Dance Techniques 2010

284 Understanding the Body / Movement
another, integrate, and move through each other. This experiential
center, however, can shift depending upon the
touch; the center can be the diaphragm or elsewhere in
the body.
The spine is not imagined as the center, but as a core
structure. Ribs and pelvis hang from it and interior muscles
are connected to it. They, in turn, impact exterior
muscles. Everything else depends upon this core structure,
which is why work on the spine is central to the training.
A student works with selected body layers and experiences
them as the central connection—central not in the sense of
‘middle’ or ‘center’, but rather as the meaningful center in
an investigated context.
Working with balance–center or off–center will depend
upon the pedagogical context and / or the dance artist’s
preference. Some choreographers, like Trisha Brown, prefer
dancers who can fall well. In larger movement phrases,
as frequently performed in late–1980s postmodern dance,
both on– and off–center can play a role.
Body weight is always well distributed—each body
part carries its own weight. This is practiced best when
lying supine and gradually surrendering one’s weight into
the floor. Over time, the spine, for instance, sinks ever
closer to the floor, away from the front side of the torso.
This easing of tension must be maintained and then transferred
into a movement sequence leading to standing: the
spine is thought of as being released downward, which, in
an upright position, is ‘towards the back’. Gries, quoting
his teacher June Ekman, says, “Release happens from the
front to the back.”
Gries does not often use the word gravity. This is not
about going down toward the floor, but rather about
levity, 17 moving up from the floor. Gries relates that his
teacher June Ekman often used to say, “The body wants to
organize away from the floor.” This means
that the body uses the floor as a source of
power to keep the spine erect and to fire
the imagination—and thus also reality—
enabling the body to organize itself up and
away from the ground.
This principle applies to every weight
shift: energy is drawn from the floor and
then used to reconstruct, reorganize, the
body. This happens, for instance, in the
Bus Stop exercise: the entire upper body
leans sideways against a wall, as if waiting
at a bus stop. When the bus arrives, participants
no longer jump unorganized into
the upright position, but instead attempt
to reorganize their anatomical structure.
One first imagines the heels sinking down
into the ground. Once this interior image
is established and anchored in the body,
the next step is to actualize it: release the heels toward
the ground. From this release and contact with the floor
comes the upward energy flow that straightens the body by
using the imagined ankle–knee–hip–lumbar spine–twelfth
thoracic vertebra–third cervical vertebra connection. Gries
does not use the term ‘weight shift’ in class, however, as he
emphasizes the continual reorganization of the body and
not the shifting.
Energy is an important field of work; it is expended
as efficiently as possible, and preferably not as overly active
but as responsive energy. This means that the energy
used is predominantly energy that does not first need to
be produced, but rather it should be garnered as power.
This training in continual and definitive non-doing has
many variations. One principle is the drop, as in “drop
the heels into the floor.” One hears this often. The heels
should not be actively pressed into the floor, but continuously
released down into the floor. In this way, no energy is
wasted. In fact, releasing blockages and strenuous movement
patterns actually returns freestanding energy that the
body then has at its disposal.
In Gries’s work, energy is not just related to individual
bodies; it also applies to groups of bodies. Energy can also
be drawn from contact with other bodies. As a result, in
17 The term levity is used in release contexts
to mean lightness, i.e., the opposite of gravity.
18 Sally Banes defines postmodern dance
as an artistic era that began in 1962 and
ended in 1989: After the initial experimental
breakthroughs of the 1960s came the
analytical postmodern dance of the 1970s,
followed by that of the 1980s, in which the
question of content again received attention.
See Sally Banes: Greenwich Village 1963.
Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 1993
and Terpsichore in Sneakers. Middletown
(CN): Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
19 About this, see also the analysis of
Set and Reset by Trisha Brown earlier in this
section.