Did somebody say 'Hamstrings'?

On being and not-being a 'performer'...

Photo by Oksana Taran on Unsplash

I am lying on a mat in the TanzQuartier studio. It’s ten in the morning, and the studio is full. Most classes don’t fill up like this one, but Malcolm Manning knows how to pull in a crowd.

The class is billed as Feldenkrais, but he points out that he’s not a purist. He does some pretty “classic” Feldenkrais, but a knowing eye and body will recognise that he’s liberal in smattering something else.

As we lie on the floor and arrive into our horizontality, Malcolm invites us to notice how we are asymmetrical and explicitly asks us not to “correct” it. I am familiar in principle with the idea of non-judgemental witnessing, but this time, something is different. My relationship with my body-mind is changing.

I’ll start by saying that I have tight hamstrings.

In my dreams, I can bend at my hip joints, move down and touch my toes with my knees straight.

Until recently, I spent my entire adult life thinking of myself as a performer. When I was fifteen, I took the stage seriously as a rock musician. Then, as an actor, I gravitated towards non-speaking roles. The word in the air was 'physical theatre'.

In 2008, after five weeks of studying Theatre at university, I switched to choreography. I missed something of a physicality in the work. Beyond physical theatre, my only other serious bodily training had been martial arts, which I loved but never mastered. Helga Musial interviewed me, and I did an internal audition. Helga had been a martial artist and a musician before escaping national service by fleeing to West Berlin, and the twists and turns of fate brought him to play saxophone in a dance company. The dancers coaxed him to perform with them beyond the neat disciplinary separation of “musicians” and “dancers”, and from there, he developed a career as a performer and choreography. I believe he saw something of his own nineteen-year-old self in my nineteen-year-old self.

A baptism of fire is a good way to describe taking up dance for the first time as an undergraduate. All this time, I was painfully aware of the inadequacy of my hamstrings. This is not something trivial. For most people in the modern world, having supple hamstrings is a nice-to-have, but if you’re training in a dance studio for 3-7 hours a day, you get to know that tightness in the backs of your thighs is a genuine occupational hazard.

After graduating from college, I promised myself that I would continue my dance training once I had figured out my hamstring problem. From the most esoteric to the most obvious, I did everything that came my way. I felt like a cryptographer trying to crack a code - maybe, if I find the right combination of movements, I will unlock the elusive neuromuscular pathway that would allow me to raise my leg straight into the air over the level of my hip. If I just hang in there, I might finally break through.

Years later, my hamstrings still taunt me. This is a tangible limitation to my ability to do dance technique. It's not that I haven't improved. I can do a standing forward bend with legs that are considerably straighter than before, but they're not professional dancer's legs, despite what my BA might suggest.

Before you play a melancholic violin for me...

The old Taoist axiom that change is often paradoxical is true—the harder you push for something to be different, the more stable it becomes. As a performer and then as a choreographer, I kicked around a milieu of people dancing professionally, feeling somewhat lost.

It was like being in the right neighbourhood but in the wrong house. This is more complicated than being in the wrong place. When you are entirely in the wrong place, you know it. But I was here, walking down the right streets, greeting the right neighbours, fetching my groceries from the right shops. I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong.

Discovering dramaturgy aligned with me was like moving across the street. This is how the light should come in through the window. This is the view I should have from my bedroom. These are the colours of the tiles I'm supposed to have in my bathroom.

Same neighbours, same grocery shop.

As I let go of my self-image as a performer, I see my body change. Despite my belief in the gentle philosophies underpinning somatic work, every physical practice I did held, on some level, the agenda of preparing to perform, of treating my body as an instrument to be tuned. I rarely allowed myself to experience the joy of movement as a raw form of pleasure. - I was able to experience some of that physical joy as a by-product of my tuning-up, but it had no place of its own.

Now, on the floor in TanzQuartier, being around dancers but not feeling like I have to be one, that I have to eventually live up to having the articulate body that a ‘proper’ dancer should have, I let myself be asymmetrical.