BodySpeak™ - Samuel Avital's unique approach to the art of movement - is difficult to place in any category. To attempt to describe it is to enter the realm Avital calls "The Elusive Obvious."

In its precise analysis of physical movement it might be described as bodywork. In its creative expressions it can look like dance. In its slow-motional meditative aspect it resembles Tai Chi. It incorporates elements of physical discipline and at the same time develops an extraordinary capacity for mental focus. But it is neither a religious practice nor a form of psychotherapy.

BodySpeak™ is par excellence a method of activating creativity by activating movement - in ways that are startling, provocative, playful, exhilarating. It is for anyone who struggles with the effects of inertia. And isn't that all of us from time to time? "A body at rest tends to remain at rest and a body in motion tends to remain in motion," reads Newton's law. Couch potatoes be forewarned. BodySpeak™ is no spectator sport. Its method of triggering outer movement seems to trigger an inner movement as well. Inner inertia, one discovers, is the real block to creativity. BodySpeak™ overcomes the debilitating effects of this innertia.

Many of its specific techniques derive from mime, yet in a whole new realization. Whereas mime is traditionally taught in a theatrical setting as a tool for honing the craft of the actor or clown, or as an art form in itself, Avital uses mime as a tool for self-discovery and for awakening creativity. "Mime is not the destination," he advises. "It's the launching platform."

"Man is the greatest mimic of all animals," said Aristotle, "and it is by mimicry that he acquires his earliest knowledge."(1) We learn by miming. At some point, though, we lose this marvelous tool of spontaneous learning, perhaps when we are taught the lesson of "Simon Says": you can only mimic Simon when he gives you permission, and if you succumb to spontaneity, you're out of the game. By these and other not-so-subtle methods, we're taught to control spontaneous expression with the check of the intellect.

"Behavior modeling," the psychological term for mimicry, became a byword in the practice of psychology as an alternative to talk therapy. Actual attempts at behavior modeling typically fall far short, however, because most people have lost the ability even to see what behavior they should be modeling! Or, if they do recognize the desired behavior, they are left to figure how to get their neglected and resistant bodies to reproduce it. For that matter who wants merely to imitate? As an art form, mime teaches "behavior modeling" but with a creative spin.

Avital uses the tool of mime to reawaken an elemental creative capacity. The effect can be stunning. One of his former students, storyteller Dot Ormes, gives her impression of atelier Avital:

"Working with Samuel is somewhat like being the over-curious sorcerer's apprentice. Enticed by the deceptive simplicity of the work, I dive in and suddenly find myself drowning in a flood, with brooms marching endlessly back and forth carrying even more buckets of water to douse me. In the nick of time, the flood subsides. The Mimagician returns, grabs me by a soggy collar and we turn back to page one in the Book of Silence. . . .My teacher is a big ring of invisible keys - they dangle in my hands as I stand before as many unmarked invisible doors. There is no superficiality here. To slide easily on the surface of mime-form would be a betrayal of this art." (2)

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Avital's essay "What is Body Speak?" briefly describes the framework, method, and applicability of this training. But of course the best way to acquire an appreciation of Avital's work is to experience it directly, as thousands have already done. My first acquaintance - Avital had retired briefly from teaching at the time - came through a reading of some of his essays.

I found a disarming simplicity and directness of expression that rises, frequently, to the level of poetry. The essays have the freshness of being spoken, "voix vivante"in the workshop laboratory itself; and in fact they were for the most part dictated and then transcribed from tape recordings.

One of my particular favorites, "Facing the Mask," describes the mask session from Avital's summer program. Through a series of preparatory exercises, the training reaches this climactic point. It is an occasion of perfect peace and solemnity. As I first read the account, I had an unmistakable if indefinable sense of another, subtle movement just behind the stately measure of the words. Philosophers have called it Pure Being. Poets have simply described it. I was reminded of a poem by Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," which describes the phenomenon (3), in a literary setting:

The quiet of the house, the leaning of the reader, the merging of the reader with the calm of the surroundings, the access toperfection: there is a feeling of inner movement here as distilled in its simplicity and effect as the quiet calm that envelops the mask session. What distinguishes "Facing the Mask" as an account of such a moment, is that the narration is not an after-the-fact description of a fortuitous and transitory occurrence. As a hallmark of the genius of Avital's method, the mask encounter is characterized precisely by its ability to elicit in the experience of the participant, and with considerable certainty of effect, the sense of attunement and wonder that it describes. All the materials have been consciously assembled for the occasion. Although individual experiences will differ in details, participants in the mask encounter describe, with remarkable consistency, an occasion of quintessential discovery whose effects continue to reverberate long after the session is concluded.

