Floating Bones

A Dancer's Tensegretic Body as Teacher

Cynthia Roses-Thema

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000263848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Floating Bones charts the author's journey into tensegrity, which begins in ballet and culminates in a model for addressing one's body as a teacher.

Tensegrity flips traditional biomechanical models such that instead of support coming from the bones, the bones float, and it is the muscles and other soft connective tissue that provide support for the moving body. Using the model of tensegretic experience, Roses-Thema connects somatics, cognition, rhetoric, and reflective practices detailing the means that constructed approaching the body as a teacher. This study presents the argument for extending the models of thinking to include bodily thinking, by citing how the experiential perspective of tensegrity constructs physical evidence of the rhetorical concept, metis, where the body thinks as it moves.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of dance, theater, and sociology.

Part I
Floating bones overview

Figure P1

Source: Cynthia Roses-Thema

I begin Part I with the story of how I bumped into my floating bones, giving you some points of origin for tensional integrity (tensegrity) as a design element and a biomechanical model, and elaborating on how tensegrity might become more prominent in dance. To get started, here is the biological icosahedron upon which tensegrity in the body is modeled. The icosahedron is a structure of 12 vertices totaling 20 triangles.

The unassuming icosahedron creates a micro-power of sensed push and pull in the moving human body by the dancer. It is, however, the fact that the bones float that provides the main distinction between tensegrity and traditional biomechanical models. Floating bones occur due to the support coming from the soft tissues (muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia). Support is possible because the body is connected in its myofascial tissues. Though anatomical models separate tissues in the body for better understanding, it is important to remember that from the body’s perspective, one tissue grows out of another. Out of the hard tissue of the bone grows softer tissues of the tendons and ligaments. Tendons grow into muscle tissue, which grow back into tendons and then grow back into bones. The bones float as a result of tensional connections created by the line of pull of the muscles making a long kinetic chain that is strong and capable of supporting the floating bones. Tensegrity in time will become the new biomechanical model of the moving body.

Following a brief historical sojourn into tensegrity, both my story and others, comes the non-linear, bumpy journey into physical tensegrity. The trailhead for this adventure comes when one finds the moving body’s perspective. After that, it’s on to sensed complementary opposites, perceiving one’s floating bones, and then the experience of sensing oneself in more than one place all at once. The cycle of breath connects to the cycle of moving until finally there is a budding philosophy that physically forms from tensegretically moving.

1
How I bumped into my floating bones

I was invited into tensegrity by my moving body. I learned through my own trial and error how to activate and use tensegrity as I danced. Since the moving human body doesn’t physically speak to one in English, I had no words to describe the totality of my inner experience of my whole body moving. It was the word “tensegrity” I was looking for in my graduate studies even though in actual fact I had been dancing tensegretically for many years prior. When I began to teach, because I wanted my students to know what dance felt like on the inside, I invented terms that described my physical sensations. I called the oppositional elastic tensional lengths I sensed as I built, maintained, and morphed my torso and limbs into shapes “stretch roads.” These stretch roads connected limb to limb and limb to torso. The network of interrelated joints that achieved functional rotation of my legs I named “neutralizing joint points.” I imagined joints as points triangularly connected to each other in 3-D for stability and joint health. The support I experienced being created in my body by pressing into the floor and air with my arms and legs as I moved I called “pressing flair.” To move quickly, I drew long arcs through space with my limbs using distal initiations from fingertips and toes. To me this was economizing: since the body was all connected, one could move huge parts of the body quickly. As a result of negotiating change in my moving body through these four strategies, I found a technique for artistry: juggling one’s perceptions between sensing oneself moving, breathing, and the sensorial data streaming in from outside one’s body. I could interpret my movement juggling these different perceptual pathways, making my fifth strategy interpreting. These SPINE strategies (S for stretch roads; P for pressing flair; I for interpreting; N for neutralizing joint points; and E for economizing) became the basis of my teaching in conservatories after my professional career. I brought my SPINE strategies to Arizona State University, searching in my graduate studies for a model of the whole body to support what I sensed inside. Initially what I found through reading and research were parts: a body of parts. Analysis of the complexity of moving occurred only by dissection. Anatomy and kinesiology texts presented a body divided. I thought all was lost until the day I read in Alexandra and Roger Pierce’s book Expressive Movement (1989) about the body as tensional – the whole body: no parts! Further, Pierce and Pierce write, “the connective tissue exerts an inward pull that not only keeps the parts together but (because of the resistance of the bones to compression) lifts the whole structure upward against gravity” (p. 38). Yes: that described what I felt. And then, Pierce and Pierce write that tensegrity had been investigated scientifically by an orthopedic surgeon:

Although some of the rigid components of a tensegrity system may “kiss,” it does not mean that they are in compressive opposition to one another. Axial loads were applied to joints in live subjects under anesthesia during surgical intervention for a variety of conditions. Joint studies included the knee, ankle, elbow and metatarsalphalangeal joints. In our studies at no time could the articular surfaces of these joints be forced into contact with one another as long as the ligaments remained intact.

