Republic of Movement

Ido Portal mentorship-led movement studio. Based in Miami.

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Killing Your Self – Why Eliminating Style Is Beautiful

Style is habit, and a habit is NOT who you are. In constraining style, we evolve. I was conflicted about this at first, but I discovered that eliminating mannerism provided an opportunity to rise above the illusory self I take for granted, and see the outline of something more expansive and inclusive.

We identify with aspects of ourselves by habit more often than by choice. This is an over-identification, an addiction to a way of being. It is a comfort zone. Even when it is something we dislike about ourselves, we can hide behind the shield of “authenticity”. We are so obsessed with being authentic, that we end up inauthentic. By insisting on being the way we think we are, we are unable to be who we really can be.

I can’t afford to be caught up in how I imagine I am, in pretending to be myself pretending to be myself. So I have decided that my movement practice is a space where style is not permitted, where I aim for the essence and to eliminate all manifestations of style.

This aspect of silencing a false self isn’t about hating my self… it’s because I love that I am, and I want to discover myself. How can I know who I am, if I take for granted that these mannerisms are who I am? I am not what I first saw when I first saw myself. How much of me remains hidden behind the veil, because I refused to look a bit further? Well, this is my process for looking further.

Unexpectedly, this “self”-effacement has only elevated and refined the applications of my “style”. When I let the djinn possess me, when I join in the aether of ecstasis and become the vessel…

But wasn’t that obvious? If manifestations of style are actually forms of possession… if genius comes from genie, and music comes the muse, if all forms of expression comes from the external… Shouldn’t the ability to empty the vessel, to allow for more inhabitation, result in a higher form, a more complex and nuanced and fulfilling form of “expression”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV8JyhgeSAw

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What you see is (not) what you get

What you see is (not) what you get. Our reality is virtual, built on semantics, filtered by psyches, and mediated by associations. 

This is old hat for the Vedic philosophy, where our perceptions will always be hidden behind the veil of maya, illusion. And for the Jewish mystics as well – the Hebrew word for world, Olam, is more aptly translated with an association of the mystery, what is hidden, what cannot be seen. And Bertrand Russell says as much in the Problems of Philosophy – we cannot see things as they are; we project a visual idea onto the objective world, but that is a subjective experience, not inherent to reality itself. If all three of these are pointing at the same truth, that we cannot witness an objective reality, then there is a curious plot twist: whatever we imagine reality to truly be, it cannot be, because we’ve imagined it as thus. 

The question is not “is this real?”. The question is – what does it mean to you? 

We limit ourselves to thinking of as real that which reflects light. But our relationships, the systems that surround us like some mycelial network, our semantics… all are real. More real than the philosopher’s archetypal table, which turns into a chair when I sit on it. One becomes two, two becomes none. 

What you see is always more or less than what there is. 

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Tarantism: Movement as healing?

Can you imagine a condition with physiological symptoms such as the blackening of the hands and face, causing vomiting, fainting, and reportedly death, which had no remedy… save for an uncontrolled shaking and flailing that can be said to mimic only dance? 

Tarantism is one such condition. What explains such a phenomenon? Is it reducible to anomaly or hysteria? Would it be any more anomalous than the ability of psychological stressors and loneliness to be immunosuppressant or carcinogenic? Does it perhaps instead shed light on the human condition? Maybe that says more of our relationship to hysteria… maybe hysteria isn’t some side-effect of the proper mind, but is rather a proper-effect of the side-mind… 

The existence of Tarantism also opens up lines of inquiry within the field of of movement. What is going on with that category of movements that is  not just involuntary, but voluntarily involuntary? What is it about movement that we invite, that we can guide but not directly control? Does this overlap with dance? Is Tarantism a dance? Is an exorcism a dance? Or is dance a form of possession – in which you set the parameters with your intentions and background and the patterns stored in your basal ganglia, but you don’t decide what comes next. What’s the name for the factor that decides what comes next? A djinn? A dybbuk? 

We’ll be screening a documentary on the topic of Tarantism on November 2nd. Here’s the event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/626958657711019/

“… began first moving the feet, legs shortly afterwards. He stood on his knees. Soon after an interval he arose swaying. Finally, in the space of a quarter of an hour he was leaping, nearly three palms from the ground. Sighed, but with such great impetus, that it terrorised bystanders, and before an hour, the black was gone from his hands and face, and he regained his native colour.” 