It is important in reading "Facing the Mask" to realize that it is not the script for a guided visualization in the manner that this process is normally conducted. The participants are not sitting or lying down passively with eyes closed while the narrator takes them on a meditative journey. They are active: looking at the mask, putting it on, moving around the room, then slowly and deliberately taking on various postures and attitudes as prompted by the teacher, and, finally, removing the mask to ponder it once more. The session has the aesthetic elegance and meditative feel of Japanese Noh. There are elements of visualization, but they are engaged by a fully participative act-or visualizing the archetypal image of Warrior or Coward, for example, and then instantaneously embodying the archetype in precise and original ways. Mark Olsen, another of Avital's former students, describes the session as "a slow, gentle handshake with the lion inside."(5)

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The approach is thus more kinesthetic than visual. All the senses must come into play and are fully integrated in service of what Avital describes as active imagination. Imagination becomes an animating principle: not just a manipulation of mental objects in a mental landscape, but a physical embodiment of the image or concept. The distance between thought and action is compressed in both time and space. Through a subtle dialogue of action and response, a skill is developed in these sessions I would describe as "deep orientation." Psychic space and physical space merge and one learns to navigate the mental/physical terrain. The teacher acts as a compass, pointing the way.

I am reminded of an incident in Einstein's early life, an encounter with a compass, which was to affect him deeply. The episode is related by biographer Abraham Pais:

. . .Einstein spent his earliest years in a warm and stable milieu that was also stimulating. In his late sixties he singled out one particular experience from that period: "I experienced a miracle. . . as a child of four or five when my father showed me a compass." It excited the boy so much that "he trembled and grew cold." There had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden. . .the development of [our] world of thought is in a certain sense a flight away from the miraculous.(6)

Avital had an equally resonant experience as a child in a rendezvous with the horizon. ("The Horizon.") On an after school adventure in his native Morocco, he is lured into the countryside by the sight of a majestic tree in the distance. The young boy decides this must be the Tree of Life he has learned about in school. He concludes that the horizon line on which it stands must be the edge of the world. With sunset coming on, he reaches his destination only to discover that the edge of the world has moved and a new horizon looms in the distance! In the mist of twilight he feels embraced by the horizon and seems to merge with it. Realization comes in the words of an ancient sage: "I wandered in pursuit of my own self. I was the traveler and I am the destination."

What links these experiences is the sense of awe in an encounter with an object - a compass, a tree - that the adult world takes for granted. And both experiences are later recognized to have been, in a sense, defining moments that intimate a life direction - a compass pointing the way. Einstein never lost his sense of wonder. Avital also never lost the sense that something lay deeply hidden behind objects: call it the horizon, the destination, the self, the essence. Terminology is not important here. The direction might be science or art or a philosophy that links the two. What is important is the encounter itself and what is experienced and learned.

To follow the compass point, to embark on such a journey of discovery, it is necessary to begin at the beginning and look at the world with fresh eyes. For Avital, that has meant the necessity to reconsider everything that we ordinarily take for granted - primary movements, sensory experience, relationship to objects and people - and to re-awaken our sense of wonder in these things, to make "the invisible, visible and the ordinary, extraordinary." In so doing, he has found a method to reproduce in the workshop laboratory an occasion for his students to experience, on multiple levels, the equivalent of Einstein's adventure with the compass or his own encounter with the horizon.

How is this accomplished? The answer may be found by retracing the route taken.

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E A R L Y L I F E

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Avital was born to a Sephardic family in the village of Sefrou near the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. He was the son of loving and hardworking parents and had a particularly close relationship with his grandfather, a respected spiritual leader of the community, successful trader, and benefactor of a charitable circle that performed its offices anonymously. It was called, with wry humor, "The Society of the Lazy Ones." Avital has fond recollections of being an unwitting emissary on their secret missions of goodwill. He also recalls his grandfather's wise counsel.

On one noteworthy occasion, grandfather and grandson joined in the traditional grape stomping in preparation for wine making. Up to his knees in half-fermented grapes, the boy became increasingly talkative. As was his grandfather's custom, instruction came in the gentle form of a story. Avital recounts:

"Before one is born," my grandfather said, "one is given a certain amount of words to use in one's lifetime -a word account in a Cosmic Word Bank. You must be very careful in using words properly, and with measure, and in how you use them to express yourself. Every word you use is out of your cosmic account. That is why you should turn your tongue seven times within your mouth before uttering a word. Otherwise you may finish your quota early in life, and you will find yourself mute." "My grandfather's words made a very great impression on me as a young boy, no doubt contributing to my decision to make my life work" in the Theater of Silence.(7)

Community life in Morocco became a cherished memory for Avital, a remembrance of "utopia" in the root sense of that word - nowhere, in all his travels, again to be found. And the travels were soon to begin.

Possessed of a fierce idealism, he decided, at fourteen - above the strong objections of his family and in a dangerous time - to emigrate to Israel. It was a perilous passage. Jews were prevented by law from emigrating, and Samuel, even though traveling in disguise, was almost captured three times. He eventually reached Israel by ship and entered an entirely new phase - kibbutz life. He studied physics, agronomy, theology, art, and theater.

Avital's interest in theater carried him to Jerusalem, where he met Solomon "Moni" Yakim, also destined to become a renowned teacher of mime and theater.

Another defining moment, a second encounter with the horizon, came for Avital when, in a darkened Jerusalem movie theater - a "cinema paradiso" - in front of a flickering screen, he encountered for the first time the genius of Chaplin. The film was Limelight - one of Chaplin's later works and not his most remarkable - but it had the effect of a revelation on a boy from a Morroccan village. Movement - deft, subtle, expressive movement - was an art in itself. Movement could convey what words could not. Movement could be studied and mastered as an art form. Avital's compass began to point northwest. He talked Moni into taking the next step with him: they would go to Paris to study theater.

