Organising Principles

Four Layers of Movement

What a movement means, how it is organised, how it feels and how it appears are not the same thing.

This framework developed from four provisional terms used in practice: Emotion, Feeling, Function and Aesthetic.

Those terms identified relevant aspects of movement but blurred their relationships. They are reorganised here as four distinct layers:

Principle

Expression is not added to movement. It emerges through the relationship between intention, bodily organisation and experience.

What is the movement attempting to do?

Intention does not guarantee an appearance. It establishes a direction for action.

How does the body produce the movement?

Organisation describes the physical mechanism rather than the desired expression.

What does the moving body experience?

Embodied experience belongs to the person moving. It cannot be assumed from appearance alone.

What becomes available to an observer?

Perception is an effect of the preceding layers, not an instruction pasted onto the movement.

Prepare the body to travel.

Weight is accepted through the supporting leg.

Pressure increases and the moving leg becomes lighter.

The movement appears grounded and effortless.

Can two movements look similar while being organised by entirely different experiences?