ABSTRACT

Very often the imagination we have of our bodies has little to do with the reality of our anatomy. These misconceptions can create physical habits that prevent us from maintaining “a state of idle readiness, a passive availability, which makes possible an active acting score” (Grotowski 2002:37). Begin by asking participants some basic questions about their bodies. Where is the middle of your body? If all your flesh were stripped away and all that remained was the skeleton and we folded the skeleton in half, where would the bend occur? The answer is at the hip joint, but many people think the halfway point is the waist or navel area, or the sternum, or the pelvic bones. A wrong answer clearly indicates how separated the person is from the reality of her body. It can also demonstrate the seat of excess tensions in the body or other chronic physiological problems. Further questions can be developed to continue the mapping session:

Where is the top of your spine? Where is the bottom of your spine? Where is the hip joint, the knee joint, the ankle joint? Not in general, but precisely where does the articulation occur? If the fingers are one end of the arm structure, where is the other end? (Hint: the answer here is not the shoulder.) Where are the lungs located? How high up or how low do they go? How much does your head weigh?