In Paris of the late 50's, studying dance and acting at the Sorbonne, Avital found that for the artist both misery and ecstasy were constant companions - the misery of surviving on baguettes and sardines and the ecstasy of artistic discovery. The acknowledged masters of mime - Decroux, Barrault, Marceau - introduced Avital to a vocabulary of wonders.

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TEACHERS AND LESSONS

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From Decroux, Avital acquired the grammar of movement. He learned to analyze minutely, the complex maneuvers of corporeal mime and then to reconstitute the analysis in movements of elegance and simplicity. Decroux's approach was scientific, detail-oriented, and supremely focused, emphasizing physical concreteness and precision of execution. He could be a severe taskmaster. Moments of humor were startling: "Samuel and Solomon," Decroux pronounced to Samuel and Moni in the midst of a session,"I see I have a prophet and a king in here."

Decroux the idealist transmitted his ideals to his students: "The mime actor must have the mind of a novelist, the body of an athlete, and an ideal in his heart."(8)

From Barrault, Avital learned the poetry of movement. Barrault was as expansive as Decroux was contained, his art as expressive as Decroux's was silent. Barrault regarded the body as the vehicle of poetry itself. Moving away from "pure mime," he endeavored to synthesize mime and text: speak like an actor, move like a mime, he said. From Barrault, Avital realized that the whole body must be the mouthpiece of expression.

Decroux the scientist, Barrault the poet. Together they had invented "subjective mime"- as distinguished from the "objective mime" of the nineteenth century.

Objective mime is primarily concerned with production of the familiar mime illusions - the invisible barrier, walking against the wind, creation of objects in space, etc. - by a system of parallels and counterweights. In the nineteenth century these illusions were enjoyed for their own sake, as an element of the spectacle of the theater. In the twentieth century, largely through the investigations of Decroux, objective mime became a means to explore the relationship between a human being and an external object or opposing force.(9)

Subjective mime, by contrast, was an exploration of interior states: feelings, attitudes of being. Barrault defined it as the "study of states of the soul translated into bodily expression. The metaphysical attitude of the man in space."(10) Decroux "often in his lessons spoke about how an actor carrying a heavy physical weight closely resembled one carrying a heavy metaphysical one."(11) In Avital's view, mime concretizes metaphysics. Where other arts may represent a concept or truth - the dancer dances it, the writer writes it, the painter paints it, the actor speaks it - the mime becomes it.

Drama had its origins in the sacred. Greek drama developed out of the sacred arts of pantomime. By miming the actions of the gods, it was believed they were invoked and propitiated. Movement itself was a sacred principle. Heraclitus held that all was movement, flow, and change. Aristotle termed the creative principle the "Prime Mover ." Movement - in its infinite varying - is the basis of every created thing. As the very essence of theater, mime, in the estimation of Decroux and Barrault, was the means of returning theater to that sacred source. "In the beginning was the word. BEFORE the word there was motion, vibration, movement, the source of all life," Avital affirmed.

Through his own synthesis of the work of his great teachers, Avital realized, importantly, that as significant as the study of mime was for those with theatrical aspirations, its methods should not be sequestered in the theatrical preserve. He composed a brief fable, "The Dancing Egg" to illustrate his point. Mime, the elegantly simple, perfectly contained, dancing egg is cracked open - taken beyond its confines - to restore the past and nurture the future. The time-honored theatrical metaphor, "all the world's a stage," would finally have to be embraced in its full implications: that art and life become one. We might then achieve the condition, as in some cultures, where there is no differentiation of the two. (12)

But part of the task of apprenticeship for anyone learning to master a skill is to apply the skill in its intended arena. For mime that arena has traditionally been the theater. Marcel Marceau, Avital's third great teacher, provided an example of applying the art to the practical realities of performance. With Decroux, performance had been out of the question: it was not allowed. Mime was reserved for the laboratory. Marceau, on the other hand, encouraged performance. "Try your wings, Samuel," he said.

Indirectly, however, Marceau's particular form of expression was to contribute to Avital's growing conviction that the techniques of mime could and should be applied beyond the theater. Like Chaplin's Tramp, Marceau's character, Bip, is an Everyman. Bip appears in every imaginable situation - Bip in the Metro, Bip the Host, Bip the Gendarme, Bip in Love, Bip Looks for a Job, Bip Commits Suicide - provoking, by turns, both pathos and mirth. Marceau's work illustrated that mime was capable of representing the gamut of human experience. So successful was his creation, though, that Marceau became its prisoner.(13) Audiences were not receptive to Marceau outside of the character of Bip or even out of white face. Here was surely a warning of the creative hazards of theatrical performance.

As audience expectation rigidified, mime itself was to become, to a certain extent, the prisoner of Marceau's success. The silent, white-faced performance became synonymous with mime. Many who wanted to emulate Marceau's success, but who had neither his talent nor skill, donned white face and began to invade the personal space of any hapless passerby. But as Decroux, Barrault, Marceau, Avital, and also LeCoq (another renowned innovator) have demonstrated, mime is an art of great subtlety and complexity. It is not even, necessarily, a silent art. Pantomime is the term reserved for silent mime. Mime, on the other hand, may or may not be silent. It may use text or music. Silence, when it is incorporated, is like other gestures - a tool of expression.

