Objetivos del desarrollo a escala humana

Mabel Todd wrote The thinking body in 1937. It was republished in

1968, and is an important early text in modern dance. Todd emphasises the evolutionary development of the body, and the importance of thoughts and feeling in human behaviour. At the beginning of her book she writes:

Behaviour is rarely rational; it is habitually emotional. We may speak wise words as the result of reasoning, but the entire being reacts to feeling. For every thought supported by feeling, there is a muscle change. Primary muscle patterns being the biological heritage of man, man’s whole body records his emotional thinking (1968 (1937), 1).

And a little later,

The correlation of visceral, psychic and peripheral stimuli, underlying muscular response, involves the whole of a man. It is the very perception of nerves, viscera and organic life. The whole body,

enlivened as it is by muscular memory, becomes a sensitive instrument responding with a wisdom far outrunning that of man’s reasoning or conscious control. The neuromusculatures of skeleton and viscera interact, always conditioned by what has been received, as well as by what is being received; and this because of emotional and mental evaluations (1968 (1937), 3).

The notion of bodily ‘wisdom’ or ‘intelligence’ recurs in this thesis (for example pp.149, 213). Todd delves into the biological heritage of humankind, elucidating the principle that ‘form follows function’:

The principle that function makes form determines the myriad shapes of life, from the earliest single-celled organism to the latest and most complicated plant or animal. The meaning of any structure is to be

found by inquiring what the forces are to which the creature possessing it is reacting so that it can maintain its own existence. Force must be met by force, and the structure evolves as the forces are balancing (1968 (1937), 8).

Todd looks at how the forces acting on life forms on land are different from those in the water. She notes how the need to breathe air instead of water resulted in the development of lungs, and how the need to move about on the land resulted in various adaptations including the development of limbs:

The apparatus for locomotion and breathing, which appeared

simultaneously in the racial pattern as vertebrates came onto the land, continue to be closely associated in the growth of individual organisms and in their functions. They are intimately related through mechanical and nervous tie-ups between appendicular and respiratory structures, also between both these and the cardiovascular system by which blood is conveyed from heart to lungs for aerating and back to the heart with its load of oxygen. And in man, the particular parts of the skeleton and musculature which operate to maintain the spinal curves and to keep the trunk erect are most closely associated with the bony and muscular parts involved in breathing (1968 (1937), 10).

In other words breath and movement go together and always have. Todd later devotes a chapter to breathing with particular emphasis on the diaphragm and the intricacy of its connection to the spine and main visceral organs:

The diaphragm and its associates, both nervous and muscular, reach into the deepest recesses of the individual … It is tied up with every living function, from the psychic to the structural, and within its nervous mechanism sends out ramifications to the remotest points of the sphere of living. Like the equator, it is the dividing line of two great halves of

being: the conscious and the unconscious, the voluntary and the involuntary, the skeletal and the visceral (1968 (1937), 217).

This quotation from Todd about the diaphragm also appears in Writings on dance, 22, an issue devoted to ideokinesis. In the preface to the

issue, dance scholar Libby Dempster notes that:

Despite the fact that ideokinesis now enjoys quite widespread

institutional recognition it continues as a relatively unregulated practice. There is no system of certification, no centralised process of

accreditation; there is no academy or school of ideokinesis or Todd alignment. The pedagogic model to which ideokinetic teaching most closely conforms is that of apprenticeship, whereby the student attaches himself or herself to a master teacher (2003, 2).

This is an interesting contrast to Alexander and Feldenkrais, as I noted earlier. Dempster lists the early lineage of ideokinesis from Todd to Barbara Clark and Lulu Sweigard, from Sweigard to Irene Dowd, from Clark to Andre Bernard and later John Rolland, Pam Matt, Nancy Topf, and Mary Fulkerson.

Writings on dance, 22 also contains a transcription of a class

conducted by Bernard in 1980, the first of a new academic year. In that class he outlines the history, objectives and methodology of

ideokinesis, and begins the practical work with the ‘constructive rest’ position.

