The way we walk

This is what I was wondering the other day as my mind gave up determinedly focusing and drifted away from the business finance it was supposed to be taking in: I was wondering about the ways people walk and why I like some gaits, find some gestures annoying, am irritated by some gesticulation or posture. Why I even notice it consciously at all.

I often find myself watching people and analysing their walks, the way they exit a room, drink a cup of tea, sit down, stand up. If I know them, I might match it to what I know of them; if I don't I might make spurious conjecture about them based on it. Or I might just follow the patterns, studying the peculiar way they curl their figures as they speak or the angle of their feet as they stand.

It made me think about the idea of dance as a language. You are building up your vocabulary, your dictionary, our choreography teacher used to tell us at Birkbeck, so that when you know enough of the technicalities of the language, you can say what you want to say in it.

I wondered whether my habit is in part because I am traditionally not a person particularly adept with spoken language. Articulacy is much easier for me on paper than straight from the brain into the air.

Maybe being quiet, being careful with words, means I am more likely to try and take more from the unvocalised language of movement?

Who knows. But what of the movement itself? The movement we all unthinkingly act out every day. The walk with which your close acquaintances can recognise you way before your face comes into focus, the way you sit in a chair, the little tics - pulling hems of shirts, playing with hair, nodding, gesturing, the rhythms to your being in space. How are they learned? How do we manipulate them? How much is physically limited, how much is driven by other factors and what are they? How aware are we of the style we move? What can we read into them? Do I see someone and match their swagger to the arrogance or defensively shielded vulnerability I have already detected in them, or do I imagine that characteristic subconsciously because of the swagger?....

I was in a training session the other week with a trainer whose hand movements were jerky and repetitive; whose spine curled over when he sat, whose head twitched from side to side as he listened to our comments. I wanted to attach some kind of movement sensors to his ears, his nose, his elbows and his fingertips. And then to film so that we could watch those movements without their body, to see people mapped out by their habitual positions and postures and unthought out shapes and motions and drawings in the air.