But in the early 1960's, Marceau was just beginning to ride the crest of his fame, and through his efforts mime was gaining wider and wider recognition. Much can be learned in an encounter with an audience, and with the growing and receptive audience for mime, Avital embarked on the journeyman phase of his apprenticeship. He began to tour with Maximilien Decroux, Etienne Decroux's son, and then with his own solo show. In the meantime, Moni had left to New York. Samuel joined him there in 1964, to perform in the Pantomime Theater of New York, which Moni had founded, and in off-Broadway theaters. He also taught in New York schools.

In America, Avital felt many sensations experienced by other immigrants arriving from Europe: a mixture of terror and exhilaration. America was as vast and open as Europe was tight and restricted. In America, sans frontières, Avital felt he could breathe and expand.

After a few years of touring North and South America, Avital was appointed artist-in-residence at Southern Methodist University. In 1971 he was invited to perform in Denver, Colorado, and decided to take a side trip to the nearby university town of Boulder. Impressed by the physical beauty of the place and by the receptivity of the people he met, Avital agreed to perform in Boulder. The day after the sold-out performance, more than 200 people showed up for Avital's first workshop. He was urged to stay and within the year had founded his own school, Le Centre du Silence. The Boulder Mime Theater was formed a year later and toured locally and nationally for nine years. In 1975, Avital established The International Summer Mime Workspace, an annual event that attracts students world-wide.

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THE WORKSHOP LABORATORY

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In these early years Le Centre du Silence became Avital's laboratory, where he could fully distill the teachings of the mime masters and develop his own unique methods. The work was improvisational and experimental, employing some prepared exercises along with anecdotes and stories. Students took notes and gradually the method evolved, always in direct response to the participants' needs.

Most of the students in these years came because they were interested in theater and were drawn by Avital's unique method of developing theatrical technique. But it was clear that their personal needs went beyond the requirements of professional apprenticeship. The late 60's and early 70's were a time when many people were drawn toward deep personal and spiritual search. Avital felt concerned to develop for his students a means to engage in these explorations that would provide fulfillment but avoid some of the pitfalls of other paths that had become popular at the time.

The demands of life in the West could not be fully addressed, he understood, by methods that drew people out of the stream of life for prolonged periods. It was too easy to drop out entirely or at least to opt out and live life in a state of numbness, feeling personally alienated and professionally stifled. The divisions of life were taken for granted to such an extent that the task had become not only to integrate art and life but also self-discovery and life.

Creativity had always been an important issue for Avital. He found that while traditional methods might be effective in developing either physical or mental discipline, they did not directly stimulate creativity. In fact it was essential to practice the discipline precisely in the time-honored manner in order to realize the greatest benefit. This was true of yoga or Tai Chi or even classical ballet, and for certain types of sitting meditation practice or martial arts. Obviously great benefit can be derived through a judicious practice of these and other such disciplines. Discipline is surely the foundation of excellence in any art, including mime. It was necessary to bear in mind, though, that any discipline is not an end in itself, it is a tool of greater realization. The finger is not the moon.

Avital developed a number of exercises with the purpose of directly accessing creativity. They come into play in all the workshops but have been assembled and condensed in "The Journey from Thought to Action." It's an eye-opener. When Avital resumed teaching recently, I participated in this intensive weekend event.

We began with "Presentation With and Without Words." Exactly as the title of the exercise suggests, each participant is asked to introduce himself or herself first, with words, and then, without words. The second half of the exercise is followed by a group commentary, which Avital calls "The One Who . . ," with each member of the group summing up his or her dominant impression of the individual's silent presentation: "The One Who Was Shy," "The One Who Walked in Circles," "The One Who Blew Kisses," and so on. The comments are meant to be brief and impressionistic. They have the effect of opening up the group and introducing the feedback principle: creativity does not exist in a vacuum. We are constantly taking in information, synthesizing it, and giving it back in a new form.

Another exercise, actually a series of exercises, called "Act and React," illustrated this principle in a most startling way. We began by walking around the room in a group. There were twelve of us; a comfortable size, I felt. On Avital's cue (he would strike percussion sticks together) we had to freeze in place and carry out an instruction: to represent an emotion, for example, or utter the exact thought that was in our minds the moment the sticks were clicked. The purpose was to lubricate our wheels and get us back into the practice of manifesting our thoughts with freshness and immediacy. Avital would select a few individuals to hold a pose that he found to be particularly illuminating. The rest of us would move around this living statuary, offering our own insights or marveling when someone had achieved the very essence of immobility.

Then came the magical moment. For the next activity of the exercise, we had to walk the room once again at random and then, at the instant the sticks were struck, take a pose in response to whatever occurred in our vicinity. There were no other instructions given: just act and react to each other instan-taneously. We were surprised to discover that our immediate response to one another had produced a coalescence: our groupings had meaning as if a sculptor or director had premeditated the tableaux. The effect was as stunning as if a chemical compound had suddenly precipitated out of a solution.

