This is an English version of a piece first written in November 2022 and expanded in September 2026. The 2022 version drew on only part of an interview with the French Rolfer Hubert Godard. This time I have read it through. The distinction between space and topos, the scoliosis, and the packed train are carried over from the original; history as space, expectation and black holes, painting and stage, cultural difference, and the two orientations have been added.
Introduction
There is an exercise I remember from my basic training in Germany. One person stands, and another walks slowly toward them — from the left, from the right, from the front. The point is to see how that person perceives the world.
I stood, and a classmate walked. Approached from the left, I felt wary; from the right and the front, nothing happened. A classmate of mine — an American living in Denmark, who had also lived in New Zealand — was different. He became wary when approached from the front. Same room, same distance. And still, what happened was not the same.
At the time I took this as a matter of people feeling things differently. It wasn’t.
Hubert Godard built the theory behind Rolf Movement. In a 2005 interview he gives a sustained account of space, and what happened in that exercise is written there. This piece is a reading of that interview. The source is “Phenomenological Space: Interview with Hubert Godard” by Caryn McHose (Contact Quarterly, Summer/Fall 2006, pp. 32-38), recorded in June 2005 in British Columbia, Canada, with editorial assistance from Kevin Frank.
Space, and Topos
Godard keeps two words apart. Topos is real, geographical, measurable space. A hundred square meters is a hundred square meters, whoever does the measuring. Space is something else: the imaginary building of our relationship to the world, tied to a person’s own story.
What does the work in that definition is the word imaginary. Each person is seeing something different. And when people meet and interact, what is there is a mix of the two.
The two differ in kind. There is consistency in the topos; space cannot be homogeneous. Space is individual, subjective, shaped by history and by associations of meaning.
Back to the exercise. The topos was the same — same room, same distance, the same classmate walking at the same pace. What differed was the space.
Space Is Made of History
What is that space made of? History, Godard says. In our history there were places that were traumatic and places that were exquisite. The first three months, first love, mother, parents. That shapes a large part of our subjective space.
When you were shouted at as a child, was the parent on your left or your right? When you had an accident, did the impact come from the left or the right? Afterwards, the world gets reinterpreted so as to avoid that direction. The topos may be wide, and the space in that direction stays narrow.
The Kinesphere Is a Gradient of Perspective
In dance, the space around the body is called the kinesphere. Godard restates it as a gradient of perspective — the range of ways one is able to notice the space around one’s own body.
One direction is blocked. Another is very far away. Another is shortsighted. Not a sphere, but a gradient that varies by direction. My left was blocked.
Expectation Builds Space; a Black Hole Blocks It
Something else builds space: expectation. We are never looking just at space. Before we look, we are already projecting into it.
Godard gives the example of a performance. You walk into the theater, you look at an empty stage, and there are already people dancing on it. The dance of expectation has begun before any dancer appears. Expectation is dynamizing and vectoralizing the space.
That shaping has a reverse side.
This desire, this vector, is going out of me and comes back partially transformed by the context or situation. The vector of my vision is superimposed with another vector—the vector of my history, where the space is full of my own phantoms or black holes.
If I’m projecting in a space where there is an open place allowed by my history, I can go on; but if in my history there was a black hole—a missing or unperceived space—I will meet a wall. And very often what we are living is a confrontation between expectation, desire, and history.
Painting and Stage Build Space
Godard talks about painting. Why are so many people moved by Breughel’s The Landscape in the Winter? Because of where the viewer is placed, he says. You are looking at the town from a little way off, and you are still in the town. Apart from it, and belonging to it. A point of view, a way to look at the life of a village. Painting is the building of a space.
Matisse appears as well. After his trip to Morocco his life changed completely, and in his paintings the ground became more important than the figures. His vision of space had changed. That episode also appears in Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function, where it sits in a different context — where Godard’s non-cortical gaze came from. The same fact answers a different question.
What Is Possible as Movement, in This Situation
On stage, set design and lighting change perspective. Dancers feel it strongly, and so do spectators, who are wrapped in a different kind of space. What the set is doing has less to do with meaning than with rearranging perspectives and expectations wholesale.
