These are notes that I made for the Lecture on Sidebending for the Idocde symposium in Vienna as part of Impuls Tanz.  Not all that has been written here ended up in the final talk.  Also the sidebending aspects were more practical.  If you would like further information then please don't hesitate to contact me.

 

The importance of Side-bending.

 

Idocde/Axis Syllabus Introduction

 

I would just like to take a moment to congratulate Kerstin Kussmaul for her initiation of the Idocde project.

 

It is a beautiful illustration of how we might move away from a competitive model towards a collaborative one. If we can find ways to support and encourage and enrich and compete in an open an friendly way with the understanding that we all just wish to up our game and to better what it is that we teach and offer.

 

This model is precisely what the Axis Syllabus is presenting also. We are interested in working collaboratively and to expand our knowledge base and theories. We want to inspire as many people as possible to involve themselves in examining human movement from a scientific point of view and to share their discoveries. We want people to challenge our existing ideas with fresh evidence or concepts such that new theories that better fit the body of evidence can be generated.

 

Like Idocde we want to crowd source!!

 

What is the Axis syllabus?

 

So this is what the axis syllabus is first and foremost – an information resource from which theories and ideas can be drawn. This is a huge undertaking and so while this endeavour began with Frey Faust it is currently decentralising itself to become an effort of many people. Though of course Frey has made a large contribution towards interpreting and gathering this resource so far.

 

At impulsTanz you could be forgiven for thinking the Axis syllabus as a dance form, as there are some stylistic similarities between axis classes that are offered here. However this is not what we are seeking to do. In fact we have people in the community applying and researching movement in a variety of contexts such as Tight rope, and Circus rope to hip-hop and african dance. Many different forms but the underlying understandings of applied anatomy and physics as gathered by the axis community is what is in common.

 

The Axis syllabus is the attempt to gather movement information into a resource that can be used by anyone as a support for what ever movement they are interested in. This also leaves room for different interpretations of the same data set.

 

So you could think of the Axis Syllabus rather like Idocde. Its a resource where ideas and information can be put in one place and were exchange can happen between those that access that information. It recognises how individual enquiry can be enriched by bringing it into contact with people who are interested in similar things.

 

I like to think of an individual as a knowledge and experience bubble. We need to come into contact with other bubbles to expand and to challenge what we do. No single person can have take get a full overview on any subject. We all have blindspots.

 

Today we are going look at spinal mechanics and in particular side bending mechanics. We have found these ideas very useful.

 

We can use this as an illustration also we use information in the axis syllabus to support what we do.

Tradition vs Evidence

 

Idocde is a wonderful opportunity to present this working theory and the evidence we have for it to a wider group in the hope that it will be seen as a useful concept that can be applied to your teaching regardless of the style. We want to smack our bubbles into yours.

 

I am presenting these ideas but I am aware also that there is a lot of expertise in the room and so the evidence I am using might be questioned as might the conclusions. If there are people here that can present a plausible counter argument to the ideas I present this would be fantastic. Maybe there is something we missed or overlooked.

 

As any theory should be subject to modification or abandonment if presented with compelling evidence. If we develop a new working theory today that can be added to the axis syllabus well that would be awesome.

 

Here at Impuls tanz there is an extraordinary amount of wonderful dance on offer.

It seems we are reaching a point with initiatives such as teachers teaching teachers and Idocde to invite the critique of our practices and that is a fantastic place to arrive at.

 

There are many different ways to educate a dancer. Using anatomy and physics to understand movement is just one way. I was talking to Malcom Manning one year and he said he sometimes gets his students to imagine that they have 100 bones in their feet. He sees a qualitative change when his students do so. Thats great … thats interesting. In the axis syllabus by contrast we look at the structure of 26 bones and how they arranged and what that might mean for how we use our feet.

We gather all the information we can and this then informs how we use our feet in the most optimal way. Sometimes the conclusions we draw contradict training ideas that we have been using. Staying with the feet as an example we have reason to think that its not a useful idea to try to get the heals down when landing at a jump.