For the physicist, the doctor, and the engineer who were participating in this workshop, for the lawyer who had spent her professional life wading hip-deep in language, or the 75-year-old self-declared ski-bum who wanted to try something new, or the shy woman who never dreamed she would feel so safe in such an environment, for the massage therapist, the artist, the writer, the timepiece restorer, and the professional storyteller, for the scholar who wanted her book to be true - there was something here for everyone. "Every artistic genius is a specialized type of mime,"(14) M. J. d'Udine observed after studying with Dalcroze, an innovator in the arts of movement who influenced Decroux and many others. In my weekend tour of Avital's atelier I realized the full truth of this insight.

One of the classic illusions of mime, the creation of a box in space, became "The Moving-Box Encounter." First, we learned to form the box by parallel movements of the hands. Then, we enlarged it or contracted it so that it became big enough to lean against or small enough to pop in the mouth. Next, we learned to move around the room in silence carrying and manipulating, creatively, our cube of space. Finally, we practiced transferring boxes back and forth to one another: this moving meditation had become a careful and tender, silent, dialogue.

The physicist had come to the workshop because he was curious about mime. "There had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden," said Einstein. This is a territory explored by mime that would, of course, be of interest to a physicist: MimeWorld where the MimeMagician plays with the laws of motion and sometimes upends them, defying gravity and creating objects in thin air; where eye-knots are tied in superstrings; where MimeTime is an arrow that bends back on itself; and MimeSpace, the moving box, is the original hypercube. Parallels, counterweights, "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" - physicists, engineers, and mimes are well-equipped to understand such things. And the mime embodies the knowledge.

"Apart from the five senses," Decroux wrote, "there is nevertheless one that serves the mime."(15) He couldn't put a name to this sense and, until quite recently, "kinesthesia" had not been given the status of being considered a "sense." It is this faculty that is activated and heightened through the explorations of mime, and that makes mime a true physics of the body, as well as an art.

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T H E "S I X T H S E N S E"

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Ever since Aristotle first identified the five senses - sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, we've been used to thinking that we have just these five. Because the senses can be located in clearly recognizable organs of the body - the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin - they are also commonly thought to be "discrete," distinct and functioning separately from one another.

Actually, the senses work in conjunction. Taste and smell, for example: food tastes bland when we have a cold. Sight and hearing reciprocate to help us judge distance and relationships between objects. Sight and touch also work together. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty describes how these two senses, once considered to operate in totally separate perceptual fields, actual coordinate. He calls this process "The Intertwining":

"The look. . .envelops, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them, it moves in its own way with its abrupt and imperious style, and yet the views taken are not desultory - I do not look at a chaos, but at things - so that finally one cannot say if it is the look or if it is the things that command. . . We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out of the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible. . . Since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world. It is a marvel too little noticed that every movement of my eyes - even more, every displacement of my body - has its place in the same visible universe that I itemize and explore with them, as, conversely, every vision takes place somewhere in the tactile space. There is a double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the visible; the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one." (16)

Merleau-Ponty comprehends, with great subtlety, the interrelationship of the sense of sight and of touch, but cannot quite allow that their fields could actually merge. A mime is capable of providing direct access to this knowledge - embodied knowledge - that the visual and tactile fields do merge, even in everyday life. We could not walk a straight line toward a destination if they didn't. In fact, the only realm in which perceptual fields are separated, artificially, is in the text of a philosopher, or in the experience of individuals influenced by that type of analysis.

Someone familiar with Avital's work might recognize in Merleau-Ponty's chiasmus a fair description of "The Eye-Knot" exercise. Two people stand facing each other. They make eye contact and visualize a cord connecting their eyes.(17) The goal is to move in such a way as to "tie" a knot in this cord without "breaking" it by losing eye contact. Participants typically become so absorbed that when Avital comes, stealthily, with his imaginary scissors and cuts the cord, they are startled and fall to the ground!

We do, in fact, have more than five senses. ("Five senses?" Avital asks. "What about the other 95?") And they all inter-relate. Perceptual researchers have identified a number of "new" candidates for recognition as full-fledged "senses."The sense of hot or cold, for instance, is pretty basic. It is related to touch but with a thermostat attached. Pressure sensitivity is even trickier. Or how about our sense of position in space - vertical? horizontal? upside down? right side up? There is, at least, this "sixth sense" which is increasingly being recognized for the profound effect it has on the way we function as perceiving beings. This is the kinesthetic sense, or kinesthesia.

Kinesthesia might be termed "the common sense" because it functions to integrate the workings of the other senses. Renaissance anatomists speculated that there must be a "common sense," which coordinates the functioning of the other senses, and they attempted to locate it in various organs of the brain. We now know that organs and receptors distributed throughout the body are responsible for the kinesthetic effect.

A basic dictionary definition of kinesthesia is "the sensation of bodily position, presence, or movement resulting chiefly from stimulation of sensory nerve endings in muscles, tendons, and joints by the force of gravity."(18) Kinesthesia is also activated by the vestibular system, the fluid-filled organs of balance in the inner ear. In its integrative function, kinesthesia depends upon the subtle interactions of all the senses: our impressions of degrees of light and sound, visual and auditory depth perception, sense of warmth and cold and the effects of breezes - to name only a few of a multitude of sensory inputs. Kinesthesia is, in short, the sense by which we orient ourselves to the world - our internal compass.