Take personal history together with the sociological and geographical context, and you get what is possible as movement in this particular situation. Godard names it here: what the perceptual psychologist James Gibson called affordance. The space is completely shaped. There is no empty container in which anything at all could be done.
What Nijinsky Could Not Do
Nijinsky comes up as the example. In many of his ballets, Godard says, there is no potential for aggressive movement. In Petrushka, Nijinsky is completely inside the training, afraid of the space around him and afraid of defending his territory. In his space of action, there is no capacity for defense against aggression. The audience is touched because even without following the story, they grasp that impossibility.
And then this. Shortly before the First World War began, invited to perform in a salon for very wealthy people, Nijinsky said he would improvise war, began to dance it, and passed out. He never came back from it.
What was so evocative about Nijinsky was not his leap but his sweetness—his innocence and vulnerability—which was under his strong capacity to move and jump. And, of course, it is very attractive to meet somebody who is strong and non-aggressive. We understand the fact that there is a missing gesture. When I say “absent or missing,” I don’t just mean a movement that is not there. You know, I can make the movement, but you also see there is a gesture that I cannot do on another level. What is “yelling” on stage is a repressed gesture.
The Space of a Lion, the Space of a Gazelle
In nature, the space of a lion and the space of a gazelle are not the same. It is the same with people, Godard says. Some have gazelle space; some have more lion space.
He also speaks about Contact Improvisation. It matters because it is a way to renegotiate: first the distance to other people, then the vectoralization of space, then the many levels of perceiving. A very direct way to address the question of space at a deep level. It touches each person’s history, and it touches the taboo of the society.
Scoliosis Is in the Space
From here, the material concerns the person receiving sessions as well. Scoliosis is not in the body. It is in the space. Godard states it flatly. The scoliosis of the space brings the scoliosis of the body. So perception has to be reorganized.
Hands-on work can make a scoliosis better. And it keeps coming back. What makes the space is perception, and if you don’t work on the perception, no change will occur. We keep working on the body and forget to work on the space. Godard mentions having had success, at times, working only on the space instead of manipulating the body.
You Can See the Kinesphere
Address the way people perceive, and be sensitive to it, and you can see the kinesphere in them. A leaking, leaning, looking toward the right — and no projection capacity on the left. That happens. What produced the gap, Godard calls an accident of life. In that exercise, my left was blocked. That is what was being seen.
There is a note about timing, too. People are not born with scoliosis. It occurs later in life, after the age of eight. It starts at the moment when something happened.
It Works Both Ways
Here the direction reverses. The space is in the body and the body is in the space. Work on the space and you work on the body; change something concrete in the body and you change that person’s way of perceiving the space. What Rolfing touches with the hands is one of those two directions.
Space Differs by Culture
After personal history comes culture. Every culture has a unique way of using space. Godard contrasts Japan with the American Midwest. In Japan people are packed against each other, and still a person can have a huge kinesphere. The topos is constricted, but the space is large. In a Midwest city it is the opposite: a huge topos, and a limited kinesphere.
Which brings the packed commuter train to mind. Almost no topos is left. And there are people who feel no sense of their own space being invaded.
One Meter Can Be One Centimeter, or One Kilometer
The study of human perception and use of space within the context of culture is proxemics, a branch of semiotics to which Edward T. Hall contributed greatly.
Godard describes putting a hundred people within one meter of each other and asking how far away the other person is. Some say one centimeter. Some say one kilometer. That subjectivity is organized by personal history and expectation, and by sociological context.
Geography plays a part as well. Put somebody in front of a big mountain and the body reacts; it changes the height of people without their noticing. Someone who has lived surrounded by mountains finds flatland strange. Live in a city, and your walk is different.
The Phrase “Legitimate Perspective”
Here the scale widens. Alberti set the rules of perspective, and the Latin name is perspectiva legitima — as though there were one legitimate perspective. Godard reads the term as a metaphor for the projected hierarchy of our society.
Each culture has its own perspective, and Western cultures declare that there is a legitimate one. In Japan, the vanishing point is very often in the back.
