13.

HEADS AND TAILS

Rogrio C. Migliorini awhi63@gmail.com or www.rodadecura.wordpress.com

Introduction
I began my training with Mrs. Maria Ducheness, a Hungarian dance teacher that studied with Laban1 and Joss themselves, came to Brazil during WWII, and introduced Labans dance methodology here. It values the inner aspects that motivate any given movement, and also accepts diversity as it can be applied in the movement teaching of pupils with different training, age, and physicalities. We own the vast application of Labans system to the fact that it deals with human movement as whole, rather than with specific patterns of movement proper to this or that dance stile. Therefore, people trained in this methodology usually observe movement in general, be them mechanic, human or animal in their nature. One of the applications of his method, for instance, is in the analysis of non-verbal communication among animals, such as dolphins, wolves, and bears. Then, one can conclude that both my approximation and identification with this system suggest that in my professional life I have searched for diversity and difference, rather than for those things that fit the mainstream models. Furthermore, expressions like the need to overcome limits, or to deal with new physical limits, alongside my gait and way of moving that changed after a brain surgery and became noticeably different from everybody elses, plus a belief that I had got physically ugly after the operation, made me reflect on difference, limits, illness and ability as well.

Gauche
In my reflexions, one of the things that called my attention was a line by Carlos Drumont de Andrade, a great Brazilian poet. It says: When I was born, a crooked angel

Rudolph Laban, (1879 1958) created a system of movement analysis that allows record and analyze the spetial and dynamic aspects of movement. This method, as well as its artistic and educational approaches, can be applied to education plus used in physical and mental therapies. It can also be applied to the training of dancers and actors, and has already been used in the coaching of athletes, training of businessmen, and in the interpretation of politicians and religious leaders non-verbal communication stiles.
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like those ones that live in the darkness said: Go, Carlos, and be gauche!. This little line that a great poet quoted an angel as saying, tells us of the difference and its need in creation. Besides the reference to an angel that does not fit the usual characteristics of heavenly beings, the poet employs a French word that in addition to left, means twisted, graceless, ill-done, clumsy, rude, impolite, awkward, ungainly, useless, complicated, embarrassing, unpleasant, improper, graceless, inapt, unskilful and left-winger. It also means everything that is not right, straight, correct, fair, honest, adequate, convenient, healthy, normal, exact, real, rightful, or yet anything that does not agree with something else, is not in a straight line, or is not true, proper, and consistent with the rules. When I read this line, I cannot help but smile, for to be gauche is but the poets, artists, creators, and disabled persons fate. So, how does it all relate? Consider that. Before having acquired a disability, I regarded myself as someone that looked like just the same as everyone else (or, at least, like most of them). Nevertheless, the disability showed up my hidden differences. But everyone has hidden differences, even when they are not noticeable. So, by ignoring and comfortably projecting these hidden differences onto others, those that do not show them up stigmatise those that do. Consequently, tastes, traits of personality, life history, etc., are inevitable, and even when we have some similarities, our individual differences prevail. As an example of the above, let us mention twin brothers: even when they are brought up within the same culture and family, go to the same school and social clubs, and have the same friends, they unavoidably share different experiences.

