Where Tonic Function Came From — Part 1 of 3
Introduction
Change your posture and your mood changes. Let your mood shift and your posture shifts with it. People say this often enough. What I rarely see is an explanation of why it happens.
The answer is in the muscles. The muscles that hold us upright and the muscles that register changes in our emotional state are the same muscles.
In Rolfing, this capacity has a name: Tonic Function. It was brought into Rolfing by a French Rolfer who had been a dancer. He arrived at it through a single question: why does the same gestural form come to mean different things?
I’m tracing this over three articles. This one is about what he saw in the dance studio.
Who Hubert Godard Is
Tonic Function was brought into Rolfing by Hubert Godard, a French Rolfer.
Born in Morocco. The son of a farmer, an athlete at boarding school. He studied chemistry at university and was among the youngest ever to be licensed to recover gold from industrial waste. He did not start out as a specialist in the body.
At twenty-one he saw a dance performance and entered that world. Late, for a dancer. He danced in a company, became a choreographer, then a teacher, and eventually someone who trains teachers.
After injuring his knee he went first to osteopathy, then moved through Feldenkrais, the Alexander Technique, the Mézières method, classical dance, and psychoanalysis. He binds all of it together with a single principle: gravity. Certified as a Rolfer in 1986. At a university in Paris he was invited to head a new department created to reorganize dance education. He has also carried on research at a cancer institute in Milan for many years. He began teaching Rolfing practitioners around 1990. He is now retired.
On why Godard went back to study the body, the sources say two different things. One points to a serious knee injury. The other is his own account: that his body was not built for dancing. For a long time I refused to choose between them.
The appendix to Kevin Frank and Caryn McHose’s How Life Moves: Explorations in Meaning and Body Awareness connects them in one sentence: Godard injured his knee because the form of the dance did not match the way his own body was built.
Not a contradiction. Cause and effect. He kept dancing in a body that wasn’t built for it, so the knee gave out; the knee gave out, so he set about finding out why he couldn’t make the movement. The same appendix places him as a representative of the second generation of Rolfing thought — someone, like Ida Rolf, born to innovate in this field.
Looking at the Form Didn’t Explain It
Tonic Function begins in an impasse in the dance studio. But at first it wasn’t about anyone else’s body.
Godard tells the story in a 1992 interview. He did four years of chemistry and was working as a chemist while dancing. When the two became impossible to hold together, he chose dance. And then his own body turned out not to be built for it. Fine as a hobby, he was told, but you’ll never be a dancer.
So he took classes by day, and by night, with a doctor friend, he investigated why he couldn’t make the movements. He went around to other doctors and other methods, and in the end he changed his own body. A man with a body that couldn’t dance set out to find out why.
When he started teaching, one more observation joined it. Give the same task, and the way you speak in the studio changes how people dance.
Classical dance was codified in the seventeenth century, and a form like the arabesque has been preserved. And yet the same form carries different meanings from one period to the next. Period, region, social class, musical choices, costume — classify by any of these and you describe the container beautifully, but you never reach the movement that is making meaning inside the gesture.
Naming What Happens Before the Movement
Godard begins by naming two people.
Rudolf Laban (1879–1958), who created a system of movement notation and taught Mary Wigman. He held that linguistic structures cannot grasp the deep meaning of movement, and turned toward a notation that doesn’t lean on linguistic metaphor. He comes back later in this series.
Erwin Straus (1891–1975), a neurologist and phenomenologist born in Frankfurt. He fled the Nazis for the United States and served for thirty-eight years as a psychiatric consultant at a veterans’ hospital. His philosophy starts from human upright posture. In his 1952 essay “The Upright Posture” he argues that standing upright gave us both a sensory awareness of gravity and, at the same time, a standing counter to it. He is also the one who asked “where am I?” before “who am I?”
As these two pointed out, upright posture — beyond the mechanical problem of locomotion — already contains psychological and expressive elements, prior to any intention to move or to express.
Our relationship to weight, which is to say our relationship to gravity, already contains a mood and a project toward the world.
It is because each of us handles weight in our own particular way that we can identify someone close to us, without fail, by the sound of them coming up the stairs. Conversely, as astronauts in weightlessness show us, when weight disappears the quality of expression changes radically — because the essential reference point for interpreting the meaning of a gesture has itself changed.
Here Godard gives it a name.
We will call “pre-movement” this attitude toward weight, toward gravity, which already exists before we move, in the mere fact of standing, and which will produce the expressive charge of the movement we are about to execute. The same gestural form — an arabesque, for example — can be charged with different meanings according to the quality of the pre-movement, which undergoes very great variations even while the form itself endures.
The arabesque comes back here. The form has been preserved since the seventeenth century, and yet the same form carries different meanings. The difference is not outside the form. It is before the form begins.
