I.

More often than not, it is not enough just to invoke “momentum” as a quality of movement.  Momentum manifests with qualitative difference depending on the succession of material it passes through; and further (or, the same said a little differently), how that material succeeds itself, how it is succession, how it allows specific allowance of momentum and specific resistance or deflection of momentum. 

In dance, momentum concerns mass of the body and gravity of the body, especially.  As long as we are still dealing with live human bodies, it would not be fair – it would not be logical – to say that any genre or instance of dance movement (or, indeed, non-movement) is without mass or gravity (even for those experimenting limited gravity situations… link to come).  But we could talk about how mass and gravity are deployed in the body – namely by their mobilizations, differentially.  Particularly, the mass of the body is not strictly unitary.  It is articulated.  By bony structure, but also by other systems – organ, lymph, nervous, muscular, etcetera.  There is necessary consistency to these systems that structure the body – the possibilities for moving them, moving by way of them, are concrete.  But just as the possibilities are concrete, they are also many, and not necessarily all are always available at once.   One could say I am a whole city within my skin, and as the supreme mayor (which, unfortunately or not, I don’t seem to be) I could set speed limits, limit automotive access, install barricades, foreclose houses, bomb subway systems, build monorails, encourage critical mass rides, prohibit panhandling, stun everyone all over with a transcendental firework display – at my “will”.

There is something consistent about the phrase material we have been learning from Akram Khan’s dancers.  Maybe we could describe it in terms of the momentous channels in which the composite movements seem to invest the bulk of their identity (their respective likeness to self).  Is a set of anatomical references enough to characterize this?  How can we characterize both the force and the stuff it passes through in order to refine our descriptions of quality of movement?