My Favourite Movement – an after-dinner speech.
Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking – I beg your indulgence as I read to you.
I want to tell you about a rare and endangered sub-species. Many people have never seen it ( or been aware that they have – rather like porcini-hunting it takes a tuned eye to catch it in the camouflage and distraction provided by the surrounding and ubiquitous common varieties.
David Attenborough and his team are currently researching, and hope to find a way to infiltrate their cameras inconspicuously so as to capture close-up footage. For it is often hard t pick out at a distance; a zoom lens or a physical proximity is often essential to detect its presence….
I have been lucky enough to see this species – called f’avoritas mouvimentum’, or ‘fave move’, or ‘f.m’ for short, and I want to try and picture for you at least a few of its characteristics.
Habitat. It is often thought to live in large theatres, but these are frequently populated by a more common sub-species – ‘polished mouvimentum’
Or ‘p.m’. It is a wonderful treat to find an ‘f.m’ infiltrating this common herd – like a brief encounter with the grit in an oyster, or the delight of a wayward coluored thread through grey silk, or some lightly stemed vegetables in the school cabage !
Individuals or small groups of ‘f.m’ have certainly been known to populate stages, but in large ‘herds’ there seems to be some inevitable mutation back to the more common ‘p.m’.
At close quarters , then, in studios, galleries, workplaces, in streets, in landscape, it can be spotted by the discerning eye, and these are some identifying characteristics of its behaviour :-
ÿ It shows great absorption, concentration in its activity, as if it is reading and recording its journey as it evolves.
ÿ Paradoxically it can either be making clearly discernible decisions moment by moment, or adopting a more witnessing role of observing itself in the journey as it arises, surprising itself.
ÿ It has a quality of wonderful transparency that lets you see through deep to its every nuance of behaviour.
ÿ This transparency prevents any sense of predominant colour in its aspect; chameleon-like it seems able to take on different sensory and muscular tones and shift effortlessly and sensitively between them.
ÿ This sensitivity expands out beyond its extremities to an awareness of the space which it inhabits and with which it interacts. The same could be said for its relation to time, gauged by how as I watch it my own Awareness of duration and rhythm is heightened.
ÿ There is an evident intelligence to its behaviour, but as if its cognitive and percpetual apparatus, by some unusual evolutionary abnormality, has been filtered from the brain and central nervous system to permeate through the whole 3 dimensional volume of a body and its integral layers and systems.
( I was working only last week with an international group of researchers who, whilst having no interest in the ‘f.m’ per se, were undertaking extreme experiments with their perceptual apparatus – seeing if it was possible to filter their perception through their 100 trillion cells. ( You may previously have heard the figure of 73 trillion mentioned for homo-sapiens, but biologists cannopt avoid the trends for growth that come with globalisation – they too have expanded their horizons)* Anyway, for all thatr we had done our best to get away from any form of known and categorised ‘mouvimentum’ by escaping to the north of Scotland – nevertheless there were occasional sitings, out of the blue, of ‘f.m’ – as if the process of opening our perceptual fields and releasing our rational and critical, analytical hold on our defenses, had just let them get through.)
BUT – I digress.
ÿ When found in the workplace it is often seen repeating, with apparent ease some intricate, detailed path – often in relationship to some object which seems to grow or change through its intervention or presence.
ÿ It is also spotted in natural habitats, but is particularly apparent for us city-dwellers when seen in slow-motion replay…
ÿ There is no particular way that it shapes itself, no form that it always takes, no path it always goes down, though it does enjoy a continuous plkay with gravity…It can even be to all intents and purposes still – though one senses then, almost more clearly, the waves and pulses that reside deep within it.
ÿ It may behave with the utmost simplicity – but a charged simplicity; you sense a control and ease –as if it had infinite choices but picked this one…
As it can take a constantly surprising, intricate path, frequently characterised by its playful enjoyment, however unconscious of rhythm and intonation
“ The reference here is to the work of Deborah Hay and her Solo Performance Commissioning Project produced by Independent Dance
ÿ . It enjoys to communicate, but also to be absorbed and oblivious of any witness
ÿ Strangely, there is no particular size that it is. It could, for example, sometimes be considered a parasite ( not in any disparaging sense of the term….
(Since after-dinner speeches require the odd spattering of useless information, perhaps just to manifest the erudition of the speaker, or so that something, at least, remains lodged in the memory of listeners, I will add that the Inuit language has no word for ‘vermin’ or ‘weed’)
ÿ …….so…parasite – in the sense of living within a host body, a home, that could even be the human body.
I was recently lucky enough to meet a historian who excitedly showed me tattered fragments of a text he had uncovered in a small bed-sit in east London, and rescued just before it was demolished. I will read you just a few snippets:
..surprise visitation by ‘f.m’ – promised to visit for ages, been looking out – even searching, cleaning the house of dust and any cluttering mires of information or ‘noise’ – trying to set things up so ‘f.m’ would really feel at home.
- completely unannounced – arrived and swept through the house in a fluid path
- - almost no walls or doors – open channel – sliding, gliding, all the furniture and contents unglued and mobile, but always in composed relation to….
- …light but grounded…
- noticed things I never knew I possessed - or had somehow forgotten….neglected since childhood, when I was so immersed I didn’t even need to know them…..
‘f.m’ seemed to know all possibilities but also not know what might arise – mapping the territory, aware of my house in relation to the world beyond
…sometimes – repeated over and over til the play began and little corners of the journey opened up with a zoom lens….
And there it ends – torn paper, fading pencil…….
…and that’s where I will end…..
just hoping that you may now have a few more tools to make a rare siting – or through your perception to help the supported breeding programme – the ‘sbp’ for ‘f.m’, through which we hope to re-invigorate the ‘f.m’ population for our delight, but alsop for the survival of our futures………
Gill Clarke
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Gill Clarke, Writing, July 2006 | 
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