Listening to Body
August, 2016
When I was younger, my mum always said the best thing I could do for my friends was to listen to them: really listen. I realised there was a difference between listening for what I expected or wanted someone to say, and listening to what was really being said. I also noticed friends spoke as much with their bodies as with their words. The glint in the eye, the tension in skin, the dance of arms and tilt of head spoke in truthful layers. Paired with spoken text, honest details were communicated in fragmented sentences, finely nuanced by the body.
As I grew up in the dance, I discovered my own body was not only listening and speaking to others, but also to me. There were corporeal messages and impulses that I could choose to listen and respond to, or ignore. My muscles let me know when I had over-stretched at the end of a ballet class and needed rest. The twinge in my knee indicated I had been using a hinge joint as though it were a ball and socket joint. I also knew the exhilaration of optimum performance: fully alive as the most fully me I could be. Mostly as a dancer I felt I had to push through: work harder, stretch farther, ignore the pain. Yet the body is intuitive, wise and alert. Patiently, I was being taught the difference between pushing through to effect healthy changes, and stopping when I had gone too far.
Now I am much older, I see the effects of this internal dialogue in the shape of my body and how I move. Australian dance academic, Antonia Pont has observed that “the knee, when not listened to, is changed and enters a casual trajectory that can only be later integrated rather than reversed” (Pont, 2015, p. 6). Many of my choices as a young dancer have been assimilated in to how I move today. Listening to my body, like listening to my friends has required the acceptance of a holistic approach to listening.
I don’t think this means to over-indulge the whims of a body bored, but at the same time to ignore, or dismiss what the body is saying will see changes integrated in to the human form for good or for worse: body and soul. Embodied knowledge, born of experience and of conversation is so very often quietly courteous. Our bodies are speaking, in constant dialogue with ourselves and each other, but the question remains: will we really listen?
Photography of Katie Chown for winery psalms by Amanda Humphries ©2016, reprinted with permission.
References
Pont, A. (2015). Encountering Causalities. Dancehouse Diary, What the body can do Dance & Ethics, 4-6.