(Pierce & Pierce, 1989, p. 38.)

Dr. Stephen Levin’s quote provided empirical proof of that what I sensed existed. I had my model of the whole body as I experienced it with the empirical proof I was searching for: the model for the whole body was called tensegrity. I had bumped into my floating bones.

Points of origin

While histories tend to credit a single source for an origin or identify a precise time that an idea began, the brief history of tensegrity I detail here has multiple points of origin with many people contributing to visualizing tensegrity. These multiple points of origin for tensegrity match the multiplicities within a tensegretic structure that allow for movement to change, depending on initiation. Thus, each of these individual points contributes to the tensegrity structure united by a beneficial tension that integrates.

One point of origin is with visual artist Kenneth Snelson’s Needle Tower in 1968, a tensegrity sculpture on display at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

Source: Kenneth Snelson, used with permission from Hirshhorn Museum

Snelson’s Needle Tower creates verticality not by stacking, where gravity uses compression to maintain form, such as putting one brick or stone atop another. Snelson’s Needle Tower produces a structure whose form is stable and independent of gravity. Snelson uses tension cables that crisscross maintaining tubes in place, achieving his artistic aim of finding ways to connect what is invisible to the visible, taking what is inner and outer into unity. Heartney (2013) writes in Kenneth Snelson: Art and Ideas about the Needle Tower of Snelson’s tensegretic sculptures maintaining their verticality and shape by stating: “things maintain their form through the outward push of the compression tubes and the inward pull of the tension cables” (p. 20). In essence, this combination of push and pull together creates the tensional integrity of the Needle Tower.

Another point of origin is with Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), who coined the term “tensegrity” to stand for the tensional integrity of the structure. Fuller went on to identify many of the properties of a tensegretic structure. Synergy is one such property; buoyancy is another. For Fuller, synergy was part of an entire philosophical approach to design and modeling that allows for discontinuous compression and continuous tension in spatial relationships. Fuller named his ideas “synergetic geometry” (1961). Fuller’s experiences that led him towards naming tensegrity have a long trajectory, which he details began in 1927 and include his curiosity about bridges, the solar system, and atoms; all these inquiries led him to consider how tension and compression work together, which he later developed as a building strategy for his geodesic domes.

A point of origin for applying tensegrity to the moving human body is Dr. Stephen Levin, a spine surgeon, who saw Kenneth Snelson’s Needle Tower in the 1970s and immediately recognized the human spine. Levin identified in the Needle Tower the truss system of the physical spine and began investigations into how tensegrity could be used to model human anatomy and biomechanics. Since then Dr. Levin has worked to model biotensegrity, a name he uses to differentiate tensegrity in the living human body from its other artistic uses. His work contributes to theorizing a tense-gretic understanding of the physical spine, pelvis, and shoulder girdle. In his article “Hang in There! The Statics and Dynamics of Pelvic Mechanics,” Levin finds for the pelvic girdle that “the bones, including the sacrum, ‘float’ in this network much like the hub of a wire spoke cycle wheel is suspended in its tension spoke network” (2007, p. 2). Levin finds the scapulae operate in much the same manner as the sacrum as the hub of the wire wheel. Muscles, which Levin likens to ropes, cannot act as levers in the body, which is the current biomechanical model for human movement. Levin also posits that the reason the human body has been modeled as stacking bones one atop the other could be linked to architecture, where one stone or brick can be placed atop the other to create the verticality of such iconic structures as the Parthenon and the Acropolis. An additional problem with the stacking model is that it is only in pathology, such as arthritis, that one bone touches another. Otherwise, bones do not touch each other, so the transfer of compressive forces that occur during stacking is just not possible in the moving human body. Levin (1995) finds omnidirectionality in the tensegrity structures “so that tension elements always function in tension no matter what the direction of applied force,” and further that the compression elements “float in a tension network” (p. 8).

Another point of origin comes from Tom Flemmons (1953–2018), a geometrist, who carefully created models for the new biotensegretic mechanics along with tensegrity furniture, sculpture, and toys. Flemmons worked with Levin in the late 1990s to design many anatomical models of tensegrity, from a single- and double-tensioned pelvis to an animated spiral tensegrity mast. One of the differences Flemmons noted in tensegretic models is that you can see through them. The importance here is that the transparency allows one to view “how the forces that hold them together are arranged” (http://intensiondesigns.ca/how-tensegrity-models-reality/). Because Flemmons states these models must be understood holistically, “they challenge us to think systematically and to see how all the parts of a whole act in concert” (http://intensiondesigns.ca/how-tensegrity-models-reality/).

