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Applying L/BMA to a backpacking trip
This is an excerpt from Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies-2nd Edition by Colleen Wahl.
LABAN/BARTENIEFF MOVEMENT ANALYSIS AND BACKPACKING: EXPLORING STABILITY AND MOBILITY FROM A PERSONAL EDGE
Contributed by Amber Kidner. Used with permission.
What are our options, our processes for taking our deepest inner impulses and allowing them to ripple ever outward? For me, exploring this question has been and remains emphatically personal and necessarily complex. The Laban/Bartenieff Movement System provides me with a field to play within and ample material to play with, whether it’s the concept of polarities within the system or the four main elements of the system (Body, Effort, Shape, Space: BESS) taken in turn. It is one way in which I can drop in using my senses to behold myself and to behold others in movement.
In the introduction to Choreutics, Laban writes, “In the past we have clung too stubbornly to a static conception of our environment” (2011, 4). When we forget for a time that we are movement, we may come to an understanding of “stability as a contrasting partner to mobility. In this way becoming unrelated to our surroundings which are in the widest sense the universe” (Laban 2011, 6). In my experience, white-knuckling a sense of stability while being asked to perform in some way (i.e., to move) can be very tricky. This is where I found myself as I signed up to go on my first backpacking trip: in transition from something of the need to arrive somewhere, albeit precariously, to unraveling layer by layer into an ever-widening field of connectivity. Returning to the breathing body of the earth and meeting and being met by the field of life that I find myself within have been crucial to addressing an externalized and extreme conception of the Stability/Mobility polarity. Applying L/BMA to a backpacking trip provides insight into a movement experience that deepens and opens support for similar experiences in the future.
The setting for this trip is Owl Canyon in Cedar Mesa, southern Utah. A group of six women have gathered to hike into the canyon, to explore and be within it for six days. The land is in spring with colors pink, red, brown, and budding greens. It’s arid, and by the end of the trip canyon grit will have found resting places in our toenails and fingernails, nostrils and hair, skin and clothes. The group has just been instructed on how to put our heavy (40 pound) packs on our backs. By standing in a split stance (we can imagine the right leg forward) and grabbing the loop at the top back of the pack with the right hand and the shoulder strap with the left hand, we draw the pack up the front leg, which provides a kind of shelf for the pack. In Effort Action terms, this movement is Direct, Strong, and Sustained. Now with the pack on the right thigh, we then take the right arm through the right shoulder strap, wrapping the right arm underneath the pack to lift and swing it around to the back with Strong Weight, Quick Time, and Indirect Space.
With packs buckled and cinched into place and hiking poles properly hung from the wrists via wrist straps, the group sets off along the trail. It’s not long before the group is presented with the first big descent into the canyon, with the total descent being around 1,500 feet.
The descent is personally daunting, and what helps initially is to consider the give and take between gear, body, and gravity. A properly fitting backpack should comfortably transfer about 80 percent of its weight to the hips and strong lower body, 20 percent to the front of the shoulders, and 0 percent to the top of the shoulders. Bringing in hiking poles shifts the weight distribution again because 20 percent of one’s weight gets distributed from the legs to the arms so that the legs take less impact with each step. Hiking poles can be particularly helpful because they can increase the base of support; the entire area that surrounds all points of contact expands as needed. This allows one to grow or shrink one’s Kinesphere in ways that enhance support in descent or ascent. All together, the exchange of weight between lower body and upper body, including the way in which one’s body is tilted slightly forward to accommodate the weight of the pack, heightens awareness of my Kinesphere.
A potentized midline animates the Core–Distal Pattern of Total Body Connectivity for a responsive organism. Not spilling or overextending but in this case probing and looking for the next moment of arrival. Yield–Push Reach–Pull with Weight Shift, sometimes Sagittally and sometimes Laterally, provides necessary support for giving my weight to the earth. Planting hiking poles so that they can be stepped into provides support for Pushing off of the weight-bearing foot into the next purchase.
Feeling my verticality and longing at times for far less height leads to the choice to, on a few occasions, sit down on my bottom and scoot by Sinking and Enclosing in a Ball Shape Form to Spreading and Advancing with joints and limbs that work to Spoke my body forward in a Directional Mode of Shape Change, much like an inchworm. If I couldn’t do this, then tapping into Shape Flow Support while on my two feet was important (although challenging at times given the tendency to retreat internally). Accessing a massaging breath that softens the belly (Sagittal), liberates the spine (Vertical), and allows for all diaphragms to spread (Horizontal) creates support for a fluid responsiveness to each moment.
When it’s time to take off the backpack, I reverse the process of putting on the pack by taking it off with an Effortful Slashing Action that swings the pack from behind and on my back to my waiting thigh. Once it is there, I ease the pack to the earth in a Pressing Action. Now I can lie down, giving my full weight to the canyon, and just breathe. In the book Becoming Animal, David Abram writes, “We can sense the world around us only because we are entirely a part of this world, because—by virtue of our own carnal density and dynamism—we are wholly embedded in the depths of the earthly sensuous. We can feel the tangible textures, sounds, and shapes of the biosphere because we are tangible, resonant, audible shapes in our own right. We are born of these very waters, this very air, this loamy soil, this sunlight. Nourished and sustained by the substance of the breathing earth, we are flesh of its flesh” (2010, 63). As I drink in my surroundings and look at the branching trees or twinkling stars, I see that there are many possibilities, many outcomes.
More Excerpts From Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies-2nd EditionSHOP
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