Bernard notes that Todd was a voice teacher who, in 1917 or so, fell down a flight of stairs, injuring her back so badly that doctors told her she would never walk again. Todd found her own way through to recovery, and used her discoveries as the basis for a way of working with bodies. She taught for a while at Columbia University in the late

1920s and early 1930s, but had problems because ‘[those] in the academic world never understood what she was talking about’ (Bernard 2003, 5).

Bernard talks a little about Clark, with whom he worked for ten years:

Clark would speak and communicate in the language of imagery and if you didn’t understand what it was as you were working with her, you just didn’t ask her to explain it. It would have been like going to Picasso and saying ‘explain this painting to me’ (2003, 5).

He contrasts Clark’s approach with that of Sweigard, whom he

describes as ‘a cut-and-dried scientist’ (2003, 6), and speaks of using all three different ways of working in his classes – Todd’s, Clark’s and Sweigard’s.

In talking generally about ideokinesis Bernard says that it has:

a kind of total influence on the organism, physiological and psychological. But if we wanted to take an immediate objective, something that will satisfy the need to know, we could say that it is:

Neuro-muscular re-education – that is, we’re trying to change muscle

patterns . . . The methodology is that of using images or mental

pictures. And that’s come to be known as ideo-kinesis (2003, 6, bold in

original).

He expands on the methodology in saying the technique also employs ‘thought, concept, intention and desire’, and moreover, ‘an image is more than just an image; an image has a life of its own’ (2003, 6). Bernard says that the work is about voluntary movement, so intention and desire are important because the desire or the intention to move

begins the process. The intention is transmitted to the muscles by the nervous system. The nervous system is the messenger, but it is also the organiser at a preconscious level. The muscle pattern is not under voluntary control, even though the movement is. Bernard uses the example that there are some 119 muscles involved in taking a step, which clarifies this distinction between voluntary movement and the involuntary control of the actual muscles. Bernard points out that the distinction between control of movement and control of muscles is more than just a semantic distinction because muscles act in groups, not singly, and muscle groups interact with one another. This question of what is potentially under our conscious control, what we can

influence by our will, and what we cannot, arises again and again in this project.

Whereas ideokinesis uses images to change muscle patterns,

Middendorf breathwork focuses on the sensations of the movement of breath and does not purport to change anything but rather to connect the person to a source of somatic intelligence through breath. An important underlying idea in Middendorf breathwork is that breath orients to the whole person rather than any particular part, so when a person participates fully with the movements of their body with breath, as opposed to acting as a detached observer, breath can act as an integrative ‘force’ because it is so integrally connected to all parts of being and life. The regular practice of Middendorf breathwork, the repeated attention to bodily movement with breath, brings a gradually heightening awareness of the physical body, a sensory awareness, and a capacity to sense the qualities of that movement.

Another way of putting this is to regard ‘identity’, one’s sense of self, as made up, in part, of a representation of one’s body in the neural

feeling of what happens (1999). He argues that consciousness begins

with the realisation that the self is changed, albeit in tiny ways, by every interaction. So this representation will be altered by the sensory

practice of Middendorf breathwork, thus changing, again in small ways, one’s identity.

My own experiences with ideokinesis have helped me understand how the ideas I have about my body help shape my experience of my body and how, in turn, my experience of my body can change my ideas or images of my body. For me the same dialectical process happens with the practice of Middendorf breathwork.

I have emphasised so far how the first-person experience of sensing one’s own body is the connecting point for the many different bodies of work that make up the general field of somatics, and how this is a central feature of Middendorf breathwork because in that work the connection to breath happens through the perception of the sensations of bodily movements with breath.

At this point I turn to breath itself, to look at those figures Middendorf acknowledges as influential in the field, at other bodies of work that deal particularly with breath, and to give an overview of how breath is treated in the fields of voice and movement training for performers.