Cronograma y desarrollo de la UDI Cronograma

30 minutes

O Lying on the floor in constructive rest. Review asymmetry, radial symmetry, and bilateral symmetry. 10 minutes.

O On the shore, feel your new relationship to gravity. Lying on your belly, keep the elbows and knees "locked" and attempt to lift your body from the shoulders and hips.

O Gradually draw the appendages (once your fins) towards the center line of the body, rotating fingers and toes forward, palms down, similar to a salamander or lizard. Explore crawling.

O Find ways to lift the belly off the earth to reduce friction. You may eventually be walking in a four-footed posture like a squirrel.

Imagine yourself to be a small, four-footed mammal, heading to the trees for protection from larger animals.

O Begin to sit, hunkering on branches. The pelvis hangs between the legs in a familiar squat position, the feet wrap around the branch for support, the hands are free to groom yourself or others, to feed, and also to locomote through the tree tops. Begin hanging from a tree branch by your arms, like a monkey. Imagine that the floor has disappeared. The legs are elongated from their flexed position in hunkering and are dangling free. The shoulder joints are stretched and the spine lengthened. Let yourself swing from your arms reaching one after the other to propel you through space,

brachiating like when you were a child swinging from bar to bar on jungle gyms. As you speed up your movements, you will feel a natural progression from homolateral movement (right hand swinging with the right leg, meaning same-sided) to the more powerful contralateral swing (the left leg swings across as the right arm reaches, opposite-sided). Feel how this movement pattern, brachiation, develops the rotation at the waist. Alternate brachiation with hunkering.

O When things become peaceful, climb back down to the earth. We now have many options for movement. We can continue to hunker and squat, we can return to four-footed movement, or we can use the elongation of our hip sockets and the contralateral swing of our arms and legs to stand up and walk. To make the transition, motivate your movement by the desire to travel through space. To rise, feel the alternating, oppositional pulls of head and tail for movement towards vertical. Then begin the walk by reaching with the hand, as we did in brachiation. Because of our hunkering posture our feet are prepared with an arch and a toe opposite heel leverage for long distance walking, or the "striding gait" so unique to humans.

O Walk around the room, feeling the heel of the foot reach as the leg swings to the front, and the toes (especially the big toe) push off vigorously in back. Let the arms swing, and use all the senses to inform your choices for survival. Let your walk develop into a run, and feel the spring of the arch cushioning your gait. Pause.

O Stand quietly still. Close your eyes and feel the constant postural sway, forward over the toes and back to the heels, that keeps us balanced over our base of support, our feet. Open your eyes slowly and see the room around you from your vertical stance.

Rock painting in Kakadu National Park, Australia

29

Photograph: Bill Arnold

"Eiffel Tower"

\

BODYMEASURING:

Terminology

7

We live in a multidimensional structure. Our height, depth, and width help to describe volume in space. It is easy to think of ourselves as flat; mirrors and photographs give us the illusion that we are two-dimensional. Instead, we have sculpted fullness, and the curves and angles give force and agility to our body.

Planes, axes, and the center of gravity provide a common language for body measurement and movement description. Planes identify dimension in the body and divide it front to back, side to side, and top to bottom.

(See illustration, next page) A primary plane divides the body equally by weight. A secondary plane is any plane parallel to the primary plane. The primary transverse plane divides the body equally by weight top to bottom. This plane passes horizontally through the center of the body, like a table top with the bust above and the pelvis and legs below. (A secondary transverse plane might pass horizontally through the knee.) The primary sagittal plane intersects the body equally between the right side and left side by weight. (A secondary sagittal plane might pass through the leg and divide the right side of the leg from the left side of the leg.) The primary coronal (or frontal) plane divides the body equally by weight front to back. (A secondary coronal plane might pass through the nose and toes.)

An axis is a line derived from the intersection of any two body planes.

If we identify the line formed from the intersection of the primary sagittal (dividing right and left) and the primary transverse (dividing top and bottom) planes, we see that this line passes from the front to the back of the body, measuring depth. It is called the anterior-posterior axis, or the a.p. axis. An a.p. axis at the knee would measure the depth of the joint from front to back; at the head, it would measure the depth of the skull.