For the mime, this sense functions in the way sight does for the painter, or taste for the gourmet cook, or touch for the sculptor, or scent for the perfumier: it is both tool of exploration and object of exploration. The purpose is to use the sense and refine it at the same time.

Martial arts expert and movement trainer George Leonard observes in The Silent Pulse that "This delicate, sophisticated sense. . .not only helps us to stand straight, but to think straight . . . .thought is involved with the body, its balance, its ability to integrate movement and sensing and touch."(19)

In its full sense, kinesthesia has two aspects, attention and attunement, which arise out of the interplay of rest and motion (Avital's "Motion/Stillness" principle). Attention is the act of placing awareness. It is a highly conscious state depending on a clear sense of the person or thing being attended to and of one's own internal state. It is a condition of restful alertness, calm focus. When full attention is given, attunement becomes possible. Attunement means to come into harmony or pleasant interaction. It depends on a feeling for the natural rhythms underlying all movements - the back and forth pendulum swing of give and take. This is the sense that develops in Steven's poem, "The House Was Quiet. . ." and in Avital's mask session. It is this sense, also, that harmonizes the imbalance of opposites. (See "Beyond Opposites.") Paradox is experienced as a "tilt" in the mind. When this tilt is played out physically, the mental tilt adjusts.

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KINESTHESIA AND THE MIND/BODY SPLIT

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According to psychologist Howard Gardner, (20) there are seven distinct types of intelligence: verbal, musical, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, and two types of personal intelligence - self-awareness and social skill. Gardner's scheme has been influential because it recognizes types of intelligence in addition to the verbal and logical, which have long held a privileged position in our culture.

Although there is value in making such distinctions, Gardner has acknowledged that in practice the types of intelligence cannot be precisely distinguished. They work in concert with one another to make possible such skills as hand/eye coordination. Intelligence as a whole depends on input from all the senses. Mind and body cannot really be separated from each other. The term "bodymind" has been used to point up the fact that, in effect, we think with our whole bodies.

Bodily intelligence - including full sensory awareness and attunement to body rhythms - underlies all the forms of intelligence Gardner distinguishes. Verbal and musical skill are to a great extent dependent upon a sense of rhythm, balance, and proper placement. Logical and mathematical ability also require a sense of balance and proportion. Spatial awareness and orientation are obviously kinesthetic.

Personal and social skills have an especially strong kines-thetic basis. A healthy person is described as "well-balanced." Being in harmony with others is being "in sync." Successful communication depends to a great extent on kinesthetic awareness, including a sense of speech and body rhythms and the ability to tune in to the presence of another human being. Avital recognized this principle when developing BodySpeak™. The purpose was to activate body awareness in service of communication and to expand the communicator's repertoire, not by a simplistic reading of body language - as if it were a magically revealing secret code - but through a deep investigation of how the body speaks.

The kinesthetic sense is thus not really separate or isolatable from the other senses. It is enhanced by input from all the senses and must coordinate their activities. We get a feel for the presence of another by visual cues, by auditory cues, by tactile cues, and so on. This is why participants in sensory deprivation studies report losing a sense of bodily contact or presence altogether and why astronauts outside the field of gravity in the weightless conditions of space retain their self-possession and kinesthetic sense (if somewhat awkwardly). (21)

By means of kinesthesia, each sense takes on tactile qualities. This is how a look can sometimes feel shockingly intimate, or words can seem to stroke - or strike. An old Chinese text has a lovely way of describing how the kinesthetic sense works: "It's like reaching for a pillow in the dark. . .Throughout the body are hands and eyes."(22)

The kinesthetic sense plays an important role in development of some of the subtler faculties. It seems to be a vital component of intuition, for example, which is often described as a "gut feeling." Explaining the source of a strong hunch, we say "I just feel it in my bones."

"Presence," sometimes mistakenly equated with charisma, is another elusive concept, but it, too, is marked by a high degree of kinesthesia. Individuals with "presence" seem to fill the space around themselves.

And in its fullest sense, kinesthesia expands our understanding of the faculty of imagination. With its root term "image," imagination centers on the visual sense. Clearly, though, when we fully "imagine" something we have a complete experience of all the senses and feel kinesthetically present within that experience. It's also true that guided visualization, which has become popular in sports training as a performance enhancement technique, is much more than visual. When successfully accomplished, as in the mask session, it is a fully coordinated kinesthetic experience.

In its coordinating function, the kinesthetic sense serves to fill in from our memory bank of sense impressions whatever sensory information is missing in a message. The need to get a complete picture on the basis of limited data is a strong survival need. The gap in information is sensed as disorienting and the active imagination jumps in to fill it.

Our kinesthetic sense is especially active in childhood, when survival is particularly perilous. Birth is the original experience of disorientation. The active imagination plays a vital orientational role as the child grows and tries to make sense of a confusing world, with the kinesthetic sense contributing to a feeling of participation - of really being absorbed by an activity - that is so characteristic of childhood. The world feels alive and every pore is open to experience. We learn spontaneously, at this stage, through mimicry.

