Body Flow #3
With Body Flow articles 1 and 2, we looked at how flow can be approached in terms of shapes. The most recent Foundation Fridays article showed techniques for creating shapes through body rolls. Today, we will put this all in a liquid context.
In Foundation Fridays: Rolls, we left off with an exercise Continuous Rolls. There are some great series of continuous rolls in this clip. This exercise is actually more than just a drill, it’s a foundation for this particular approach to body flow. The general idea here is to have continuous rolls, but to have your arms doing complementary liquid.
The problem is that it is difficult and even limiting to do traditional connected hand flow while doing continuous rolls. The hands really need to separate in order to create the kind of space needed to involve the body. If you watch the Eric and Fu clips from the first body flow article, you’ll notice that the body really gets involved when the hand spacing is larger. But with larger hand distances, the rules for maintaining flow become less clear, so that is why I prefer to focus on shapes.
We can get our feet wet first by doing the continuous rolls drill, but limiting ourselves to one-handed liquid. Stand in front of a mirror, take your left or right hand, and trace out the paths you would normally do with regular hand flow, except leave the following hand out of the flow and at your side. Whatever height the tracing hand is at, roll that body part (ie, if the hand is at chest level, roll the chest). Some notes:
- The shapes you create are the end, the rolling and tracing are just the means. If a particular shape works better without a roll or with a still tracing hand, then by all means do it.
- Move around! Step, float, glide, hop, work it all in.
- The tracing hand does not have to be next to the rolling parts, just at the same vertical level. Often, more space gives the shape some depth.
- A roll might cause successive rolls, and this body movement might end up defining the tracing hand. This is fine. Ideally, from an audience’s perspective, what is causing what is not discernible, only that everything is moving in accordance with itself. So, just focus on creating series of shapes.
- Continuous orbital and helical paths are the easiest to work with for the tracing hand, in my experience.
You can do this exercise with the left hand as a lead hand, the left hand as a following hand, the right hand as a lead hand, or the right hand as a following hand, with the rolls rotating clockwise or counterclockwise. I think it is best to have as many directions and combinations as possible at your disposal.
Once you have the feel for the connections and shapes involved with one-handed body flow, try to do the continuous rolls exercise with both hands as independent tracing hands. Their traces may overlap and create moments that look like traditional hand flow; you may use traditional hand flow as the trace itself; or you may just want to use traditional hand flow as a transition. However, if you want to involve your body in the flow, larger hand distancing and a focus on tracing/creating shapes can give you a wider range of options.
In the next article, we will cover a couple of other techniques for creating a full-body illusion.