Eugenics
Along history, man has constantly pursued the norm, the common, the sameness, the perfection, and has always tried to eliminate whatever does not fit them. Nevertheless, total equality, a perfect match, or yet complete evenness, do not exist either in nature or in the real world. On the contrary, in the ideal world where Barbie dolls and super-heroes dwell, ballerinas certainly do not grow old, kings and queens never go to the toilet, doctors do not ever get ill, and dentists by no means have toothache. Still, difference has always been. Therefore, difference is part of reality. Why then has men always tried to eradicate it? There must be very good reasons for that. Then, what are them?
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As I have said before, those who hide any differences or deviations are purified by those who cannot conceal it. The later do that by absorbing those differences or stains and carrying them away forever so that the former can remain stainless. In other words, with the total elimination of the differences that we projected onto a minority of people, we perpetuate the illusion that we ourselves are not different from the majority of them. Therefore, in a paradoxical and perverse way, while mankind tries to eliminate difference, it perpetuates it. To do that, some people are chosen as escape-goats of the human-kind. Their fate is to carry mankind malign traits, and as the dead dont talk, die in the desert, be stoned to death, or yet, be burned alive in flames or kilns, subjugated, enslaved, made an outcast, and so forth. As escape-goats are persons that differ from the majority, we are comprehensibly terrified of being pointed out as different and thus become escapegoats. At the end, to save our skin, we point out, stigmatize, and reject all those that differ from us. Still, we cannot always hide our differences by projecting them, and at moments, we get face to face with human reality, fragility and finiteness. We may take this as a real calamity that can finish our lives. However, is it so?
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Difference and movement

Just as a coin, difference has two sides. If the one discussed above is gloomy, the other one is bright. Lets see. Difference puts things into motion, proposes the new, initiates disturbance, questions and destroys that which one that is already established. Finally, it opens room to creation and modification. An everyday example of difference related to movement is the water that streams down rivers and falls in cascades because of the differences of the level of the ground in its way. As a result, the motion of the water caused by the fall can be used to generate electricity. To enlarge even more this array of advantages, if it was not for differences it would be impossible to identify people trough their finger-prints; we would have to forget all about human, animal, mineral and vegetable variety; and discard the evolution of species, the several urban and natural landscapes, as well as the cultural, linguistic, architectural, and artistic diversity that enrich life and make it interesting. After all, total

Maringela Guelta, a visual artist, art-therapist and philosopher, told the origin of the term escape-goat to me. 3/6

equality would make the world extremely dull and immutable. Life would not offer us any surprise or challenges. Boredom would reign. Ultimately, there would be no movement, and death in life would be a fact. Even in religion difference is praised. For instance, Kali, the Hindi goddess of death, as all Hindi deities, has simultaneously positive and negative features. I think she embodies the positive aspects of difference as she kills old lives and bears new ones. A similar thing happens with Shiva the god of dance. He destroys ancient and worn out worlds to create new and fresh ones, and then, he imprints movement to life. In other words, through dance and movement, he creates the cosmos.

Limit as essential to creation

I do not regard limit as something that can be overcome. I believe that a real limit is something given. For instance: if we can stay underwater for a longer time, run faster in less time, or jump from ever higher altitudes, in all these cases we are not breaking a real limit, but rather extending our belief that the human body is capable of much more than of what it actually is. This way, the best diver does not stay underwater longer than a globefish, the best runner cannot beat a cheetah, it is impossible for an air pilot to fly as well as a hawk or even a beetle, and in proportion, a flee jumps much higher and further than any golden medallist jumper. Therefore, in all these cases, no records were broken. I believe that this is because the human being is always enclosed in a limited body. Actually, bodies are limited things, and each one of them has its specific limits. In the visual arts, especially in drawing, we can see that the limits of a given shape are given by its outline. Without an outline or limit although indefinite it may be, there can be no shape, and not even the perception of it. For instance, a blot can only be perceived because of limits, since they highlight the stain from its background. Without this blurred separation, we would not be able to see it at all. In nature, everything also has a limit. According to Gestalt, we are not able to imagine the world without limits. Sky, clouds, raindrops, puddles, creeks, rivers, and seas are demarcated by it. In other words, if those forms are distinguished this way, then limits are form. I believe that the starting points of any given creation are the limits that reality imposes upon the creator. Perhaps, this is the only real and concrete departing point for a creation. For example, the size of the drawing paper; the theme of a choreography;
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the number of lines available to an article; the pre-requisites of a research; the budget allowed to a given work; the material available for it; the ingredients required for a dish; the existence or not of oxygen in the atmosphere; the environmental conditions of a given place; the creators skills; the cultural and historic context that surrounds him or her; all of these determine paths and choices. Limits are also essential to order, and in turn, order is essential to creativity. As I think the human creators emulate the divine ones, I feel free to give another example drawn from religion. When we study different religions, we see that all the myths of creation tell the story of the way chaos is changed into cosmos, which is ordered and organized. In the Christian Myth of creation, God started his work by establishing conditions to life. In other words, he organized the original chaos. Then, he set darkness and light apart by creating limits to each of them. Afterwards, he did the same with water and land until he colonized them with living beings. Shiva, as stated above, created the world by setting things apart, or by ordering them through dance and movement. Finally, adequacy rather than originality stands for creativity. It is not creative to do whatever one wants whenever one wants. That would be to act like a character created by a Brazilian author that decided to repair nature that she arrogantly deemed wrong. So, she made pumpkins grow in tress as big as that fruit, transformed the cow udders into taps to facilitate milking, and created earthworms with legs. Of course her intents proved to be wrong, and everything went back to normal at the end of the book. Therefore, rather than being wasteful or greedy, it is creative to do exactly what is necessary. Putting the same thing in a different way, to be creative is to be elegant. Then, it seems relevant to ask: What distinguishes chaos from order? If the creators order and organize things, does he or she not have any limits or impose them upon themselves? Can order exist without limits? Is freedom equal to the complete inexistence of limits? Can one really be creative by disregarding every single limit?

