Artifacts for Body-Knowledge
In June 2018, I did a loose version of the Israeli Movement Guru Ido Portal’s 30 day squatting challenge.
I’m a white guy of Jewish and WASPish descent living in North America, and this is what my squat looked like at the beginning of the month:
For some contrast — here’s a squatter from India:
And here’s Ido squatting:
And here’s Feldenkrais squatting:
I took on the squat challenge because I am trying to write something about Ido Portal.
I haven’t really figured out my angle yet.
I know I want to write about the transition he made from Capoeira to an individualistic, monetized, performative movement practice.
I also want to write about him as an Israeli Movement Guru working in the shadow (in my mind) of Moshe Feldenkrais, an Israeli Movement Guru from the 20th century.
But since I haven’t yet zeroed in on exact angles for any of these ideas, I thought I’d do something to ground my thinking in experience.
This post turned out NOT to be about the nuts and bolts of the challenge. Instead it’s some preliminary questions about body-knowledge and what kinds of artifacts are appropriate for its generation.
Living in Boulder, CO, I have the option to go to classes at the Boulder Movement Collective, a gym run by some of Ido Portal’s students. The monthly fees are over $200, and having gone for a month of classes previously, I know that I am not really interested in being an Ido scenester. Maybe if I were 10 years younger. And maybe if I hadn’t already drunk the Feldenkrais cool-aid. And maybe if I wasn’t already a scenester at the Boulder Contact Lab.
So, I decided to do the simple thing and start with one of the basic low-cost/free ideas that Ido throws out to beginners: squat everyday for 30 mins for thirty days.
My experience of the challenge was a 30-day-long story and not a particularly interesting one, so I’ll skip to the end and just give you the takeaway: the interesting thing about the squat challenge is that it’s an instruction, which means means it’s actually a specific kind of body-knowledge artifact. It’s a generator.
Consider pictures as body-knowledge artifacts. What happens when you look at a picture of me squatting?
When I was interested in being a performative dancer, I wondered if dance is a visual art? For the watchers, yes. For the mover, no. An audience watches a dancer move, but the dancer produces and perceives their own activities through kinaesthetic means.
In its essence, body-knowledge is not understood visually. Body-knowledge is only truly understood kinesthetically.
As far as body-knowledge on the internet goes, pictures and videos have functions. They pique interest and point towards bodies. They are visual advertisements for bodies as objects. But body-knowledge itself is only experienced in situ, through embodiment and touch, momentum, weightiness, gravity, levity.
Body know-how comes through learning new sensations, new ways of organizing action, new ways of being in touch — none of these things really lend themselves to visual documentation or numeric recording.
Visual artifacts fit in with goals of image production and circulation [something that is important for advertising, something which Ido is very good and successful at].
The squatting challenge itself has numeric goals. Squat 30 minutes a day for 30 days in a row. When you’ve counted these numbers, you’ve achieved the challenge.
But the body-knowledge itself…
