Dance Techniques 2010

Jennifer Muller — Muller Technique
235
How did you come to developing your
own technique? I started my technique from the
influence of that first Asian tour, when I was eighteen.
That tour was the first time I left New York. I got
in the plane in NYC and out of the plane in Australia.
Amazing! I was just inundated with the newness
of everything. The next city we went to was Singapore.
I will never forget the ride in from the airport to the
city—the smells, the air, the look…everything. And we
were a long time in Korea and Japan, in Thailand to
Philippines, Hong Kong. It changed my life. I was
so struck, I felt a closeness to it—which is weird—to the
thinking, to the atmosphere. I was knocked over by
the art, by the atmosphere, by the sensibility of it.
When I came back to New York, I started reading
Eastern philosophy. And read, and read, and read.
At that time I was also becoming a little bit dissatisfied
with the techniques. I felt there was still too much
tension in the techniques and still too much upright, vertical
feel to the various techniques. So I started developing
my technique out of the Eastern philosophy I’d
been studying. It wasn’t till much later that I came across
approaches such as Tai Chi and Qi Gong. Now I do
Qi Gong every morning, I feel it is like coming home.
I had never studied Thai Chi or Qi Gong when I started
developing my own technique yet I arrived at the same
place, the same principles.
I remember very distinctly, at one point I was asked
to teach a masterclass at the dance festival in Connecticut,
and before my class there was a Tai Chi workshop. I
looked in and the teacher was saying the same things that
I had been teaching, and I was just shocked. I think
because of reading Tao Te Ching, the I Ching, and various
other books, I had arrived at the same understanding—
cyclical nature, the polarity of nature from the I Ching
the polarity between up and down, between large and
small, the sense of naturalness, the sense of non-interference,
the sense of organic life from the Tao Te Ching,
from Lao Tse. Those books were my constant
companions. I used them not just for the technique;
I used them to evolve in my life.
How did you integrate this knowledge into the
techniques you had studied up till then? I have
never really gone back and done a comparison to things
I learned. Doris Humphrey’s fall and rebound—this
formed a conceptual basis. But I felt that I wanted to take
it a couple of steps further. A polarity technique goes
deeper into the internal sense of changing the molecular
energy in the body. The plié should be absolutely
drained, and not drained just to the floor, but drained to
be underneath the floor so that the power and the
energy that you sourced has originated in two places:
under the floor, and in your abdomen. The Chinese
word Dan Tien means the gate in your abdomen that is
the source of your power, a source of energy. You
also draw up energy out of the ground. That is the polarity,
an energized ‘up’ and a ‘down’—totally relaxed.
Only with an empty ‘down’ can you source new energy
to come up. The up is extremely elongated, attenuated,
and filled with energy, filled with electricity, with buoyancy.
You fill it from inside the skin. You can trace the energy
as it moves through the body. As I got more and more
sophisticated in terms of what I was discovering, I started
to understand all about the lines of energy in the body,
what body parts related to each other, and how the
energy was used. And that energy can then lead to different
kinds of dynamics of energy.
The other discovery was the use of visualization, the
use of imagination and how it relates to and affects
your physicality. How listening relates to your physicality,
how the creative mind relates to how you perceive
your body. Filling and draining energy translates into
sensation—it just feels different, it supports your dancing
in a different way. Dancing from the inside out, not
through muscle but through spirit and energy. Other
techniques do not have the kind of deep internal change
that I am talking about.
What effect does this internal change have
on the moving body? It is an organic technique. There
is much less cause for injury because you are not
straining the body in any way. You replace tension with
energy. Tension only blocks the energy from moving
through your body, just like a rusted plumbing pipe will
block water. So you think of yourself as an empty skin,
a skin envelope that the energy inhabits. And that there is
a lot of space, a lot of space for the energy to travel.
Along with the energy work is the placement work.
Where are your hips? How do they relate to the small
of your back? How do they relate to your ribs and your
shoulder blades and your spine? The true strength is
the back of your legs, the inside of your legs, your spine,
and your abdomen. We emphasize placement: placing
the body so the abdomen is absolutely perpendicular to
the floor. If you stack everything over itself, you have
no need to grip. The minute you grip, the minute you have
tension, the minute you are dealing with musculature
as your source of dancing—not spirit, not energy. And the
more muscles you use, the more tight you are going
to get. So, control of the body comes through awareness
and placement.
Most dancers live in a middle ground. They don’t
really release the plié, and they don’t really go past a kind
of ‘held energy’ on the top. So they are never changing
their energy, they are dancing in a similar energy all the
time. Finding the vitality, the change in your body, that
is what drove me—both the cause and the development of
that concept, that sensation. It was only when I had