Pre-movement determines the state of tension in the body and defines the specific quality, the specific color, of each gesture. And pre-movement acts on the gravitational organization — that is, on how the subject organizes their posture in order to stand and to answer the law of gravity in that position.
The Muscles That Hold Posture Also Register Emotion
There is a system of muscles called the gravitational muscles. Most of what they do escapes waking consciousness and the will. They are charged with holding our posture, maintaining our balance, making it possible to stand without thinking about it.
And here is the thing.
These are also the muscles that register changes in our affective and emotional states.
So any modification of our posture, however small, has an effect on our emotional state. And conversely, any affective change brings about a change in posture — even one too slight to perceive.
Because these gravitational muscles are charged with keeping our balance, they anticipate each of our gestures.
Take reaching an arm forward. Before the arm moves at all, the first muscle to come into action is the calf muscle. It takes on, in advance, the destabilization the weight of the arm is about to create.
Other examples share the same structure. Before you use your hand to grasp something, serratus anterior engages. The tongue resting quietly against the palate is what keeps the neck and face stable.
This is pre-movement. Invisible, imperceptible to the person themselves. And it sets in motion, at the same time, both the mechanical and the affective levels of their organization.
Depending on the mood of the moment and on what is being imagined, the contraction of the calf that unknowingly prepares the arm’s movement will be stronger or weaker. And the meaning that gets received changes with it.
A dancer’s culture, their personal history, and how they feel and interpret a situation — these produce what might be called a “postural musicality” that constantly betrays the gestures they intend to perform.
The effects of this affective state give each gesture its quality, and yet they cannot be commanded by intention alone. We are only beginning to understand the mechanisms. The whole complexity of the dancer’s work — and of the observer’s — lies here.
What the Film Showed, Frame by Frame
Godard demonstrates it with a film. In Vincente Minnelli’s Ziegfeld Follies (1945) there is a duet in which Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly perform the same gestures at the same time, and precisely. And still, the effect each dancer produces is radically different. How do we explain that difference?
The number is “The Babbitt and the Bromide,” choreographed by Astaire. It is one of only two times the two of them danced together on film.
Slowing the film down, frame by frame, shows us that in spite of their intention to produce the same movements, the anticipation of the attack of the gesture — the pre-movement — is opposite in the one and the other.
Gene Kelly first secures the ground with a movement of the legs and a gathering of the body (a concentric movement), then orients himself in space through the gaze or the arm, initiates his attack by pushing off the ground, and follows with an extension in the chosen direction. He organizes his relationship to gravity from the bottom upward, from the inside toward the outside.
Fred Astaire does the opposite. He always begins with a movement of orientation in space — gaze, head, or arm. That first provokes an extension, a suspension (an eccentric movement), and then brings about a disequilibrium, which is afterwards stabilized by a movement of the legs toward the ground. He organizes his relationship to gravity from the top downward, from the outside toward the inside.
| Gene Kelly | Fred Astaire | |
|---|---|---|
| First | Secures the ground by gathering legs and body (concentric) | Gaze, head, arm move out into space |
| Then | Orients in space through gaze or arm | Extension and suspension (eccentric); disequilibrium |
| Then | Pushes off the ground to launch the gesture | Legs move toward the ground and stabilize it |
| Organization | Bottom up, inside out | Top down, outside in |
In slow motion, Gene Kelly always starts slightly later, but arrives earlier, so much does this anticipatory concentration give him an “explosive” quality, particular to the feline quality of his movement. Fred Astaire’s manner is more spread out in time, by the grace of his inimitable suspension.
These flows of gravitational organization, which are played out before the attack, then profoundly modify the quality of the gesture and color it with nuances that “leap” to our eyes, without our always being able to give the reason for it.
It leaps to the eye, and we can’t say why. That is why the film had to be slowed down and followed frame by frame.
Movement and Gesture
Having come this far, Godard draws a distinction.
One can then distinguish movement, understood as a phenomenon relating the strict displacements of the different segments of the body in space — in the same way that a machine produces a movement — and gesture, which is inscribed in the gap between this movement and the tonic and gravitational backdrop of the subject: that is to say, the pre-movement with all its affective and projective dimensions. It is there that the expressivity of the human gesture resides, of which the machine is deprived.
※ Quotations in this section are from Hubert Godard, “Le geste et sa perception,” in Marcelle Michel & Isabelle Ginot, La danse au XXe siècle (Bordas, 1998), pp. 224–229. Translated from the French original for this article; an authorized English translation exists as “Gesture and its Perception,” Writings on Dance, no. 22 (2004), pp. 57–61.
The Marionette
To explain that gap, Godard turns to Heinrich von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theatre, a short text in which a classical “first dancer” and a spectator of puppet shows talk together.
The dancer says that a dancer can learn everything from the puppets. Here is his reason.
For one is moved, you know well, when the soul (vis motrix) is located at a point which is not the center of gravity of the movement.