Facing limits
One can say that sensitive and creative persons never avoid them. In fact, they tackle them face to face in a courageous attitude. So did Picasso. When he was young, he would draw a bull thoroughly; in his maturity, though, he would synthesise the shape of a bull with very few strokes and lines. Equally, if we take a close look at one of the paintings by Rembrandt in his mature years, we see just blots of stained paint. Nevertheless, if we look at them from
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some distance, these blots reveal blazes, transparencies, jewels, and draperies as rich as the ones he used to detail tirelessly in his youth. Goya is not behind them, either. He was known as the best European painter of his time. The originality and emotion that flow from his paints, and the freedom of his style, highlight his work at the end of the eighteenth, and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Despite his huge production, only after he was forty, he created real original works. An event very important to this change occurred in 1792 when Goya got severely ill. In consequence, he got temporarily paralysed, partially blind and permanently deaf. Neo-classicism in vigour at that time, aimed to deny subjection to any matter by praising highly the purity of form and ideal order. In opposition to it, perhaps because of his confronts with the fugacity and imperfection of human life, Goya chose to face the concrete reality of matter instead of denying it. Then, through his art, he fought darkness, tyranny and imposture, the unexpected faces taken by the French Revolution. According to Goyas visual messages, the Revolution turned into darkness, since Napoleon fought blood-thirsty wars and dominated most of Europe in order to spread out the freedom it professed. By accepting the finiteness of matter as well as the apparent restriction caused by suffering, Goya said that we overcome the cosmic powers or violent happenings of history because of our spiritual dimension.

Restriction, constraint, and limitation?

Certainly reality imposes limits, but unlike we usually think, they are not coercive nor prevent us from dreaming or expressing our dreams. On the contrary, limits consolidate creation. Ostrower states that like the margins of a river, or the coast of an island or continents, limits allow us to explore the deep water safely because we will always be able to return to the safe ground whenever it is necessary. That agrees with Goyas beliefs when he stated that the creative human beings must not deal only with beauty, but with human life as a whole, be it beautiful or hideous. He could assert that once he witnessed beauty turn into ugliness exactly because of this error. He saw that matter and things created from it, last for a certain time before wearing out and rotting away. He found out that death and suffering are inevitable facts of life. He recognised that loneliness is everyones burden. Trough his work, he showed us that the independence of ones ideas and their power lies in ones ability to accept and learn how to deal with that existential yoke. So,
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limits are also closely linked to ingenuity, ability, real mastery of a technique, maturity, and true freedom. (Ostrower, 1991) The same thing applies to Gods creation. Consider a river: when it finds a blockage, it does not stop flowing; instead, it simply goes around it and continues flowing in another direction. Along its way many things may happen, and a little stream that trickles down from icy mountains, can reach the plains far below, run through a thick rainforest, receive waters from several other rivers, and grow to gigantic proportions like the Amazon. Consequently, rather than stopping the river, the blockages define its course. In floods, though, several of these blockages are like disregarded by the overflowing water. The river, then, goes out of its course, and does not run inside its margins anymore. In that case, we have the marshes, and often destruction and death.

