Can we trust ourselves? In personal and developmental work, we have to know that a process of change can and will be supported. For example, if a difficult memory from childhood emerges in a movement session, the mover needs to trust that she or he has the resources and will take the time to integrate the experience into conscious awareness. Otherwise it is more appropriate for the memory to remain unconscious. By internalizing a supportive, nonjudgmental but discerning inner witness, we develop self-trust at a deep level.
Photograph © Alan Kimara Dixon
Being Seen, Being Moved: Authentic Movement and Performance, Part II
By Andrea Olsen
The discipline of Authentic Movement teaches us about the relationship between mover and watcher.
The relationship between the mover and the witness parallels that of performer and audience. The multiplicity of the human experience lives in each of us, and the stage provides an opportunity to embody our inner selves by moving as performer, or by empathizing or projecting as witness. This transference of awareness between the audience and the performer enables transformation for both. At first, the collective mind of the audience supports the surrender of the performer to unconscious energies, but soon the audience surrenders its awareness of self and goes with the performer toward transformation as well. In this context, transformation becomes an inclusive experience. For example, in China during a solo concert, when I dropped my head, the heads in the room would drop; when I lifted my focus, the audience’s focus would follow my movement. Performance became an environment in which people who were seeing could be moved.
In my experience, if I am performing well, I am witnessing a moving audience. I am holding the witness role as dancer, the audience is the mover, and I am supporting their journey. Thus, part of the practice of performing Authentic Movement is the practice of community. At these times, dance becomes a vehicle for energies beyond the self that can be invited, or invoked, but certainly not forced. This exchange exists as an aspect of “being moved” that is available to each of us.
Within the spectrum of collective experience, there is a tremendous relief, both as a mover and as a watcher, as we realize that we are participants in a larger whole. If we are attentive to our unconscious, and others to theirs, there is inherent order, unfolding, and relationship that occurs. Group work in Authentic Movement includes experiences of synchronicity, simultaneity, cross-cultural motifs, feats of endurance or strength, interactions with other people and other energies in the room, extraordinary lifts, and dynamics that could never be planned or practiced. Injuries are rare; if the body and psyche are working as one, anything seems possible and true limits are respected.
Encountering others in group work allows development of trust at a profound level. The basic “rule” in group sessions, eyes closed, is that you follow your own impulses. In the moment of contact, the choice to move with another person is based on whether you can stay true to your own inner impulses while working in contact with another person. As each person follows his or her own impulses, no one is “responsible” for taking care of anyone else. We long to be seen for who we are in our totality, not for the limited view of who we present ourselves to be, or who others imagine or want us to be. The practice of Authentic Movement in group work is the practice of being true to who we are in the presence of others.
There are several ways in which Authentic Movement is useful in performance. Authentic Movement informs performance. Its practice gives us information about our own personal movement material that helps us decide whether to explore it for ourselves in the studio, extend it into therapeutic work, or bring it to the stage. One of my earliest discoveries with Authentic Movement was how much the body has to tell us. Simply by letting my body move me instead of trying to control it, fascinating movement and useful insights would emerge. I felt the expansiveness of my own vocabulary as a dancer, rather than wondering if I could come up with one more evocative or unusual movement in the studio. When I taught a group of students, the same richness was present in each person’s movement. It was a humbling lesson in the universality of individual uniqueness.
Authentic Movement also informs our viewing of dance. As we practice witnessing, we begin to recognize authentic states and become aware of our own projection, noticing the extent to which what we are reading into someone’s movement is our own material, how much is theirs, or how much is a shared state. Then we can more clearly identify unconscious content in our own work—read our own dances, and facilitate others to notice their unique movement language. Whether Authentic Movement is the criterion we want to use to watch performance is a choice; it informs, but it is only one of many ways to view movement.
Authentic Movement is also a resource for performance. The ongoing practice of Authentic Movement provides a scrapbook of images, movements, and energetic states that can be drawn on in the choreographic process or in an improvisational performance. In my early work with Authentic Movement, I felt that the practice gave me the emotional subtext for a dance. For example, the first full-evening piece that I created from Authentic Movement was called In My House, and it unfolded in its entirety in a one-morning Authentic Movement session—seven sections with specific movement vocabulary. I could develop it any way I wanted, but the emotional and structural clarity had been established within me.
For performers, the practice allows movement patterns learned from others to become integrated with personal experience. Sessions also facilitate a kind of housecleaning of habitual movement patterns that need to be processed at the level of the unconscious and released before beginning new work.
Authentic Movement also exists as performance. An increasing number of dancers are presenting the practice of Authentic Movement in a performance context. In questioning whether the Authentic Movement experience itself is transmittable or whether it needs another form or frame to allow for transmission, I participated in an Authentic Movement performance series with a core group of dancers who had worked together in Authentic Movement for many years. We tried five monthly performances and after each, one or more of the performers was sick—with the flu, for example.
We had used Authentic Movement in choreographed work quite a lot, and in other forms of improvisation without problems, so we tried variations to develop a safer container for showing the work: adding music, having eyes open, having a witness in the audience, having some performers who were sourcing in a more traditional dance mode, as well as presenting the pure practice as performance. Eventually we considered two possible causes of the post-performance illnesses: while performing, we were merging with our watchers and were not establishing boundaries, so we picked up whatever was present emotionally and physically in the room, overloading our systems; or we were exposing unconscious material that needed the process of dialoguing directly afterward for completion.
Regardless of whether the raw authentic movement state can be sustained and transmitted in a performance setting, it is generally agreed that “good” performance—choreography, improvisation, Authentic Movement, and so on—is authentic. It includes the sensation of moving and being moved, a merging of unconscious and conscious states, and a moment-by-moment unfolding of the performer and the work.
As Authentic Movement informs performance, the underlying motive and hence the nature of performance changes. There are years in performance when we may be driven by our need to be seen, when our ego seeks validation, when we must shape and control, when we desire to transform and know other parts of ourselves, or when we are compelled to create rituals of experience for others. These motivations may change during our lives as performers. Dancing at twenty is different from dancing at forty or sixty.
At a mature level, a performer has an articulate, discerning inner witness that allows authentic