And the dancer defines “grace” as the state in which there is no gap between the center of gravity and the center of movement.
The marionette has no such gap. It doesn’t have to manage its own weight. Suspended from above, its limbs obey mechanical law strictly, and trace perfect parabolas around the center of gravity.
A human being cannot do that. Caught in the hesitation of affect, a distance opens between the center of gravity and the center of movement — a kinetic imperfection generated by the interference of the affects.
It is in that gap, in that tension, that the expressive charge of the gesture resides. On the marionette’s side, expressivity belongs to the puppeteer.
So what, on the human side, creates that gap? The muscles of the gravitational system, which organize the internal resistances to disequilibrium. The psychic apparatus expresses itself through this system. Desire, inhibition, emotion — they all pass through here to color the movement.
And it is induced before the gesture — from the moment the project of an action takes shape, and without the subject’s knowledge, upstream of waking consciousness.
Which is why dancers know: if you want to change the quality of a gesture, you have to reach the dimension of pre-movement. And the only access to it runs through the imaginary.
Godard adds an example. Pina Bausch’s dancers can speak a text while developing a gesture that carries the opposite meaning — because they can work with this gravitational organization.
A Way of Looking That Doesn’t Name
In a 2005 interview, Godard traces how he himself was formed. It starts with the interviewer’s travels.
Caryn McHose describes a recent trip to Bali and the sense of being in a culture where the split between nature and culture isn’t so strong — where the perception of nature is still alive. Godard answers:
Yes, you feel it if you go to Morocco. It’s so strong for me because I was born there. There is something in Morocco that forces your gaze, your perception of space, to be peripheral. You are not in cortical vision; you are in a way of looking that is not about naming. And you get a direct melting with the space, something very specific.
In the same passage a painter appears. Henri Matisse’s life changed completely after his trip to Morocco: suddenly, in his paintings, the ground became more important than the figure. What changed, Godard says, was Matisse’s way of seeing space — because painting is, in itself, a statement about space.
Reading this, I remembered a class I took. In Phase II of the Rolfing basic training, there were two sessions on the history of painting. (The basic training runs in three phases; Phase II is where you spend weeks learning to see and to touch the body.) We traced how the body has been seen through Western painting, and how the face and head have been seen. The teacher was Giovanni Felicioni — someone who has been involved in the development of Tonic Function for more than twenty years, teaching the history of painting.
At the time I couldn’t see why painting. Now I can. Where you place the vanishing point, what you take as ground and what as figure — it is the same question as how you see a body. The history of painting wasn’t there as general culture. It was there as training in perception.
Peripheral Seeing
The interviewer asks: how did you arrive at the way you see now? Was there a particular foothold, a moment of discovery?
I know that I was shaped by this peripheral seeing. By this I mean a way of looking that is not about naming; I call this a non-cortical gaze. This non-cortical gaze allows you to have very easy body reading because you have the capacity to incorporate people in your subjective space; you are in the space, the space is in you.
This “peripheral seeing” is the same thing as the peripheral vision that comes up later in this series. Focal vision looks at detail, names, distinguishes; peripheral vision locates us and orients us in relation to gravity. He is seeing with the second of the two. I suspect Godard could only name it in the negative because what we ordinarily call “looking” is the first one.
Space Is a Support
The interviewer presses further: did you become aware of this relationship, this kinesthetic resonance, when you began teaching dance?
Teaching dance formed me completely, he says. He noticed that the way he spoke in the studio, the way he phrased things, changed how people danced. Trying to understand why, the first thing he arrived at was this — space is a support.
You can give space a direction. Set an upward vector and the body goes up; set a horizontal one and it widens. Seen that way, the history of modern dance had two sides. Martha Graham’s choreography is built entirely from the ground; Doris Humphrey and José Limón are suspended from the chest.
Ease of movement requires both: orientation to the ground and orientation to space. From psychological experience first, then from clinical experience, he arrives at one thing.
The accidents of a life — how you have built your space — are directly responsible for the contractions and contradictions in your body.
That inquiry led to Tonic Function. A way of seeing that puts the body’s orientation to weight and to space at the center of understanding movement.
Back to the Opening Question
What this article traced is what Godard saw.
That the same arabesque carries different meanings in different periods. That what the slowed-down film revealed was a difference before the movement began. That the muscles holding posture also register changes in emotion. And a way of looking that doesn’t name.
The opening question has an answer here. Posture changes mood because the same muscles carry both. And those muscles begin working before we move.
So when we call that capacity Tonic Function, what exactly are we pointing at? Part 2 takes up the name itself.
※ Other quotations are from Caryn McHose, “Phenomenological Space: Interview with Hubert Godard,” Contact Quarterly, Summer/Fall 2006, pp. 32–38.
This is Part 1 of Where Tonic Function Came From, a three-part series.