Part 4, project 3, exercises 3 and 4: Form – stance and energy. Stage 1: a little preliminary research

All websites mentioned in this post were accessed on 1 October 2015. All images shown are in the public domain.

1 October, 2015. What an emotional rollercoaster. Back from Innsbruck with the best possible result under the circumstances. We are still quite dazed. Our little son belongs in the tiny, tiny group of children worldwide who respond positively (or even at all!) to the initial treatment. He responds with a nearly complete remission at the lowest possible dose. A new balance for his troubled body and mind, so precious, so unstable, so easily toppled over.
Such a coincidence.
I want to dedicate this exercise to my son. I want it be about unstable equilibria, depicting people in a moment of losing or regaining their balance. What I want to transport is not just a physical event, but a disturbing type of imbalance, e.g. an “emotional shift” translated into unexpected movement. By coincidence I came across the following etching and an explanation of its meaning on https://taicarmen.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/gravesoul.jpg (unfortunately I did not find an image large enough to read the artist’s name or date of creation), which seems like an extreme of what I said above. The dying body lying on the bed is in perfect balance, but the soul leaving it defies the law of gravity in all aspects.

In psychotherapy this effect, called disassociation or “soul-loss”, is known to occur e.g. at times of severe pain as a means of self-protection. I think that this is exactly my subject. In order to deal with this successfully I will need to familiarize myself thoroughly with the distribution and behaviour of weight in the human body and experiment with techniques suitable to transport my idea. On http://www.makingcomics.com/2014/02/22/elements-gesture/ I found an extremely useful introduction to the importance of weight in the believable communication of balance and imbalance. The latter made me also think that the best approach might be to combine exercises 3 (stance) and 4 (energy). So off to some experimenting!