Final Considerations

When we create, we simultaneously deal with the immutable reality together with fluid dreams and wishes. Reality without imagination becomes bear and crushing whereas imagination without reality is no better than madness and insanity. I conclude that, if difference stands for limits, and limits for forms, limits are essential to the creative process as they are about giving shape to something. Consequently, limits, form, and creativity, even if apparently apart from each other, are as close among themselves as the head and tail sides of a coin. I also think we must urgently review our values concerning limits and differences, once they were built up along a sick history. Through them, we oppress and annihilate those who are different from us. Through those values, we project our dark, negative, violent, stupid, fragile, evil, ignorant, primitive, side onto our neighbours. Then, it is time we stop throwing stones at other peoples glasshouses and take exactly what we mostly want to hide upon ourselves. It is time we begin to think, backed up by several examples that just as tails and heads are the reverse of each other, so are darkness and light, health and illness, life and death, and so forth. Only by accepting our imperfections or ugliness, we can find out our strongest power, and our immense beauty.

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REFERENCES
CAMPOS, Leonildo Silveira. O corpo na cotidianidade de diferentes culturas: contribuies das cincias socias para uma reflexo fenomenolgica. In CASTRO, Dagmar Silva Pinto de et alii (org). Corpo e existncia. SBC, FENPEC/UMESP SOBRAPHE, 2003. CROATTO, Jos Severino. As linguagens da experincia religiosa: uma introduo a fenomenologia da religio. So Paulo, Paulinas, 2001. DRUMONT DE ANDRADE, Carlos. Poema de sete faces In DRUMONT DE ANDRADE, Carlos. Poesia e Prosa (organized by the author). Rio de Janeiro, Nova Aguiar, 1998 GOFFMAN, Irwing. Estigma: notas sobre a manipulao da identidade deteriorada. Rio de Janeiro : Zahar, 1975 GROSSI, Miriam Pillar. Masculinidades: uma reviso terica. Mandrgora/Ncleo de Estudos Teolgicos da Mulher na Amrica Latina, So Bernardo do Campo: Metodista Curso de Ps-Graduao em Cincias da Religio, year XII, #. 12: 15--20, 2006. MERGAULT, Jean. New Dicitionary Larousse: Franais/Anglais, English/French. 1990 (Ed.). Paris: Apollo/Larousse,1990. MIGLIORINI, Rogrio. Assumindo a Marginalidade. umpublished, Unicamp, 2001 MIGLIORINI, Rogrio. Diferena, limite e criatividade. Aplauso Electronic Magazine. http://superig.ig.com.br/aplauso/links.asp, So Paulo, 2004 MIGLIORINI, Rogrio. Pensar com o movimento e danar com palavras. In FERRETTI, Vera Maria Rossetti (org), Danando atravs do Ps-Modernismo. Magazine of the Art Therapy Division at Instituto Sedes Sapientiae Special Edition on Art therapy 3rd National Congress. So Paulo, Year V, # 4, 2000/2001 OSTROWER, Fayga. Criatividade e processos de criao. 8th ed. Petrpolis, Vozes, 1991. OSTROWER, Fayga. Universos da Arte. 4th ed. Rio de Janeiro, Campus, 1987. SACKS, Oliver. Um Antroplogo em Marte: sete histrias paradoxais. So Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2001. STAROBINSKY, Jean. 1789 os emblemas da razo. So Paulo, Ed. Schwarcz, 1988. WINNICOTT, D.W. Textos Selecionados: da pediatria psicanlise. Rio de Janeiro, Fco Alvez, 1988

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