proprius

Proprioception comes from the Latin proprius which means "one's own".  So proprioception, simply put, means the awareness of one's self as a body moving through space and time.  I first became interested in proprioception as an acting teacher who taught movement and I wanted to enhance the sub-cognitive awareness that runs in the background of conscious existence to conscious states so that actors could have a greater sense of motion and control and choice.  Acting is nothing but a series of creative choices, sometimes intuitive sometimes conscious, that allows the actor to express meaning as a character and as an element in a narrative.  The development of actors and their training is simply a process of bringing those choices to a greater awareness and learning to create a deeper and wider variety of choices--some of us like to call it a vocaublary--in bringing a character or performance to greater heights.  

However, in learning about proprioception, one can't help but also think about this element of consciousness as it pertains to being, or as one German philosopher was fond of saying, "being-in-the-world".  How does it feel to be a human being with a consciousness of moving about and experiencing the world? This is the central question that animates a particular school of philosophy called Phenomenology.  Phenomenology was founded by Husserl and has developed several branches of philosophy of its own--and this article here is concerned with a branch developed by Maurice-Merlau Ponty and argues for the primacy of embodied existence.  Which is to say--we must include what it is like to experience reality as a physically sensing being with a constantly sub-cognitive awareness of that state (in the cerebellum) that through deliberate introspection can become a fully conscious awareness that one records and analyzes.  Or even more simply put, it states that philosophy must include with it an acknowledgement of an embodied "I" who does the sensing.  

Meet Walt Pascoe.  Walt actually Tweeted this article and then sent me these pictures of himself painting in his studio which really instantly brings forward the way in which proprioception is involved in art-making, one that I think is similar to the way proprioception is a large part of acting.  

Walt writes eloquently of his experience of creativity here, and he records his experience of creativity with an acknowledgement of his own conscious and physical experience of it.  What he writes about in this short piece is also a part of something else that came to my attention as part of trying to teach and learn about what the actor does.  It's something called muslce memory:

I've been making things for so long that I no longer need attend to my hands and eyes. They hold their own ongoing conversation with the materials, by turns laughing, weeping, speaking with carefully measured clarity, or simply crying out with utter abandon, while my subconscious just seeks,seeks,seeks.....struggling to clean the windshield....determined to keep scrubbing and scraping down to the true new old always present. Hoping to elucidate the dream, and settle at last into what Proust so eloquently referred to as "the repose of enlightenment".

Walt is referring to something that is animated by the cerebellum--that is the sub-cognitive background music of our own existence as a moving body.  It has a specific and unique kind of intelligence.  

One of the paradoxes of teaching actors to become more conscious of their movement is that when it comes to performance I then have to teach them to inhabit their "score" and forget what they made conscious in training and rehearsal.  This is particularly hard for a certain kind of cerebral actor.  I directed a production of The Trojan Women in which we choreographed elaborate physical scores to accompany the action, ones that expressed through something I called "living sculpture" to express how reality in war feels as opposed to narrating a particular action. The actors were required to move from posture to posture without hesitation--because it was supposed to happen in synchrony with each other. One highly intelligent actress could not do it.  Why?  She was using mnemonoch device in order to remember what her next pose was.  You could see her thinking and she was always half a moment behind the other actors who moved intuitively from pose to pose.  

It was a frustrating rehearsal the day I tried to get her to forgot the consciousness of her movement.  I tried to have the other actors explain just how they remembered the movement.  Because they were relying on muscle memory and not on conscious manipulation of their movements.  They couldn't really articulate anything helpful except things like "you just don't think about it."  "you just do it."  "you have to get out of your head."  It was funny--as in interesting--because the actress who was struggling during the concsious act of creation of her self-scuplturing was brilliant.  But when it came to relying on her body rather than her brain to perform what she created she was stimeyed. 

There are things that escape language; there is an element to existing that binds us but seems to escape description and measurement.  The irony is that philosophy, almost since the beginning, has tried to separate that immeasurable and experiential "thing," because since physical reality is, to a large degree, measurable and observable, that "thing," must be something other than the physical and material.  

However, as my experience with actors and Walt's insightful description (and images of) his own creative process illustrate, that "thing" is inherently tied to being embodied and existing in and interacting with a physical plane.