Huge contributions to how the soft tissue can support the weight of the bones comes from understanding more about the connective tissue of the body: the fascia. As a tissue, fascia interdigitates everywhere in the body. It is said that if one took out everything from one’s body leaving only fascia, one could still be recognizable; that is how much fascia connects throughout the human body. It was Ida Rolf (1896–1979) in the mid-1900s who first deemed fascia important. Rolf’s research formulated into a form of body-work called structural integration. Stemming from Rolf’s work with the fascia come two other notable points of origin for tensegrity: Robert Schleip and Tom Myers. Robert Schleip started as a structural integration therapist and then transferred to a researcher on fascia. His discoveries that the fascia is alive complete with specialized nerve cells have led to important understandings of how fascia contributes to bodily communication. The aliveness of fascia being able to respond to movement for tensegrity also contributes to how soft tissue creates a network of support for the floating bones. Additional work on this support comes from Tom Myers, who became a structural integration therapist and dedicated his life to discovering the fascia trains he calls “anatomy trains.” His maps of the long kinetic chains in the fascia and myofascial anatomy have contributed much to understanding how soft tissue can support floating bones. Myers’s work details how fascia unites the body through these long muscular kinetic chains and finds that expansion and efficiency are built into tensegretic hierarchies. Myers, while acknowledging tensegrity is present in each and every one of us, recognizes that to fully activate tensegrity requires one to lengthen and extend the body. Any sinking deflates tensegrity’s ability to counterbalance the body and causes the soft tissue to contract rather than expand. Myers explains it this way, stating the body perhaps operates “more like a tensegrity structure in Fred Astaire than it does in Jackie Gleason” (www.anatomytrains.com/fascia/tensegrity/).

A point of origin for tensegrity as a biological model on both the microscopic and macroscopic levels comes from the research of Donald Ingber, cell biologist and bioengineer, co-director and founder of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Ingber’s (1998) finding that tensegrity was the underlying structure in the whole body as well as in the cell has implications for biology as a whole. But more importantly for the moving human body, Ingber’s work is another confirmation that current models being used to understand biomechanics and structure are too restrictive. The point here is that moving one part affects the whole tensegretic structure, a design element that current biological models do not account for.

How do some of these design elements of tensegrity manifest in the moving human body of a dancer? In a nutshell, at the most basic level the ideas of push and pull encapsulate a portion of the experience of doing tensegrity in physical movement. For example, when one pushes the left hand out into space away from one’s body, there is what I call the tensegretic response. That is to say that one senses simultaneously support or pull from the push outward coming in the opposite direction, in this case from the right shoulder area. The pull is the sensation that lengthens the line one is drawing and connects the support from the right shoulder to the left hand. Thus, the sensation of tensional integrity is created by the dancer sensing push and pull simultaneously during movement. For the dancer who activates tensegrity, movements also become easier and lighter, connecting to a sense of buoyancy when one creates sensed length in movements.

From a medical standpoint, now that a muscle chain has been proven to be strong enough to support the floating bones, tensegrity is called for by medical professionals as a new holistic model for the moving body that will “change the landscape of how human movement is perceived” (Dischiavi, Wright, Hegedus, & Bleakley, 2017). Seeing the body holistically working together as a way to understand how to correct biomechanical issues in one area has important implications for the medical community, who now call for tensegrity as the new biomechanical model (Dischiavi et al., 2017).

Dance and tensegrity

After teaching a contemporary ballet class and working with my students on tensegrity at Arizona State University, Allegra Fuller Snyder, daughter of Buckminster Fuller, who was visiting the Dance Program on campus, approached me and said, “I knew a dancer would find tensegrity.” Elated, this comment also gave me cause to reflect about dance and tensegrity. Perhaps others like myself didn’t yet have a word for the inner sensations they experienced. Yet tensegrity, due to its health benefits physically, in helping dancers ease pain and possibly preventing injuries, and mentally, in giving the dancer a holistic sense of self, needs to be more prominent in the dancer’s everyday. Tensegrity needs to spread in dance as a way to understand one’s moving body. What can be understood as potential road blocks to the increased experience of tensegrity for dancers? In my view, the answer is twofold. First, the relationship between the inner and outer perspectives in dance training needs to be knitted together much more, and second, more of a flushing out of the benefits of structure for the dancer could also prove beneficial to the dancer.

Counterbalancing inner and outer perspectives

The inner and outer perspectives of dance relate to the experienced versus the observed views of the moving human body. Both are necessary and both work together, yet for the mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Floating bones overview
• Part II Thinking as overview
• Part III Configuring the dancer’s tensegretic body as teacher overview
• Bibliography
• Index