Where Tonic Function Came From — Part 3 of 3
Introduction
You think you’re talking about posture, and somewhere along the way it has become a conversation about mood. Or the reverse: you sort something out in your mind, and find the body has let go.
This is not a coincidence. Tonic Function takes it up directly.
Part 1 traced how this way of seeing was born in the dance studio. Part 2 established that Tonic Function is the body’s ability to organize itself in gravity.
This last article is about what that ability sees. Not only structure, but coordination, perception, and meaning. Why those four?
Why There Are Four Aspects
When Tonic Function is explained, four aspects are named: structure, coordination, perception, and meaning.
For a long time I took this for a classification — a list of four things that affect posture. It isn’t.
Newton’s article quotes Godard himself, from a 1993 workshop in Philadelphia.
In the body, there is no difference between the gravity system and the expression system. They are inseparable. Whenever we work on tonic function, we inevitably work on expression.
This is the root of the four aspects. Not a classification. One system with four faces.
Coordination Comes Out of the Order of Release
As we saw in Part 2: the order in which tonic muscles release conducts the work of the other muscles. That refinement and sequencing is what makes coordination.
Newton offers a conjecture here. Rolfing is work that acts primarily on the body’s tonic function. Perhaps that is why it has such a strong effect on athletic movement and on the efficiency of movement.
Meaning Shows Up as Inhibition
Through coordination, the tonic system also comes to be involved in expressing inhibition.
Part of you wants something, and psychologically you are blocked. That block is expressed as a loss of refinement in the response of the tonic muscles. The tonic system controls movement through an appropriate alternation of tension and release. Inhibition disturbs that timing. So the intended expression is disturbed too.
Which means that changing a movement pattern sometimes requires working with the inhibition itself.
Newton continues: if you look at movement only through the popular lens of economy and efficiency, you may miss the limitation in expression — and that limitation may be the real problem preventing the most economical and coordinated movement.
Perception Is an Action
For the fourth, perception, Godard has an experiment — the aikido “unbendable arm,” checked with modern instruments.
You extend your arm and rest your hand on someone’s shoulder. They put their weight on it. First you’re asked to keep the arm from bending with the intention of resisting that force. Then you’re asked to use an image of energy flowing out through your fingertips.
The image version is invariably far stronger. The arm holds easily. When you brace to resist, the other person wins.
An EMG shows what is happening. When you brace to extend the elbow, you are contracting not only triceps but biceps as well. You are fighting yourself, helping the other person bend your arm.
When you imagine reaching through your fingertips to the wall, biceps stays released — quiet and free. Only triceps contracts. The result is an unbendable arm.
Newton draws out what the experiment means.
This example demonstrates, among other things, a phenomenon that we intuit: that perception is an action. Perception is a form of intentionality, a movement in a direction.
Simply directing sensory attention to the fingertips changes the firing pattern of the muscles. And so — a movement problem can be a failure of perception rather than a failure of motor function. Changing a movement pattern means working with that person’s perception.
Perception itself has its own place: We Don’t See the Same Thing: Why Work with Perception?
Hence Four
The system that handles gravity is, as such, the system of expression. Its order of release makes coordination; a disturbance in that order shows up as inhibition; the whole of it is changed by perception. And the place where all of this happens is the structure of the body.
The four were never separate doorways. They are one system seen from four angles.
Doorways Other Than Touch
Once perception and meaning enter the list of things that determine posture, something significant follows. Doorways other than touching the body open up.
Godard divides what affects posture and tone into four: coordination, perception, meaning, structure. In an explanation I received from Giovanni Felicioni in November 2014, each of the four was assigned to a different method.
| Aspect | Method assigned |
|---|---|
| Structure | Rolfing |
| Coordination | Feldenkrais |
| Perception | Alexander Technique |
| Meaning | Counseling |
Take it this way and Rolfing’s territory is structure alone. I wrote it that way for a long time. There was a period when I farmed the other three out to methods outside Rolfing — yoga, Pilates, counseling, coaching, tarot.
Now I see it the other way around. All four fall within Rolfing’s reach. Working on structure ripples into the other three. Perception and meaning are not things to hand off; they are moving inside the session. Change how space feels and posture changes; change the judgment that this place is safe and tone changes.
Four doorways also means that entering through any one of them reaches the other three.
The Direction Differs by Source
Let me be honest about something. How these four relate differs from source to source. The position I called “the other way around” is only one of them.
| Source | How the four relate |
|---|---|
| Giovanni Felicioni, 2014 | The four are assigned to four methods |
| How Life Moves, main text (2006) | Physical structure derives from the other three. If you can dialogue with the other three, the body is easiest to change |
| The same book’s foreword (Godard) | Lists the four, then states that imagination and perception are one and the same phenomenon |
| What I have written myself | Working on structure ripples into the other three |
Within one book, the authors and the writer of the foreword point in different directions. Even the names differ. What the main text calls “meaning,” Godard’s foreword calls “psychological make-up.”