Geographical colonization is well known. Cultural colonization is stronger, and that gets forgotten, Godard says. The history of acting, performing and dancing, and the history of painting, are affected by where and how we build the horizon.
Space Does Not Exist
Godard gathers the broad view into one statement. Space — not the topos — is in fact an imaginary space of action, and it does not exist. There is no contact with space out of time and history. The context and one’s history give the affordance of what can happen in terms of whole-body gesture and movement.
So there is no empty space. Space is not unfilled; it is a space of action. What makes a space frightening is fearing what can happen in it; what makes a space attractive is that one can go into it.
A Place with No Place
The space of personal history, of expectation, of society, of geography — and after those, Godard goes to a non-space.
After we talk of the space of personal history, the space of expectation, the sociological space, and the geographical space, we come to a non-space, which is the meaning of utopia (Greek: literally “no topos” or “no place”). This is the space of action in which “inside/outside,” “me and the space,” are the same. There is just one. It is movement, a space with all the movement happening in space. And this is a goal in bodywork and dance—to open the full potential for action.
Seeing, and Being Open to Space
There is something in Morocco, Godard says, that forces the gaze to be peripheral. He was born there himself. It stops being a way of looking that is about naming, and becomes a direct melting with the space. With that kind of looking, reading a body becomes easy, because you can incorporate people into your own subjective space. This non-cortical gaze is taken up in Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function, where Morocco, the history of painting, and my own 2015 trip run together.
Godard also says where his thinking came from: he was completely shaped by teaching dance. The way you talk, the way you tell the story, makes people dance differently. Trying to understand how that happens, he arrived at the idea that space is a support.
Built from the Ground, or Suspended from the Chest
The example is a difference between schools of dance. Martha Graham built entirely from the ground; Doris Humphrey and José Limón were suspended by the chest. The subjective building of Humphrey’s space was the horizon. Graham was very territorial, and she knew what she wanted. A type of space had become a type of movement.
And then Godard draws it together. Ease of movement needs both ground orientation and space orientation. And the way one has built one’s space — “the accident of my life” — is directly responsible for the contractions and contradictions in the body. That investigation led to Tonic Function.
One concrete example is worth keeping. The hamstring often doesn’t respond to daily stretching. Change the perception, reorient to the ground and to the sky, and it changes right away — an instance of a muscle responding when perception is addressed. From there the material belongs to Our Relationship to Gravity.
Diminishing Expectation
Toward the end, Godard talks about how one learns. You learn that the ground can be everywhere, and you learn by diminishing your expectation. Then you give freedom to the space that arises. If you have too much expectation, the space is full already.
It pairs with the dance of expectation at the start. Expectation builds space, and expectation fills it up.
He also mentions his farm in Burgundy — a specific space he can transport with him. Each person has to find their space. It could be a garden, a house, whatever.
In Closing
Back to that exercise once more. Wary from the left, nothing from the right or the front. I had taken it for a difference in how things feel. It wasn’t. My left was not in my space.
Where does space exist? Outside the body, and at the same time inside it. And it can be worked with from either side. What Godard gives as the line at the head of the interview is one sentence. “I’m in the space and the space is in me.”
How your own space is blocked is not something you can see by yourself. There is a point past which it only begins by having someone else look.
Note, September 2026
When this piece was first written in 2022, the discussion of space ended here. Since then, the same subject has spread into three places.
One is the side of the body. Past the point where Godard says the investigation led to Tonic Function, the material becomes a matter of gravity response. A page for that was written in 2026. Another is the side of perception: if what makes space is perception, then what is perception? That question got a page of its own. The third is the side of the practitioner — where one is seeing the body from. Being open to space led there.
What I wrote in 2022, that each person is different, stopped at that. What differs can now be said in parts: history, expectation, culture.
Related Articles
- Our Relationship to Gravity: A Guide to Tonic Function──from the side of the body. This piece takes the side of space; that one takes gravity response
- Perception as a Way of Seeing — What Is Rolfing Actually Looking At?──from the side of perception. If what makes space is perception, then what is perception
- Where Does Your “Being” Come From? — Phenomenology for Bodyworkers──from the side of the practitioner. Where the body in front of you is being seen from