Movement Language

I have been having a lot of opportunities recently to communicate with people through movement rather than with language.  As a society, we put a great deal of emphasis on the importance of spoken language.  For the most part, I am a big fan of language and do believe that our ability to speak connects us to the world.  In fact, I think our personalities are formed by how we use language or perhaps whatever personality we are born with creates the groundwork for how end up using language. In either case, our relationship with language is important, but what about the language of the body?  Does our movement or lack there of play a part in who we are in the world and the ways we relate to others?  Recent experiences have helped me to reconnect with the richness of this kind of communication.

I have a group of friends that I meet with every few weeks and we talk, a bit, but mostly we experiment with movement as a way to express ourselves and relate to each other.  This past week we met and I was fascinated to see the difference between how we relate to each other when we speak as opposed to when we move.

When I met my friends this past week we began by talking. I remember seeing a lot of worry in one friend’s face. She was distressed by a relationship in her life and spoke about that.  I remember thinking that her body looked tense and she seemed distant. Another friend said that things were going really well for her although she looked kind of miserable, another tactic that people tend to rely on to get by in life and another friend was engaged in the being “super busy and doing a million things at once” paradigm, yet another survival technique that doesn’t do much for interpersonal connection.  Personally, I didn’t want to be there in the first place and felt a big detached.  We talked a bit although the words seemed to only to take everyone deeper into our personal distractions. Ultimately, we were just a bunch of disconnected satellites sitting in the same room.

After a bit of muddling around and general confusion, we decided to focus on a newer member of our group and create a kind of welcoming ritual for her.  We all sat on the floor and I decided to put my back against this member’s back to give her some support.  From this position I wasn’t able to see anyone else in the group, but as the music played I just swayed with my friend and let myself relax.  After a while I turned around to see what the rest of the group was doing and I was amazed. This once stressed out and fragmented group of women were now a pulsating collection of energy flowing together.  Their faces had completely changed and their energy shifted.  All the thinking, worries,  working things out and trying to make sense had fallen away and they were left with the rhythms of their beings, rich colors of their corporeal bodies and a deep connection to their spirits and each other.  

I am seeing this kind of transformation with movement, rhythm, beat and sound in many places in my life.  This isn’t about being a dancer of being “good” at movement, its just about accessing a part or yourself that functions outside of language.  At times, I think that I function much better in this space and I have a feeling a lot people do as well.  I wonder what the world would be like if all of our interactions relied a bit more on using our bodies and movement to communicate.  I imagine we would make some deep connections and it would look really wonderful as well.