Nor is there only one way to count. Aline Newton organizes it as five factors: tissue, perception and cognition, thought and language, meaning and symbol, coordination. What the fifth adds is clear: tissue — the manual work itself — gains a place inside the theory.
I don’t think this is a question of which is correct. The four look different depending on whether you have hands in the work. From outside the manual work, the body looks like the result of the other three. From inside it, the body looks like the doorway to the other three.
Three Examples
What do these four actually look like? Three examples from Godard’s 1995 essay. All of them are about dance, but what they are handling is the four aspects themselves.
Coordination — The Same Name, the Meaning Reversed
At the center of Martha Graham’s technique is the alternation of contraction and release. That technical choice persisted over an extremely long period.
Watching filmed records from different periods, the contraction — that naturally very complex curving of the lower back — corresponds to a roughly constant form across the years. And yet the quality and the meaning vary enormously by period.
In the 1930s, early in Graham’s work, it was a concentric movement that gathered the body. And this is not unlike the style of Gene Kelly as we described it.
In the later works, the form is apparently unchanged and the movement is exactly the opposite. It has become eccentric — closer now to Fred Astaire’s organization. Less a contraction in the proper sense than an elongation, an opening of space that curves as it stretches.
The name didn’t change. The meaning is nearly reversed. And it already prepares Cunningham’s curve.
The two dancers from the slowed-down film come back here. The same pair, concentric and eccentric, reversed within one choreographer’s lifetime.
Seen this way, resemblances surface between categories usually held far apart. Vaganova and Doris Humphrey. Bournonville and Dominique Bagouet. And conversely: kathakali, flamenco, and tap. The apparent form — striking the floor with the feet — is the same, but the handling of weight and the accent of suspension differ, and that is how a spectator tells them apart.
The difficulty of accounting for such phenomena in words lies at the root of Rudolf Laban’s whole body of work. Linguistic structures cannot grasp the deep meaning of movement. That powerlessness is what sent him toward a system of notation.
Godard points out one more thing. History has left us an enormous amount on costumiers, musicians, and choreographers, and remains almost entirely silent on the dancer — on the work, the training, the bodily techniques.
Meaning — Posture Is Where History Is Inscribed
What determines a person’s gravitational organization is a complex mixture of three things: the history of the species, culture, and individual history.
The trace of the passage from quadrupedalism to verticality, the evolution of walking. And at the same time, each person’s upbringing. Learning language alongside learning to walk, organizing one’s autonomy toward the world while carrying the hazards of separation from the mother. That is where the symbolic relation linking posture, affect, and expressivity is made.
Change the environment and the gravitational organization of the group changes. The images of the body circulating in a society are inscribed in the postural system, and conversely people’s bearing becomes the medium that performs that image. Architecture and the shape of cities bear on it too.
Godard’s example is Germany in the 1930s. The theme in the original is “the interest in vertical organization and the conquest of new territories.” These two found radically opposed outcomes.
Mary Wigman’s incantatory, praying bearing: an ascending axial tension, constantly linked to the exploration of an inner imaginary space, in which the frontiers of her own body are perpetually redefined.
At the same moment, with the rise of Nazism, another body appears, drawn around a solid axis: an armed body, with fixed frontiers that leave no room for the inner frontiers to vary. And this body will go on to conquer other “territories” around the forces of another “axis.” This power declared Wigman’s bearing degenerate.
The word “territory” carries both the frontiers of the body and geopolitics. That is why the example is there.
One works the imaginary; the other constrains it with ideology. Both inflect the gravitational and tonic organization that anticipates every gesture. That said, social upheaval does not appear on stage immediately. There are periods in which aesthetic tension accumulates, finding artistic expression much later.
Perception — Figure and Ground
Figure and ground are, originally, terms for looking at a painting. What you are looking at is the figure; what lies behind it is the ground. A person is figure, the landscape is ground. Godard applies this to watching movement.
One can consider postural attitude and pre-movement, the inevitable precondition of the gesture, as a background against which the apparent movement is drawn: the figure.
What we see as “movement” is the figure.
The original also calls this ground the backdrop (toile de fond) — the cloth hung at the back of a stage. Where Part 1 distinguished movement from gesture and spoke of “the tonic and gravitational backdrop of the subject,” the original used the same word. What on the body’s side is a backdrop is, on the stage’s side, a backdrop cloth. Both point at pre-movement.
