves, without imposing any preset pat terns, without interfering with notions of what might look "graceful." I lay there, not thinking about how to move. I felt my legs gently pull apart, opening up my genitals, and my pelvis tilted under, slowly lifting my torso upward and back down. The experience was both real and unreal, as if my body were literally talking to me, telling me how I felt. I watched, observing how my body wanted to unfold, to open out, my pelvis widening, my chest expanding. I got scared. And I retreated, my body closing in, curling up tighter and tighter. My "dance" spoke to me about my female sexuality in a way my head had never allowed.

My body as a woman. A biological given. Each month I go through the menstrual cycle. I sense the changes inside my body, the shifts in mood. My lower back tenses in anticipation, as if to inhibit the flow, to deny my natural female functioning. Is that a learned behavior? Clara Thompson, a well-known analyst wrote: "Because menstruation is obvious and uncontestable evidence of femaleness, many neurotic attitudes become attached to it; many painful menstrual periods are not due to organic difficulties at all but to protests against being female."4 The secrecy of menstruation, not to be mentioned, not accepted. If I let my lower spine and pelvis move slowly, unrestricted, as they want to move, I can allow the flow to happen. Without the cramps of protest.

Menstruation — a sense of inner rhythm, an obvious connection between my body and my being. And I wonder if the visibility of this connection, month after month, makes it easier for women to get in touch with their feelings through their bodies. Margaret Mead notes: "It may be that the fact that women's bodies are prepared for a so much lengthier participation in the creation of a human being may make females — even those who bear no children — more prone to take their own bodies as the theater of action."5

I think about Erik Erikson's article "Womanhood and Inner Space, and the controversy it raised.6 Believing that play represents the child's experience of her/his own body, Erikson found that the differing spatial configurations of play scenes constructed by children reflected the girls' preoccupation with inner space (womb) and the boys' with outer space (penis). In a recent replication of Erikson's study, Phebe Cramer concludes, "In other words, the exciting events of a boy's life are exterior — and here I would say exterior to his own body ... Girls, on the other hand, focus on the interior. Excitement occurs within...."7 I read this as a positive assertion. My body is constructed differently from a man's. The sense of inner space —not a void, empty, waiting to be filled, but a possibility, in touch with growth, alive, whole.

My body as a woman. Have I learned to hold my body in a particular way because I am a woman? How does my stance conform to and reinforce how I am supposed to feel as a woman? In Elaine Summer's class I was working with my shoulders. The exercise: to stretch my arm out from the shoulder joint as far as it wanted to go, then release it slowly back to center. Repeating this, turning my arm, rotating my shoulder first in, then out. Afterward my shoulders relaxed, heavy, weighted on the floor. Yet when I stood up, I felt vulnerable, my chest, my breasts exposed. Confusing instructions ran round my head —to be a woman is weak, you must not be weak, you must not show you are a woman. And I observed my shoulders rise in tension to protect me.

A friend told me that once, while working with her shoulders, she reexperienced her teenage embarrassment at being flat-chested. She remembered intentionally caving in her chest so no one would notice her "deficiency." Expectations of how to be a woman. Elaine mentioned watching a little girl running around, doing cartwheels, moving freely, naturally. The girl's mother called her over to walk beside mother and grandmother. The little girl's body stiffened, her "activity" constricted, as she readily assumed the pose of "woman" in imitation of her mother and grandmother. Three generations — a legacy of how to behave as woman. The little girl sits demure, hands on her lap, ankles crossed — do not fidget. All those messages. And how do they make me feel as a woman?

My body as a woman. I return to Anna Halprin's workshop. After three weeks of working together, the women and men separated to find out how we experienced ourselves as groups, women interacting with women, men with men. The women began with a rap session. Tentative, sensing each other, a preliminary.

Anna then led us through a "movement preparation," to take us inside ourselves. While doing the exercise, we were to visualize our "life histories as women, to become aware of our woman hood. We worked in pairs, focusing inward by concentrating on our breathing. I sat on my partner Sara's chest, pressing against her shoulders as she exhaled, letting go as she inhaled. Then, in another exercise, I gently pushed down on Sara's stomach as she breathed out. When she inhaled, I raised her up, my hands grip ping behind her, opening out her chest ... pulling her toward me as I lay back on the ground ready to exhale. Repeat, reversing roles in seesaw alternation. Release, letting go — expansion, taking in. A natural rhythmic cycle at the center of my being. And yet how hard it is not to try to control this vital process, not to interfere. Letting go, giving up freely, "passive"; taking in, open ing up fully, "active" —the simple process of breathing acquires connotations. Do I resist exhaling, stopping short, afraid of being "passive"?