 

So it is important to understand the function of what we are doing as teachers. But if we are proposing ideas of good technique and the longevity of the dancing body then isn't it prudent to look beyond our traditions and individual experience. Of course many of you are doing just that.

 

Osteopathy and Evidence

 

I am currently training as an Osteopath. I took this training because I had some amazing results from treatments that I have. I found osteopaths to be very helpful to keeping me moving.

 

However it may surprise you to know that in osteopathy and even physiotherapy there are a lot of the ideas that are untested. That is to say we only have anecdotal evidence, that is a huge body of clinical experience that tells us osteopathy can work but much less hard scientific studies to support the claims. So its a delicate thing … we don't won't to throw out this long history and clinical experience but we must also look to find scientific evidence for our practice. We are moving into an era where we need to use evidence.

 

I think this is true for our dance practice we must look for the evidence and find ways to generate evidence to support our claims. We must be able to differentiate ideas about technique that are aesthetically or historically driven vs ideas that are anatomically supported as the two may or may not be in agreement. And we must abandon some of our traditions if there is reason to believe them to be harmful.

 

 

Sidebending

 

So lets turn to the biomechanics of the spine as an illustration of how this information might affect our practices.

 

Brains and movement

 

Do any of you know this animal? If you have seen the ted talk on brains and movement by ???? you will know it.

 

This is the humble sea squirt. It is interesting because this animal has different phases. A movement phase and a stationary phase. It starts life as a larvae type thing that can move around. It has a primative nervous system and brain. At some point it binds itself to a rock and then promptly ingests its own brain.

 

The reason we have developed a brain is for movement. No movement no brain.

 

In a human being we have a very sophisticated brain. Do you remember this idea that we only use 10 percent of our brains. Well its wrong, a human being delicately balanced on two small points uses more than half their brain for staying upright so that we can locomote to the shops and back.

 

You could say that the capacity for philosophy is a by product of our ability for sophisticated movement??

 

A human being is first and foremost a locomotive animal. We evolved to move.

 

If we look at our evolutionary history it is clear that a great deal of it has been spent walking and running.

 

We have for most of our history been hunters and gatherers. And if you look at the few places in the world where hunter/gatherer people still exist you can see that such people do an incredible amount of moving. The average hunter and gatherer would walk the equivalent of crossing australia in the space of a year. Thats 11 km a day every day and they would walk that everyday of their lives.

 

We can therefore make the case that our primary movement is gait.

It is walking and running.

 

We may not think of ourselves as being movement specialists but there is strong evidence to suggest that humans do somethings better than any other animals.

 

We are experts in sweating. And actually we are experts in endurance and in particular running. We can run for longer than any other animal even the most untrained can run far. Usain bolt can be beat by even the slowest of dogs but we could all run our dogs down as they cannot cool themselves as efficiently as we can.

 

So thats interesting we are not built for speed but we are built to move and to move for long periods of time. We are experts in endurance, in both walking and running.  These are our primary motoric patterns.

 

We can look at locomotion and in so doing distil biomechanical concepts and paramenters of how the spine operates which if we follow may allow us to move our spines consciously in the most functional and supportive way possible.

 

Practical Component of the Talk

1) Rotation of the spine - resonance and ease in moderate rotation.

2) Spine moving in locomotion in all three planes

3) Moderate angulation

4) Lumbar curve oscillating in a neutral zone.

 

Anatomical Considerations -

Vulnerabilities of the spine in verticality.

Why rotation and Flexion of the spine are problematic in vertical weightbearing. - posterior longitudinal ligament, disc anatomy.  Why preserving the curves of the spine are important for load bearing

Lower thoracic anatomical adaptations that fascilitate tri-planar/axial motion.

 

Demonstrations of sidebending

moderate rotation, triplanar motion, preservation of the lumbar curve.  

 

 

 *Note by IDOCDE editor: DUe to a technical problem the sound quality in the video is less than ideal. We apologize!