As we grow, we come to a critical period of emerging self-awareness. Visual orientation develops. We see ourselves in mirrors. We begin to regard ourselves as having distinct boundaries, as separate individuals. A gap in awareness forms: I am here. . .You are there. Self/Other. Some can remember their first experience of this gap. It can be a poignant memory. Inhibitions arise as we see ourselves being seen. Spontaneous mimicry ceases.

The visual sense develops further. We learn to read; we watch things, we watch television. Eventually, visual orientation can come to dominate so completely that we become obsessed with how things look. Image becomes all. The other senses lose the edge they had when we were very young and were touching and tasting everything in sight. Visually dominated, we literally "lose touch." In our hypervisual culture, the kinesthetic sense atrophies like an unused muscle, and too much weight is given to visual cues. Sensory awareness must be reawakened across the full spectrum of perceptions.

This is why mime, in Avital's world, is not a spectator sport. And perhaps why Decroux was so suspicious of performance: the uncomprehending scrutiny of an uninitiated audience was of little value to him, and, as in the case of Marceau, the act of spectating could actually distance the audience from a true perception of the function of mime, certainly as Decroux understood it. Mime in its new realization was intended as nothing less than fully coordinative in its functioning and fully participative in its realization.

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THE RETURN TO THE BODY

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In its integrative role, mime belongs in the context of a twentieth-century undertaking that we might call "The Return to the Body." The Western discovery of Eastern disciplines - yoga, Tai Chi, the martial arts - is a mark of this trend. Modern dance - as pioneered by Duncan, St. Denis, Shaw, Graham, Cunningham, and others - has sought to liberate the expressive body. Movement therapies - such as those developed by Alexander, Feldenkrais, Trager, and Rolf - have played an important role.

Psychology began to investigate the inter-relationship of mind and body. Head, a contemporary of Freud, described kinesthesia as "deep sensibility." Gestalt has brought about a complete re-assessment of the nature of perception. Schilder speaks of the "body-schemes" by which we orient ourselves. A body-centered trend in psychotherapy is emerging. Somatic Psychology, a recent development that traces its origins to the early Freud and to his student Wilhelm Reich, considers that "body sensations, gestures, postures, and expressive movements are a kind of language of the unconscious."(23)

In the field of anthropology, Ray Birdwhistell developed "kinesics," a method of minutely analyzing communicative behavior. Edward T. Hall pioneered the science of "proxemics" in his influential studies, The Silent Language and The Hidden Dimension, which argue that gesture and use of space are a language in themselves that can vary from culture to culture.

Poets and novelists have led the vanguard of the return to the body. T. S. Eliot laments our "dissociation of sensibility." D. H. Lawrence considers the "blood knowledge" of the body and "reciprocity of touch" to be the only real hope for human redemption. Poet Theodore Roethke sings sensual praise of "a woman lovely in her bones."

Popular writers have taken up the chorus. Diane Ackerman saturates us with A Natural History of the Senses. Morris Berman writes eloquently and urgently of the need for Coming to Our Senses. Michael Murphy has produced an encyclopedic assessment he calls The Future of the Body.

Philosophy in this century has at last begun to address the full implications of the Cartesian legacy of mind/body dualism. The subtle analyses of Merleau-Ponty and the highly original reflections of Gaston Bachelard represent the pinnacle of this endeavor.

All of these efforts, and this is of course only a selective inventory, have played a part in correcting the imbalance created by a host of "isms" - including Puritanism, Romanticism, Victorianism, as well as various strains of philosophic Idealism and religious mysticism -or gnosticism - that had discredited or denied the body, or upheld an otherworldly ideal in which the body played at best a marginal role. Twentieth century human beings arrived at the supposed final "ism," the Deconstructionism of the 1970's, with nowhere else to go.

Morris Berman calls this tragic tale of flight from the body "the hidden history of the West" and makes his own plea for reunion. Yet Berman himself admits, in his candid epilogue to Coming to Our Senses: "This has been a difficult book for me to write; I struggled a lot with my own body, which I love and hate, as the pages were filling with ink." He wonders if he may in fact have "overvalued the body as a vehicle of cultural integrity":

We can recognize the tremendous drawback of the mind/body split, and the severe limits of dualism and a dualistic culture; but body integrity finally doesn't necessarily get you into the social or natural environment, and there is no way that these can be ignored.(24)

If Berman struggles in a love/hate relationship with his own body, he may not truly know whether body integrity, fully realized, can "get you into the social or natural environment." He regrets:

Something obvious keeps eluding our civilization, something that involves a reciprocal relationship between nature and psyche, and that we are going to have to grasp if we are to survive as a species. But it hasn't come together yet, and as a result, to use the traditional labels, it is still unclear whether we are entering a new Dark Age or a new Renaissance.(25)

Berman is surely correct in observing that "it hasn't come together yet," in spite of the dedicated efforts of the artists, psychologists, and philosophers mentioned in our brief survey. Pioneer visionaries do not any longer have the option of retiring to a basement atelier with Decroux or to the woods of Maine with Thoreau - who had longings of his own:

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one. . .but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries!-Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it.,-rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?(26)

Thoreau wails where Berman sighs, but the same concern haunts both: where have we arrived in our headlong technological rush? can we much longer endure the divisive legacy of our systems of thought and belief? how do we redeem the natural world and a community that has lost its way? In partial response, Berman cites Decroux, who once remarked "that people should walk down the street as if they belonged to each other."(27) More than that is required, of course, but we might also cite Barrault, who speaks very differently from Thoreau:

