I watched Wayne McGregor‘s interview on Hardtalk today, and something he said has really stuck with me:
“…the body is the most technologically literate thing in the world”.
Not only in this one sentence did he make the body sound enormously amazing (“I want one!”), but there is a HUGE morsel of truth about it.
McGregor’s approach to dance is stamped within his everyday language, biological and technological terms scattering through his sentences. Even more endearing is his association with the body as a huge computer system. The complexity of functioning cannot be compared to anything else in this world. From the skeletal, muscular and nervous system to the function of memory and recall, using our bodies as instruments just got a whole lot more exciting.
I don’t know about you, but my muscles constantly murmur. Sometimes in excitement, sometimes in protest. I rehearsed for eight hours today and it was exhilarating, it’s what I would do every day if I could, but until that’s possible, I make to with the experience of working with a body that is not quite at it’s peak. Hearing this phrase of McGregor’s, I’m heartened and more able to tame my frustrations and re-frame these negative ideas into a new context.
I’m able to see how amazing it is that my body (being the complex thing that it is) can not only remember physical phrases it’s being taught so quickly, but can draw on muscle memory, “rebooting” of my system so it could function at a faster and more efficient level. And I didn’t even need to defrag.
Marvelous, isn’t it?