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Existential Movement

Movement as a practice is a way of operating the most sophisticated tech, this human “mindbody system” (for lack of better word): reducible neither to the flesh nor the neuron, but rather considered as the collective of the hardware, software, and firmware.

Humanity has never come so close to losing itself – the juggernaut of progress is moving so fast, leaving us choking on the dust of a modern existential crisis. Who are we, who do we want to be? Movement can be a major piece of that puzzle – nothing else both sits at the origin of what we are and can, yet simultaneously guide us along a path of growth and complexity.

This is what makes movement so appealing as a practice. Beyond its functionality, beyond its contributions to health, movement can serve us in times that feel like standing on the precipice of losing ourselves.

Just as breath is invaluable for sitting at the intersection of conscious and unconscious processes, and thus became a primary tool in meditation, movement is invaluable for sitting at the intersection of origin and complexity. These two opposing poles, where we come from and where we go, compete in what seems a zero-sum game – as binarism gives way to cyborgism, as dualities yield multiplicities… Do we align ourselves with the past or the future?

But, inside of this dilemma, a hidden path…

This hidden path hints at resolutions to our greatest challenges – social, technological, political, spiritual… If we can find the hidden answer to the riddle of the zeitgeist, we can push open the door to a new era, the next step in evolution.

Everything we’re doing through this movement practice seems to be for the sake of injecting more complexity into this system. Whether it’s improving predictive systems and timing mechanisms, refining motor maps, developing coordination of disparate elements to yield a coherent outcome, building an internal/cybernetic architecture, pattern acquisition, etc… it all takes us towards higher complexity.

And yet, even as the complexity of the system increases, something of the origins remains, and indeed, becomes strengthened and fortified. Perhaps this is because physical movement is fundamentally constrained by every evolutionary step we’ve taken since our protean origins. Inside of the limitation, the seeds of freedom. The freedom to grow and expand while staying close to the source to remain, at heart, human.

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At the Edge

When you’re going to the edge, whichever edge, the edge of reason and sanity, or of weightshift and balance… what defines the moment is the quality of attention. You can afford no lapse in concentration, no hubris to lure you beyond the base of support. 

To stay sane, to keep balance as you flirt with madness and falling… this is how poets live, but it’s how we all realize the moment. 

Why do you think we return to these places, over and over? 

Where do you think the mystery and paradox of creativity is born? All life is an improvisation, but we’re asleep to that fact 99% of the time – making it feel like anything but. We live for the other 1% – when we realize, oh shit, I have no idea what’s coming next. Of course, we never knew what was coming next, we all just fall for the statistical anomaly of a seemingly persisting state of things. Pattern recognition is the boon of humanity, and the curse. 

So it’s up to us as a society to find the edges, to constantly generate pattern interruption. 

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The Missing Body User Manual

It’s curious – we come into this world with the absolute highest form of technological development, the human body, and seemingly zero instruction on how to operate it. 

Why is that? Why don’t we come into this world with a body user manual? At first glance, it would seem obvious that evolutionarily, we should be optimized to survive by coming into this world with only the best instincts. Instincts for eating, for moving, for fighting… Why do I need to train to avoid the startle reflex when I get hit in the face? Why must I work on coordination, timing, distance management (as Ido puts it, installing the booster packs for our instincts)? 

One common answer is thatwe are “distracted” from the body user manual by our modern environment. But… maybe the answer is less based on an argument in favor of a lost past, and more… science. 

Why, from a neuroscience and evolutionary biology perspective, are we not optimized with a “body user manual” (“perfect” instincts)? 

The reason is… because not having a body user manual IS the most optimal. By sacrificing a user manual, we ended up with something much greater – the most neuro-flexibility of any animal.

Unlike other animals, we don’t have a “natural” way of being. Our natural way is to invent artifice at the first opportunity. This allows us to be the most complex creatures on this planet, the most anti-fragile, the most creative… We can pick and build our instincts, to create the vision of ourselves that we wish; that’s amazing enough that I could spend all day doing it…