Life has been given to us? A great thanks! I will never do enough to be worthy of this gift. Modern society, carried today in a sort of toboggan of destruction, can leave me lost and wandering in the middle of a pile of ruins; that doesn't bother me anymore. In giving me life one made me: a body. An integrated body, a magnetic body which, giving me the universe for parents, tells me what I have to do: to connect myself with it. This body which I love as much as I love life, I must be worthy of. I am at the same time astonished and marvelling. . . . I am not against anyone. I am ready, on the contrary, to bring my humble share to the community.(28)

Apocalypticism may be just too grandiose a mood to be indulged any longer. We already know that the Emerald City is an overrated destination and that "there's no place like home." How do we get there? The answer, Avital would say, is right under our noses.

Melissa Huntress, a long-distance runner who took Avital's three-week summer program and is currently working privately with him, speaks about the effect of the training.(29) Each physical improvement has been accompanied by another change that is even more subtle and meaningful. Practice of Avital's exercise cycles enables her to lift out of her pelvis and breathe more fully; her motion "is more directed and organized" and she runs "with less effort." She is also "beginning to feel or sense a very subtle internal circular movement of energy - an ebbing and flowing, a rising and falling." At the same time she notices that she is more able to feel her own source of power and motion. She calls the experience a feeling of "deeper will." "Best of all," she says, "I make the decision to be running this way now. Before I would have this experience randomly or accidentally."

But another phenomenon is occurring, one that might interest both Berman and Thoreau. By practicing Avital's perceptual exercises she experiences increased depth and dimension of perception, as if she is fully embracing, with all her senses simultaneously, the terrain through which she runs. She has a feeling that she is no longer just running past scenery: "I am now able to draw on the power of things I am running by." She is very careful to explain that her experience of this is something much more focused and intelligible than "runner's high." Perhaps it is the "elusive obvious" that Berman mentions: "something that involves a reciprocal relationship between nature and psyche, and that we are going to have to grasp if we are to survive as a species."

He says this relationship "hasn't come together yet," but evidently there is a way it can: a method that is a physics of the body as well as an art form, that unites aesthetic cultivation and physical discipline, that integrates body and mind in service of imagination and creativity, that activates deep sensibility and a deeper will and permits nature and psyche to link up on a morning run - a bodymind compass known as BodySpeak™.

Jane Evenson, Boulder, Colorado - ©January 1994 - even@nilenet.com

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NOTES:

1. Poetics: IV, 2. Quoted in Marcel Jousse, The Oral Style, trans. Edgard Sienaert and Richard Whitaker (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990) 24.

2. Mime and Beyond, 103.

3. In this introduction, phenomenon is used in the philosophical sense of perceptual event or occurrence.

4. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975) 358-9.

5. Mime and Beyond, 101. Mark Olsen, a theater professor and former Mummenschanz performer, is also author, along with Avital, of The Conception Mandala, a guide to techniques of conscious conception.

6. "Subtle is the Lord": The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) 37.

7. From an unpublished manuscript.

8. Avital's personal recollection of Decroux's frequently recited dictum.

9. Thomas Leabhart, Modern and Post-Modern Mime (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989) 62.

10. Quoted in Modern and Post-Modern Mime, 63.

11. Modern and Post-Modern Mime, 64.

12. Leabhart notes that in Bali art and life are so well integrated that there is "no separate word for art." Modern and Post-Modern Mime, 126. See also Hands.

13. "I am a prisoner of my art. People do not want to see me speak, or use props or appear as a character other than Bip or the stylized mime that I have created. They are uneasy with a Marceau that is unfamiliar."Quoted in Mime and Post-Modern Mime, 75.

14. Quoted in The Oral Style. p. 24.

15. Etienne Decroux, Words on Mime, trans. Mark Piper (Claremont, CA: Mime Journal, 1985) 81.

16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) 133-4.

17. Compare with these lines from "The Exstasie" by poet John Donne: "Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred/Our eyes, upon one double string;/ So to'entergraft our hands. . ."Renaissance anatomists theorized that sight was caused by a beam which was emitted from the eye and touched the object seen.

18. The American Heritage Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980)

19. George Leonard, The Silent Pulse (New York: Arkana, 1986) 44.

20. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

21. In the early 70's, Avital was asked to train a group of astronauts to experience "weightlessness" on earth in preparation for "moonwalking" in space. (The moonwalk is a classic technique of illusionistic mime.)

22. Thomas and J. C. Cleary, trans. Blue Cliff Record, vol. 3 (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1977) 571. My rendering of a slightly longer text.

23. Juliet Wittman, "Somatic Psychology: Taking Your Body to Therapy," Nexus (Sept/Oct 1993) 20.

24. Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses (New York: Bantam Books, 1990) 343-4.

25. Henry David Thoreau, The Illustrated Maine Woods. ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) 71.

26. Coming to Our Senses, 344.

27. Ibid., 344.

28. From "Le Langage du Corps," transcription of a lecture given by Jean-Louis Barrault, June 2, 1980, at Zellerbach Playhouse.

29. From workshop notes and private conversations.