Godard contrasts two choreographers who treat that ground in opposite ways.
Cunningham — Making the Ground Invisible
In one piece Merce Cunningham takes up the classical figure called a “promenade.” In a classical pas de deux this figure carries a charge tied to the stirrings of love, redoubled by the look the partners exchange. In Cunningham it is so different you don’t recognize it as the same form.
The two are not preoccupied with a psychological relationship; no tension can be read in their eyes. It is as if those eyes were simply listening to the distant echo of the cutting of space they provoke — and perhaps to a distant echo of Kleist’s thought as well.
So the Cunningham dancer offers a surface as neutral, as invisible, as untroubled by affect as possible. So that the figure stays clear. So that the ground does not trouble the figure.
From then on the spectator, more than the dancer, is the true interpreter of Cunningham’s dance.
Trisha Brown — Showing the Ground
Trisha Brown does the opposite. Her 1994 solo If You Couldn’t See Me is danced entirely with her back to the audience. Neither arms nor legs settle into any form. They seem to be nothing but the prolongation of tensions working at the very level where pre-movement arises.
The public therefore has no other choice than to see the “backdrop,” the place of the origin of the movement: the puppeteer is laid bare.
The marionette section from Part 1 comes back here. Kleist’s dancer said that expressivity belongs to the puppeteer. Trisha Brown put the puppeteer on stage.
The Order Is Reversed
The stimulation a performance produces follows two different routes in the spectator’s perceptual sphere.
With Trisha Brown, the stimulation works first in the not-yet-interpreted kinesthetic, and emerges afterwards as conscious perception.
With Cunningham, perceptual interpretation works first, reworking the observed material, and only then touches the spectator’s kinesthetic sense.
Same act of looking; the order is reversed, depending on whether the ground or the figure arrives first.
As we saw in Part 2, Tonic Function is working in the ground, not the figure. Cunningham and Trisha Brown handle that ground from the erasing side and the showing side.
※ Quotations from Godard’s 1995 essay are 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.
Written for People with Hands in the Work
Each chapter of Frank and McHose’s book ends with a section called “For Teachers and Bodyworkers.” Not explanation for the general reader, but instructions to people with hands in the work about what to look for.
The Question Tonic Function Is Trying to Answer
Research has shown that people with low back pain need to relearn the function of transversus abdominis and multifidus. But how to teach that is something researchers have only begun to consider. That is where Tonic Function sits.
“What makes a person learn healthy coordination?” It is an attempt to answer that question. The aim is to teach the feeling of a stable core without thinking about the core.
Form and Flow
Why is meaning the fourth? The explanation turns up somewhere unexpected.
Much of our chronic pain and tension is rooted in a human dilemma. Civilization is necessary and good. How do we keep that civilization from shutting down our own creativity and freedom of expression?
The book says there is no answer. It is a dialectic between form and flow. Survival strategies require language, rules, social structure. But without flow, mind and body and physiology begin to suffocate. Form without flow is rigid; flow without form is a drunkard’s dance. If we can’t decide which side of the road to drive on, people die.
And the aim is stated. Not to acquire a new and better form. To discover that form can change.
Declaring a Position on Lordosis
How to view the curve of the lower back is contested, and the book doesn’t hide it. The development of lordosis, cultural attitudes toward it, and how it is addressed are matters of controversy. New research on low back pain combined with Godard’s framework, they write, has let them answer clients’ questions better.
And then: be critical of all the therapies and movement instruction you receive. Including our own book, I take that to mean.
The main text gives a criterion. Posture based on an abstract ideal and posture that responds to a situation are different things. Lordosis is adjusted naturally by the stabilizers of the trunk. Consciously trying to control it — gripping the abdominals, reducing the curve — produces fixation instead.
Working with What Isn’t Visible
Let me gather three articles into one thing.
Tonic Function works in the ground, not the figure. What we look at and call posture is on the side of the figure; the work is happening in front of it.
Which makes it hard to see. Hard to see, but not small. The same form reverses; a society’s history gets inscribed; the order in which things reach the viewer swaps around.
And posture reaches mood, and mood changes posture. What I wrote at the beginning was not a coincidence. The gravity system and the expression system are one and the same.
※ Sources for this article: Aline Newton, “Basic Concepts in the Theory of Hubert Godard” (Rolf Lines, Vol. XXIII, No. 1, March 1995, pp. 32–43); Hubert Godard, “Le geste et sa perception,” in La danse au XXe siècle (Bordas, 1998), pp. 224–229; Caryn McHose & Kevin Frank, How Life Moves (North Atlantic Books, 2006).
This is Part 3 of Where Tonic Function Came From, a three-part series.