Grateful to dancer and visual artist Andréa de Keijzer for sitting down with me talk about pain and performance in dance, and, by extension, in asana practice. An excerpt from the intro: Heres the problem with the yoga selfie nobodys talking about. Lying beneath its potential narcissism or failure to challenge social constructions of beauty and health is the fact that it reinforces the most alienating illusion of the advertising State: that a picture can convey the definitive internal reality of its subject. That reality is always presumed to be pleasurable and liberated. But we all know this is not true, because we all know what it feels like to perform to expectation. Some of us know little else. Were so afraid of not performing enough that we photoshop ourselves into further dysmorphia. Photoshop is the means by which neoliberalism carves even deeper forced smiles onto our faces, after it has cut away the parts of of our flesh we are told to despise. And heres Andrea: My grandmother had a ballet school, and my aunt was a ballet teacher. As a 3 or 4 year-old, I was at the studio, and I saw it as something good, something that I saw my family enjoy. And then over time what happens is that you’re taught the movements, and taught what is good and what is not good, based on aesthetic values. And then that becomes ingrained into my own perception about what is good and not good. It became entrenched: if my foot is pointed, that’s good. If it’s not pointed, it’s not so good. Not only in my perception of my own body, but in the perception of my fellow students. I would point at them in my heart and saying O, she’s good, and O, she’s less good. You start differentiating a hierarchy of how good people are at this game. What’s been interesting is that in my transitioning into more biomechanically sound movement, it’s taken a while to shift my visual perception of what to appreciate. Because when I first saw people moving in biomechanically healthy ways, I would feel: I understand that it’s better for them, but I don’t like it, they don’t look good. They looked not-square. The studies that I’ve been doing are mainly through the Axis Syllabus, which is an international research community focusing on the ways knowledge of biomechanics can inform how we move and teach others to move. What I appreciate and find beautiful has changed. Now, when I see someone moving with biomechanical integrity and healthy coordinations, I’m so attracted. It happens much less when I go to ballet or contemporary dance. I can see the lines, but now I can also see through the lines into the stress they conceal. and: in dance and I think in yoga as well, there’s information that gets passed down as the “good” way or the “right” way, but if you dig down a little you realize that the “right” way often, though not always, refers to aesthetics and not biomechanics. In dance, it comes up through injuries. Now I have a labral tear, and at first I thought: ‘O, I’ve been a bad dancer, I’ve done the technique wrong. And then I start looking around and realize that so many of my colleagues have labral tears. It has made me think that perhaps there was something wrong with my technique, but really there is an epidemic happening, and it’s much bigger than myself. The techniques involve extreme rotations, extensions and flexions of the femurs that encourage hypermobility and joint laxity. Once a joint is lax you can take your body parts into all kinds of odd shapes and alignments which over time and with dedication can damage soft tissue around the joints. It feels like the information dancers receive in the beginning lacks an element of choice. I think there’s nothing wrong with doing extreme movement, but what I find sad is that there’s no mechanism of choice, especially at a younger age, in knowing that we’re crossing the line into something risky, but that we’re willing to take that chance. Rather it is sold to us as what we must do to attain the form.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:10:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015