As I wrote in the extended abstract: “These qualitative aspects
of movement are separable only reflectively, that is, analytically,
after the fact; experientially, they are all of a piece in the global
qualitatively felt dynamic phenomenon of self-movement.”
There are further comments I would make.
First, when learning a new skill of any kind, one not infrequently
pays attention to the qualitative dynamics of one’s movement,
specifically, for example, to the tensional or areal quality-—the degree
of effort or the range of the movement. In such instances, one is not
attending to the globally-felt dynamic but to particular aspects of the
dynamic. Precisely by such attention, one perfects the skill one is
learning.
Second, whether in dance, in sports, or in washing the dishes, movement
is
movement. It may be attended to in various ways and indeed awareness may
alternate among the spatio-temporal-energic aspects of movement-—what
you
name “digitized procedures”--and the global phenomenon. With respect to
professionals, whether they be in dance, sports, or yoga, the
professionals
have spent time learning to do what they do and hence the dynamics of
movement run off fluidly, in seeming effortless ways.
Third, other forms of movement analysis exist. Labananalysis and
Eshkol-Wachmann analysis are graphic forms. I have been told by
researchers
in both areas that the phenomenological analysis of movement is
complementary
in many respects to those graphic forms—-Labananalysis in dance and
Eshkol-Wachmann in studies of wolves, mice, and other mammals (see the
studies
of ethologists John Fentress and Ilan Golani on the latter.)
Finally, one of the obstacles to veridical accounts of movement is the
confusion
of movement with objects in motion, which commonly carries with it an
inability
to separate movement from objects in motion together with a tendency to
give
preferential attention to objects in motion over movement. An analogy
might be
made to particles and waves in physics with respect to the latter
tendency and
possibly even to neurons over dynamic networks in brain studies. The
tendency
appears to stem from a predilection for what is solid and spatially
pointillist
over what is fluid and does not stay in place. Indeed, as pointed out in
the
extended abstract, common notions of movement—-that movement is a force
in time
and in space, and that movement is a change of position—-overlooks a
primary
kinetic fact: any and all movement creates its own distinctive dynamic,
whether
a tennis serve, an ocean wave, the hammering of a nail, or a sneeze.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
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