The Living Line by Veder Robin;

Author:Veder, Robin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

Self-consciousness also, although less frequently, took the form of internal visual imagery that accompanied the feeling of being watched by others or by oneself as if removed in space or time. Titchener decided in his researches that kinesthetic imagery with an actual visual component was more likely to accompany the acquisition of new motor skills.27

In the 1930s, therapeutic body cultures harnessed this tendency to create a self-image, turning it into a technique of visualizing both the desired end result and of the physical process for achieving those goals. Some used it only as a starting point to develop a new skill, while others like the Rolf and Alexander methods saw such introspective kinesthetic awareness as an ever-present tool for self-care. In texts and classrooms, visual images and techniques were instrumental and had at least three levels of complexity. At the first level are sequential illustrations, an established and schematic mode of exercise instruction that demonstrated a series of actions and demanded imitation. Second, nudity and mirrors in the classroom, X-ray views, and annotated reproductions of paintings all extended the range of vision into the normally concealed body interior, thus developing powers of inspection and appreciation. In this chapter, I introduce the third and most demanding use of visual imagery for physical education.28

A number of early to mid-twentieth-century body reformers, including Rolf, Mensendieck, F. Matthias Alexander, Moshé Feldenkrais, Mabel Elsworth Todd, and Lulu Sweigard, used visual imagery to teach posture, alignment, and movement. Sweigard named it “ideokinesis”: “the image or thought as facilitator of the movement.”29 According to the new theorizations and practices of ideokinesis, whether in direct or metaphorical imagery, visualizing movement increased kinesthetic attentiveness and liberated movement from deleterious habits.

In Mensendieck’s well-publicized and widely distributed 1931 self-help text “It’s Up to You,” she advised readers, “We must get into the habit of visualizing our body as a building” in order to remember the importance of a solid foundation and correct alignment of weight masses. “Uneven floors, sagging walls, shutters that hang down — these are conditions that we would not for a moment tolerate in a house. Yet we are willing to walk . . . with sagging shoulders, slouching trunk and slackly held arms and head!”30 Then, for her 1937 Mensendieck System of Functional Exercises, illustrators Ivan Stoppe and Richard Loederer compared functioning musculature to machines and organisms. The principles of movement united the mechanical and natural worlds. Their plate “Similes for Muscle Contraction” shows what Mensendieck explains: when muscles contract, it is not like the “ ‘stretch and give’ of a rubber band”; rather, it “is much like the hunching movement of a caterpillar or a worm” or, as the artists imply by inclusion, muscles move like the twisting ripple of an eel. The artists venture further into instructive ideokinesis when they offer an infant’s cradle to demonstrate how to rock one’s pelvis into proper carriage (fig. 7.5), a faucet to show how the bones of the arm rotate inward from top (shoulder) to bottom (wrist), and an accordion that rounds incrementally like the spine.

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