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Chapter 4 Doctors, Dancing, and Ideokinesis Before making specific distinctions between teaching dancing to professionals (or aspiring professionals) and the kind of classes I taught in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I will make a further point about Sweigard’s book and her system of teaching as I conceive it. I alluded to various responses to her book (and, by extension, to ideokinetic practice) in a review written in 1979, published in 1981: If one thinks of dancers reading the book, one wants to say, do not reject it or the method because you do not understand the language or do not think of your bodies in this way. The language in which the book is written is, after all, a respectable language although it may seem far removed from concepts of beauty and other more artistic or aesthetic notions about the body which you may have. (Williams 1981; 292) Part of the reason that dancers (and others) don’t read Sweigard’s book can be attributed to the language in which it is written, which is challenging for people who haven’t been trained in any of the “body sciences.” She makes this point herself in Chapter 2 of her book, saying: In studying any subject, the student must first learn the language used in the field. Here the student must become familiar with the names of various parts of the body, the skeletal structure in particular, and must be able to describe and locate these parts. He must know the kinds of movement that occur in the joints of the skeleton and the names applied to these different movements. Terms such as hips, hip joints, backbone, and stomach muscles usually are avoided in this text because they often promote inaccurate concepts or vagueness concerning their location in the body. For example, stomach muscles have nothing whatever to do with voluntary movements: the stomach is an internal organ. Hip and hip joint are anatomical terms, but most people, even some who have studied anatomy, cannot locate them accurately. (1974: 8—italics added) i-xiv_1-130_Will.indd 54 7/8/11 12:28 PM In my understanding (when teaching years ago and now), Sweigard recognized the difference between the “anatomical” (medical) lexicon of the body in contrast to the “social lexicon” of the body (see Appendix to Chapter 1, page 18), explaining why she didn’t use the (English) social lexicon in her book—it was inaccurate in terms of movement. When I was teaching, many dancers (and students of dancing) didn’t want to learn the scientific terminology of the body, nor did they want to learn the movements of which their joints were capable. I am told that now this is not the case, although I remain skeptical regarding the extent to which the entire American dance world has changed. I believe it has changed in small enclaves in metropolitan centers like New York and a few universities, but I doubt that a general linguistic revolution of this kind has taken place throughout the country. Be that as it may, we will turn now to the viewpoint of part of the scientific community toward ideokinesis as it existed when I was teaching. Such discussion naturally involves complementary attitudes among dancers and teachers of dancing. Of particular concern then (and now) were professional medical attitudes toward movement education, for any technique or system that bases itself on a notion of maximization of human movement potential is likely to be looked on askance by doctors—at least, it was in the late fifties when I studied neuromuscular reeducation. This is unfortunate, for the sanction of reputable members of this profession is tantamount to credibility and the acceptance of ideokinesis by many people, but there is a difficulty. Why? In general, medical doctors are trained to bring people from states of malfunction , dysfunction, and/or disease to normal states of health, which (for our purposes) may be defined as freedom from pain. A movement educator’s or dance teacher’s aims, problems, and objectives are not the same, because the latter are guided by notions of optimum function and the maximization of movement potential. They begin their work with normally healthy bodies . In its broadest definition, ideokinesis is about maximizing the human potential for movement. It is not about malfunction. If traditional medical criteria of sickness and wellness are applied, then it can easily be seen that medical criteria of “normalcy” and “freedom from pain” provide no categorical slot for, or explanations of...

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