“Take care of your animal body” are the famous words of Steve Paxton. The concept of the animal body “refers to the presence of a being underlying the socialized self, a being underlying that part of the self which is expressed through verbal language, linear thought, and movement behavior appropriate to civilized spaces” (Lepkoff 1998, 1).
The term “animal body” is coined by Paxton to indicate how in dance improvisation one needs to relate to the animal self. In contrast to our culturally conditioned self, the animal self is a physical intelligence that consists of reflexes, instincts and primary movements – both learned and acquired.
The animal body becomes accessible to us by play, as the energetic release of forces, weight and flow. Paxton urges the dancers to search for “one’s animal”, to move beyond the socialized self in order to engage with a deep sense of self that is physical and that is grounded in the play of the body.
The animal body is thus juxtaposed to the cultural, habitual body (Turner 2010). The animal body is affectively and cognitively attuned to its environment. Even more, the animal has to adapt to surroundings that are constantly changing, to an environment that is never completely the same as it was a day before, something which in its complexity is always different.
The animal body attunes to the lived experience. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone suggests that by physically relating to the world through lived experience we enjoy our “livability”.
"An essential element of that livability – is an awareness of one’s own movement, without which instincts, mental powers, and affections, whether of ants or of any other creatures, would count for naught: an animal that knew not how,what, that, or when it was moving would be incapable of effective agency, indeed of agency at all.The animal would not in fact be livable. Its livability, like its agency, is contingent on kinesthesia" (Sheets-Johnstone 2010, 228).
The animal body is a tactile kinesthetic body that thinks in movement. Steve Paxton’s notion of the animal body can be seen as way to attune to the tactile, kinesthetic body, or a body that is aware of sensations, feelings and thoughts in a spontaneous play of movements in direct proximity with others.
"We literally discover ourselves in movement, we grow kinetically into our bodies. In particular we grow into those distinctive ways of movements that come with our being the bodies we are. In our spontaneity of movement we discover arms that extend, spines that bend, knees that flex […]. We make sense of ourselves in the course of moving" (Sheets-Johnstone 2011, 126).
It is this animal body with its kinetic intelligence that offers possibilities to re-invent, re-engineer and re-construct our bodily senseof self.
‘What happens when I touch the air? I become a bird'
What happens when I touch the water? I become a fish’
‘What happens when I touch the earth? I become a mole’
‘What happens when I touch wood? I become a beaver’
On a Sunday morning Lisa is lying on the big blue carpet in our living room. Just lying. Out of the stillness Lisa spontaneously starts to move. First she does some rolls, then some stretching and along the way Lisa finds a soft blanket that becomes part of her play. ‘I am a bird’ she says, ‘And birds can do whatever they want’.
She stands up, runs and flies. When the running and flying are exhausted, she lands on the blue carpet. ‘Water’ she says in an associative mood. ‘What happens when I touch the water?’ It is not a question that is directed to me since she seems not to expect any answer from me. The question is directed towards herself. ‘I become a fish’, she answers. Immediately she starts to moves in a fishy way. The blanket is part of her transformation. Lisa wraps it around her, as a second skin, and soon the blanket and her body transform together in scales, fins and the tail of a fish. The blue carpet is the water: as long as Lisa is in the water, she is a fish. Lisa swims and dives around, and before she knows it, she accidently rolls off the carpet on the wooden floor. ‘The earth’, she says. ‘What happens when I touch the earth?’ ‘I become a mole’, she answers. Voilà, her body transforms into a mole. She crawls around, blindly, and hits a small wooden table. ‘What happens when I touch wood?’ ‘I become a beaver’, she answers