Often, doing the movement work, one associates in images. Each of us drew the images evoked by the exercises, and we showed our drawings to each other, relating how these images reflected our experiences of ourselves, our experiences as women. Dana had depicted a child-woman standing small before an enormous closed door, surrounded by empty space. No mother to greet her. Alone. On her own. Alice had drawn a little girl seated in a yoga position with her arms held tightly against her body. She explained that at 31 she felt "too young" to have children, that she herself was just a child. Alice looked at her breasts in disbelief; she couldn't be grown up. My own drawing showed an interior space —delicately pasteled, tenuous lines flowing into and around each other. Scribbled flames of orange-red anger surrounded the inner sanctum, threatening to penetrate, to over whelm it. And all of this was rigidly encased in thick black lines ...contained.

Some of the women danced out their visualizations. The process of drawing our responses to the original activity and then using these drawings as a score for another dance encouraged a dialogue with our experiences. Melinda had sketched an incident from her childhood: while trying to prove her strength by climb ing a tree, she had fallen in front of her father and sister (her sister turned away from her in disgust). She asked us to call out conflicting instructions —for her to be a "lady" or a "tomboy." At one point someone yelled, "You won't have any boyfriends. Melinda lashed out at this voice and burst into tears. She closed her dance by convincingly repeating Anna's words, "I can cry and still be strong."

Marlo's dance was last. Her drawing was covered with words: "you can't get out," "push me." Like Alice, she explained she felt "too young." In response, we formed a birth canal, offering resistance as Marlo tried to crawl between our legs. Several times she stopped, frustrated, and we taunted her gently, urging her on. Finally Marlo reached Anna, who was waiting quietly at the other end. But Meg, the last woman in the canal, still held onto Marlo's legs. When the two separated, Meg curled into a fetal position. The group gave birth to twins. Humming softly, we became a chorus cradling the two women. Marlo rocked, nestled quiet in Anna's arms. Meg, in contrast, needed to laugh so that she could cry. And those of us surrounding the two women were no longer simply performers enacting a score. We were participants involved in a drama —not fiction but real. Each of us was Meg and Marlo, woman finding her self, woman reborn. Woman secure in the presence of other women.

The following day our movement preparation focused on how certain feelings correlate with specific body positions, how emotional responses are locked into particular body attitudes. We sank slowly, vertebra by vertebra, from a standing position, curling tightly into a ball, then opening out, spread on the ground. As we continued to shift from open to closed positions, we were told to imagine a man in our lives looking at our bodies and to note how we felt about his gaze. I saw first my father, then my friend Bob watching me. Again the feeling of exposure as my chest and pelvis expanded wide. As if by opening, I were to give up my self. My arms reached to hug my knees to my chest. No, I would not show them my body, my femaleness.

Finally we spiraled on the ground, one leg rotating across the body, reaching forward, the corresponding arm rotating out, reaching back. We explored this movement, making it more and more sensuous, twisting slowly, luxuriously, until we were dancing our love for our female bodies, accepting our sexuality. Turning the torso, tentative at first, reaching down to caress an ankle, a calf. Flowing from one movement to the next, exploring the fullness of the chest, the length of the neck, opening up to new possibilities of movement, new ways of being. Each woman performed for the others, sharing her own discovery of the beauty of her body, of her self. A celebration.

In contrast, we spent the afternoon dealing with aggressive energies, with what Anna called "self-hate." We worked again in pairs. Alice lay down, hands beneath her head, elbows on the ground. As she tried to lift her elbows up to bring them together, I offered resistance by pressing down on them — not so much that she couldn't perform the movement, just enough to make it a struggle. While striving to raise her elbows, each woman was to let out a sound as a way of releasing energy and vocalizing her emotional response. A welter of groans, screeching into shrieks, often climaxing in tears.

Again we drew our experiences and danced them out. My image was a mountain, closed off in dense blackness, impenetrable, with a tiny figure struggling desperately all alone to the top. A pretense of strength. The barrier from my earlier drawing ...I am afraid to cry, afraid to show "weakness." I keep telling myself I can make it, I can make it, I don't need anyone. So I grit my teeth, holding my feelings in, and lift my elbows... To perform this score, I asked several women to hold me down so that I couldn't get up. How real this "game" became. Despite the resistance, I was stubbornly determined to stand up. I couldn't (wouldn't) let any sound out, let anyone know how I was feeling. The others' taunts hurt me —"how constipated she is," "you don't want to take up our time," etc., etc. — but the hurt remained bottled up inside. Sure, I might have simply told the others to stop at any time, but (psychologically) I couldn't. And I reflect on Anna's insistence that dance is a direct expression of one's life. That the same emotional blocks that restrict our everyday functioning also limit our movement.

