Journeying the city…

First, second and third impressions

Upon arrival, what do you see? I see workers. I see faces of tired, working people who look as different from each other as they can, and yet the common denominator as laborers is clear. More often than not, when I make eye contact with someone, they smile and have a buoyancy about them that strikes me as pure wisdom. Perhaps survival strategy would be a better way to put it. (Is there a difference?)

Upon arrival, what do you see? I see movement. Urban movement powered by all these people’s movement whose faces and bodies I’m looking at. I feel thankful… for the power, for the movement, for the wisdom that is a smile. I feel thankful because I’m seeing them, and perhaps even letting myself be seen by them. It happens one at a time. It’s a one-on-one engagement. And I’m deeply, perhaps ridiculously, satisfied by it.

I didn’t think of ‘urban movement’ or the practice of ‘seeing and letting oneself be seen’ while navigating the airport, the bus and the subway’s particular configuration that day. What I did think of was the phrase “the belly of the beast”, the huge human mesh that makes the city run. Besides the smiles, there’s heaviness, urgency and a lot of tiredness.

The next day I went to Williamsburg and saw people who seemed weightless. They moved agilely, with little connection to gravity compared to the crowds at the airport, the bus and the streets of Queens and Upper Manhattan. To put them in the beast’s body, I would say they are at the distal ends, connecting to space and air. They had clothes that floated easily in the wind and covered very little. Most of them looked happy. None looked or smiled back at me.

On my third day back in the city, I walked through the East Village to take my first class: an awesome opportunity to study some of Irene Dowd’s ‘warming up for dancing’ choreographies. I reflected back on what I had seen in Williamsburg and I wondered if this was too harsh an image: In the incomprehensibly coordinated movement of this beast’s body, each individual seems tethered to the human world by some fragile resemblance to it. In this Gibsonian image, leashed dogs are visible tethering forces, either vestiges or promises of a non-bestial body.

Two notes:

1. The beast is neither native to New York, nor unique to the city. It’s a global beast. It’s just that it’s very visible here.
2. The non-bestial body, which we can as easily call ‘the original bestial body’ putting the metaphor on its head, is conceived, born and nurtured when one goes to movement class, among many other occasions.

Thank you movement reasearch and MELT.