Sometimes it helps to use sheets of paper to visualize three-dimensionally:

place two sheets of paper beside the body as the sagittal and transverse planes. They will form a 90 degree angle where they would intersect. The line created where the two papers meet represents the a.p. axis and measures depth. Using your papers, identify the line formed from the intersection of the primary transverse (top and bottom) with the primary coronal (front and back). This line measures the width of the body and is called the horizontal axis. Find a secondary axis at your skull. Identify the line formed from the intersection of the primary sagittal and primary coronal planes. This axis measures the height of the body and is called the vertical axis. Find this with the two papers representing the planes. Find a secondary vertical axis in your leg.

Depth

Many college-age students are involved in getting ahead. Literally and figuratively, their bodies strain forward and their front surface, how they appear, is of prime importance. In their senior year, students take the experiential anatomy course. To-gether we work to find their back surface and to explore their depth.

For many years I thought of myself as tall.

At 5 '3," this is not the case, but my closest friends were tall and I imagined myself at

their height. This was useful as a dancer, and often after a concert a surprised audience member would say, "You look so much taller on stage!" During this same time, I was fighting with my body; I was always working at dancing. One day I thought of myself as short. I lifted my leg from my hip with ease, I stretched my arm from my shoulder without strain.

Movements that had always been hard were accomplished with relative ease. By accepting my structure, I was free to move.

When I was taken to the communal baths in Japan, I would see bodies of every age, from childhood to the edge of death, being touched by water. One old woman in par-ticular would stand for a long time with the fountain pouring down her front. Next to her, my friend Mayumi was scrubbing my back. Inside myself, I felt the space between front and back.

31

When I was in Nairobi, Kenya, I visited the health club at the Hilton Hotel. I assumed it would be used by weary travelers and was delighted instead to find the steam room full of local women. They were reading the paper and chatting about their lives in a mixture of Swahili and English.

As I took my place among the sweaty, relaxed bodies 1 realized that I was very narrow. Here, the image of female beauty was one of fullness of body, with breasts and pelvises of weight and volume, and an expansive elegance of presence and humor.

I remembered being afraid in high school that my pelvis would get too wide, or my chest too big, or my thighs too round. I felt my trim, small, white body for the first time as flat.

Planes, axes and center of gravity

The plane not involved in the formation of an axis is called the plane of motion. The body or body part rotates around its axis through the plane of motion. A movement, for example around our vertical axis (measuring height) would be a spin, or a head shake no. A movement around our horizontal axes (measuring width) would be a forward bend from the waist, a flip-flop, or a head shake yes; a movement around our anterior-posterior axes (measuring depth) would be a side bend from the waist, or a cartwheel. A movement which crosses the body planes, such as a spiral or a tennis serve, is considered an integrative movement, as all three planes are utilized. In the human species, our capacity for rotation at the waist, through the horizontal plane, gives us the potential for multidimensional agility. We can reach in any direction in space without changing our base, by spiraling around our center. There are many such spirals inherent in the body structure. Each muscle fiber, the strands of DNA, and the heart are in spiraled configurations; the fascia wraps and interweaves throughout our body. Our capacity for multidimensional, integrative activity is inherent in our structure.

The intersection of all three primary body planes creates a point. This point is the center of gravity around which all movement is organized for balance and mobility. In the human body, as we have noted, the center of gravity is generally between the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae on the front of the spine (behind your belly button). Move your center of gravity slightly; feel the body respond to keep balance. Move the center of gravity further in space. Feel it pull you into locomotion.

Falling, walking, running, hopping, skipping, jumping, leaping are all locomotor patterns common to our two-footed structure.

Basic locomotor patterns move through the sagittal plane (with some rotation at the waist through the transverse plane to accommodate balance). These "sagittal movements" reflect our bilateral symmetry, with paired body parts and forward /backward orientation, like a horse. Cartwheels and side leans are

"coronal movements" because they pass through the coronal plane. They reflect our radial symmetry. Spinning and turning are

"transverse movements" because they occur through the transverse plane around our vertical axis (even when done on the ground as rolling). Spiraling movements pass through all three planes and integrate the dimensions of the body. •