I have people clearly looking at their old dance, confronting it and accepting what it is and by dancing it, experiencing that it is not working. Once this has happened, all that vital energy locked up in the old dance is rechanneled as energy and motivation to be used in creating a new one.8

After two days of separation, the women and men came back together. Each group presented its experience to the other. The women chose to perform in a redwood grove. First we sketched out a collective score, each of us offering suggestions as the plan took shape. The atmosphere of our setting was compelling ... the silence, the needle floor muffling every footstep. We decided to make that silence the core of our dance — no words, no sound. Other elements impressed us. We noted the trees towering upright, the light softly filtering through, the sacredness, the timelessness of the place. We wanted to merge with this environment without invading it, to recognize and respect its power as part of ourselves. And we wanted to convey what the two days of being together had meant to us, how our experience as a group had strengthened us as individuals.

We began our performance separated, each woman dancing her self in relation to the surroundings. I snuggled myself inside a tree stump, needing enclosure within the vastness around me. I couldn't see the others. Yet I felt their presence, I felt joined in experience to them. And I became more confident; I rose to meet the trees, standing straight and tall. My hands reached out to clasp Alice's. We walked toward each other, slowly, silently, deliberately. Other women too began to approach each other, linking hand to hand. Soon we formed a chain, and we wended our way, step by step, downhill. At one moment we paused. Sylvia stood alone, below us, sunlit on the dust-covered road. She just stood there ... silent, still, the only movement the rising and falling of her chest as she breathed in and out. That was her dance. And her dance spoke to all of our experiences. A sense of inner strength, not assertive, just present. An inner rhythm, in tune with, part of the world around. An openness both expand ing, filling the space, and taking in, absorbing the space. One.

The men's dance was totally different. I find myself resorting to clichés. The men performed in a cove at the bottom of a sharp cliff, where the sea battled the rocks. The women watched from above. Each man stood isolated on his own rock. Each was costumed according to his self-image. Arthur posed erect, legs firmly astride, a warrior, face painted, high above on the tallest rock. Lower down, on another rock, Jamie writhed, moaning and shrieking, shaking his seaweed hair. Each man did a specific movement which the others then imitated. A male "chorus." Each note sounded, then echoed back in differing tones as each man adapted the movement to his own body. The shouts, the power flung amidst the waves pounding rocks. The aggressiveness, the "maleness" struck me.

One by one, the men disappeared around a corner. Arthur jerked his rattle in a frenzied dance, Jamie plunged into the icy water to swim away. We could only hear the triumphant cries of the tribe gathering. Then they reappeared, to enact a healing ritual. How different from the women's ceremony with Meg and Marlo. The men danced around each other, they seemed to avoid touching each other. Their gestures were bound; less gentle, less direct than ours had been; their mutual support less overt. And then they invited us down to the rocks to be healed. To be healed by the men? Was this really a meeting, equal to equal?

I still wonder that so many women went down. The atmosphere created by the men's dance was alien, alien to me as a woman. To go down was to enter a territory already staked out on their terms. Again the stereotypes. And yet ... What I had felt among the women was our shared strength, each of us rein forcing the other — not so much through isolated echoes, as in the men's dance, more in harmony. We were less insistent on an individualistic integrity. The men seemed afraid of each other, afraid to let their bodies mingle, afraid to touch. An aggregate of dominant notes rather than a true chorus. (Some people have thought that the difference I sensed was because I was an observer of the men and a participant with the women. I don't think so. In later discussions, the men admitted how difficult it had been for them to come together as a group, how hard it had been to relate physically, to get close to each other.)

Differences in communication patterns. In Marge Piercy's novel Small Changes, Wanda is showing the members of her theatre group the different ways men and women occupy space. She chooses for illustration how people sit in public places. "Men expanded into available space. They sprawled, or they sat with spread legs.... Women condensed.... Women sat protectively using elbows not to dominate space, not to mark territory, but to protect their soft tissues."9 And I wonder again about the ways women have been taught to hold their bodies.

It's almost two years since I became aware of my body. And l'm still learning. Finding my center. Me. A woman.

Research into sex-role differences in movement patterns is still limited. Nancy Henley's new book, Body Politics: Sex, Power and Nonverbal Communication10, provides a much-needed compilation and review of the research on male-female differences, and what this means in terms of status. Just the title implies the importance of body language in regard to social "position." In another study, Martha Davis, a clinical psychologist, points out that a number of aspects of non-verbal communication have both sex-role and status significance—"frequently confirming the expectation of lower status associated with female, higher status with male."11 Davis concludes her paper with a description of the pictures of man and woman sent into outer space on the Pioneer 10 spaceship: "The man stands upright, wide, ready to go into action. The woman stands with her weight shifted to one side, one knee slightly bent and inward, her attitude more passive, a role difference apparently considered important enough to propel beyond our solar system."

My thanks to Jacqueline Morrison who took all the photos at Anna's workshop.