As someone who found an interest in movement as a young adult, having not really enjoyed sport at school, I find myself drawn to movement practitioners who can do extraordinary athletic feats that I can’t do. Accordingly, my Instagram feed is full of people who can do amazing things. Gymnasts doing twisting layouts. Parkour kids doing precision jumps at height. Burly men finding new and creative ways to lift extremely heavy objects.
These sort of posts are frequently accompanied by text that espouses an ideology of hard work, sacrifice and dedication - connecting the extraordinary personal feats with being a good and productive person. While I admire a good move, the more oppositional side of my personality - the side that encouraged me to skip PE when it was raining and disapproved of the rugby team - bristles at the idea that being good at sport or exercise has a moral component. However, as someone who is interested in movement, learning and self-development, this bristling feeling gives me pause for thought. Because I do believe that broadening our capacity for movement broadens our capacity to live. So what exactly is the problem?
I think the source of my discomfort (or irritation) is the uneasy link between movement and ideology - the straight line that’s so often drawn between doing something and being something.
Perhaps the clearest example of the connection between movement and ideology is found in the concept of ‘natural movement’. The French physical educationalist and naval officer, Georges Hébert, was responsible for popularising the practice of ‘Méthode Naturelle’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hébert is known for coining the phrase ‘be strong to be useful’. After witnessing the devastation of a volcano eruption in Italy, Hébert devoted himself to developing a system of physical education that prioritised the core competencies that he deemed to be the foundational elements of natural movement. These were: walking, running, climbing, crawling, swimming, jumping, defence, balancing, throwing, lifting and carrying.
There is a lot to admire about Hébert’s approach to physical education; however, it’s worth noting that his thinking was rooted more in the aesthetics of neoclassicism and the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau than it was in rigorous paleontological research. It’s also worth noting that the collision between evolutionary theory and broader concepts of freedom and human potential can be found in the writings of many post-war somatic theorists. Moshé Feldenkrais, Ida Rolf and F. M. Alexander all wrote texts in the mid-20th century that sought to reclaim a positive account of humanity’s natural inheritance after the horrors of the Holocaust and the Second World War. The idea of the natural is always filtered through a specific lens.
While this fact is probably not news to you, I do think it’s interesting to see how concepts introduced by figures like Hébert are transformed in the context of social media sharing - where aspiration and desire for influence become blended with pedagogy in strange ways. The idea of tree climbing or weightlifting or self-defence as natural pursuits is worthy of inquiry and discussion, but I’m concerned that labelling these practices as fundamentally natural risks encouraging people to set intentions around movement practice that are restrictive (maybe even oppressive).
To frame walking, climbing, swimming etc as activities that connect practitioners more deeply with their natural inheritance as human beings might be empowering for some; however, it can also serve to dehumanise those who would rather do ballet, knitting or breakdancing (or who aren’t interested in movement at all). Labelling specific practices as authentic and natural needs to be understood as a practice of exercising power, and history is full of examples where such reification has disempowered and disenfranchised minority groups.
Labelling a practice as natural may also risk concealing the weirdness that can be unleashed by movement practice. In my experience, movement practice has a capacity for revelation that opens up questions about what feels natural rather than closes them down. I vividly remember a workshop with Susan Klein where I spent five days stretching my hamstrings, with my hands on the floor and my head hanging over my feet. At a certain point on day three I had spent so much time upside-down that I began to think everyone in the room was hanging from the floor, rather than standing on top of it. My sense of my ‘natural’ relationship to gravity was transformed. What interests me here about this experience was the fact that both accounts were true. We are standing on the ground, but we are also hanging from it.
In her book, Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed writes, ‘How is it possible, with all that is possible, that the same form is repeated again and again? How does the openness of the future get closed down into so little in the present?’ One would think that social media would provide us with opportunities to increase the diversity of practices being shared, but really, after a while, the algorithm serves to flatten out the potential for diversity. You scroll and scroll and get more of the same - more of what you seem to like. And what you seem to like is often framed as moral and natural and good - even though it’s only one small part of the story.
So perhaps my provocation here is this: instead of treating movement practice as a means to an end, it’s worth interrogating what it might open up for us in our experience. Rather than defining certain movement practices as natural, it’s worth thinking about what we might learn about nature and ourselves by entering into movement practice with an open mind. This might seem like a small distinction, but in terms of one’s felt experience it’s a big one.
I haven’t recorded a specific lesson this week. Instead, I invite you to search out the uncanny through orienting yourself to your movement in non-habitual ways.
Try to imagine standing as hanging from the floor.
Get interested in the relationship between the knees, nose and lower back as you walk or run. (Or any other combination of anatomical parts.)
Try writing for 5 minutes with your non-dominant hand.
Try an alternative way of tying your shoelaces.
Avoid any attempt to correct your posture or movement. Instead, exaggerate the strange patterns you notice.
Get interested in the unusual feelings that hide in the recesses of everyday experience.
Maybe this approach is rooted in its own ideology. But at least it’s one that goes against the grain.