Yesterday I attended a football game, a highly rare occurrence for me. I still don't understand the rules of the game (and seriously, don't bother trying to explain; what I don't care about just doesn't stick), but I enjoyed the pageant and virtuosity of all the performances: the players, the coaches, the referees, the cheerleaders, the band, the fans.
In honor of the game (and Stanford's crushing victory, ahem, "Go Cards!"), I offer forth some of Richard Schechner's words on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the body through performance training:
"In preparing performers to perform, rigorous exercises reshape their bodies. This is as true of kathakali as it is of football, of ballet as it is of shamanism...Each genre deforms and reforms the body by introducing disequilibrium, a problem to be solved by a new balancing specific to the action: ballet's way of unbalancing-rebalancing is not football's is not a Huichol shaman's is not noh drama's and so forth. But each form needs to play dangerously with the body, to deconstruct and reconstruct it according to its own plan of action. The body is deconstructed--opened, made provisional, uncreated, enters Brahma's night--so that it can be recreated according to plan. The plans are not fixed. They change, sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly. Ballet's body, and football's, and so on, are each a maya-lila of possibility. And as many genres as exist, untold others could exist: of natural balancing there may be limits, but no such limit hinders the invention of new unbalancing-rebalancing cycles according to not-yet-known codes." (The Future of Ritual, p. 40)
The bodies created by the practice of football training and competition are beautiful and graceful in their own right. But I'm even more excited about the forms of embodiment that await as we continue to invent new ways to unbalance and rebalance ourselves against the weight of the ever-shifting world.
I know a little bit about that. We see people all the time that are unbalanced *from our perspective as CrossFitters*, though they may have been well suited to their other passions. This rebalancing process is interesting to watch. It is never completely the same - each genetic composition responds to stimulus differently. Each body expresses itself in most efficient response, but each expression is unique.
ReplyDeletemayhaps tangentially related... Faron and I have had a series of conversations about girls playing football. There have actually been a spaight of yahoo-news articles about girl kickers in the midwest. Faron's dream was to make the team as a kicker - because that would be her best chance - but then work her way up to being a receiver. This lead to a conversation about why a girl couldn't go straight to being a receiver. It's a graceful position. You run patterns, you have to have "soft hands" and balance a lot of qualities associated with volleyball actually. It's not like being a lineman you're not in constant physical contact. The problem, we realized, is the getting hit. After you catch the ball someone's going to try to kill you. Faron pointed out that, yeah, BUT you LEARN to get hit. You have a certain posture and fluidity that makes it hurt less. This leads me to speculate that the reason we don't have girl receivers (and maybe quarterbacks) is because it would be radical to have a bunch of women walking around ready to get hit... And also inspires me to mercilessly train my daughter into a Division one receiver.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the thoughts, guys. So interesting! And Johanna, I'm fascinated by this idea of how learning to be hit, it does sound radical to teach and learn that process. Makes me think of martial arts, a bit, transformation of energy from one variety (the trying to kill you kind) to another, less mortal variety.
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