Morphotherapy of the soul through movement

This review of a simple night of dance and encounters at Stereo on Sept 30, 2023 goes far beyond mere reporting, and will take you with me into the etymology and expression of new modes of consciousness through movement. I refer to many external links and scientific articles, and for that reason consider this night’s review an educational foundation of the dancer’s consciousness. You’re invited to hang on and read to the end.

Premises:

First of all, this was a friendly and ritual appointment with our friend Cesar Romero. It’s always a joy to dance to the sound of our friend and Montreal ambassador of the “progressive Stereo sound” @Simply City, who will live an incredible dream by playing in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from Oct 17 to 21, 2023 at the SUDBEAT SHOWCASE with Maestro Cattaneo. (info here https://ra.co/events/1732882 )

You can be proud of our local talents who shine and spread the Montreal sound elsewhere in the world, and Cesar Romero is one of those artists who managed to stand out from the crowd to represent Montréal and Canada on other stages.

So it was without embarrassment that our valiant soul-dier made way for the guest DJ after a little 4 hours of warm-up.

Lexical theorizing: The meeting of the SELF

Jeremy Olander is a Swedish DJ and producer born in Virginia, USA, but based in Stockholm, Sweden from a very young age. His arrival was expected around 4 am and from his entrance he coloured the music with a form all his own. All through the night, my brain being what it is, putting the experience into words started up and carried on for several days even after the night… Because the key word that had revealed itself was too strange to be easy!

Indeed, this is the first time I believe I’ve so clearly lived an experience I define as characterized by the term “MORPHO”, and I confirm I searched for many hours to find THE word that adequately expressed the experience.

This is its story, and the purpose of this time of sharing is to draw your attention to your own uses of dance as a therapeutic tool, through understanding the structural effects of music on the movement of the body, and its effects on the soul.

Musical context

To describe the atmosphere a little, imagine that instead of tracks built on tempo or syncopated percussion (tech-house or techno style), you were instead immersed in a huge rolling low frequency (closer to the great Prog à la Cattaneo – almost), like a long-cycle breaking wave. That is, the tempo is not regulated by percussive impulses (bam-bam-bam-bam), but rather by a powerful and continuous rumble of thunder (brrrrrrrrbrrrrrrrbrrrrrrrrbrrrrrrrr).

To help illustrate the positioning, let’s make a little comparison.

His musical style, which is defined as HIGH-TECH-MINIMAL, is described by the site Musicalyst as follows: High-tech minimal is a subgenre of electronic dance music that emerged in the late 1990s. It is characterized by its stripped-down, minimalistic sound, with a focus on repetitive rhythms and subtle variations in texture and tone. I’ll add that it stands out by its mechanical structure and sounds, characterized by a powerful bass and textured elements in the Highs (Sail & high-hats). There’s little Midrange and few vocal or organic sounds, it’s all in the percussion.

So if Brejcha is defined that way, in opposition I’d say Olander’s style should be called Deep minimal organic house, mainly characterized by a deep, extremely heavy bass, in long and progressive sequences, but not melodic-progressive, rather organic, at a very accessible tempo. The dancer had plenty of space, time and texture to hang a choreography on, articulated to the logic of the morphologists, in tribal and afro-rhythmic origins…

Curious to accompany your reading with his music?

Jeremy Olander Live from Vivrant | City Hall in Stockholm

In my very subjective observation, which may not be shared at all by anyone else who was there, the DJ very well mastered the energy descents right to the edge of dropping off, always returning in force to fill the space with the much-desired big dirty beat, and in return with great very articulate sequences. Many didn’t manage to grasp the rhythm, you had to dive in to find the current.

Hang on, we’re getting to the meat of the subject **

The appearance of the morpho concept that night came from, or was generated in my thought by, a movement taking me absolutely out of my technical zone.

Let me explain.

To follow the artist as a dancer, you had to concentrate and dive well beyond choreographic ease. What gives this experience its “morpho” aspect was the obligation, or the invitation by the music, for the dancer to dis-articulate his whole body to follow the DJ’s rhythmic and energetic curve. Let’s be honest, in its afro-beats-organic complexity, this was not easy candy dance, and you had to commit and dive INSIDE the music to Absolutely savour the artist’s force and his Mastery of his art. Yes yes, really.

OK, all right? Not too many nosebleeds?

I know I know, why all these words to share your dancing Costa? Do I really need to read this?

No, of course not.

But sometimes, we don’t know what we’re experiencing until we hear it from someone else. And then we make it ours. We feed our consciousness… we turn up the gas on the torch… And Light!

So THAT’s where it happens actually…

Remember I spoke of the term “morpho”, but it wasn’t precise.

So I searched in my head, on the internet, and asked universal intuition for three days to find the right word – the perfect word that would define exactly what I wish to express, and on the morning of the 3rd day, while reading an article on the war in Ukraine, the flash came to me in relation to “movement”.

Let me explain.

One of the terms used in military tactics for great combat manoeuvres refers to “kinetic operations” – that is, an act of war involving physical movements of troops, or displacements, or confrontations between good guys and bad guys, but all things that directly involve the phenomenon of “moving and/or making move”.

It is to this flash of a thousandth of a second, referring to my old missions of twenty years ago, that I owe the emergence of the perfect lexical composition that would serve me.

Come on, hang on, the fun starts.

MORPHO

### Etymology: The genus name Morpho comes from an ancient Greek epithet μορφώ, roughly “she who is well made”, for Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. So the forms of matter.

KINETIC

feminine noun and adjective

1. Theory explaining a set of phenomena by the movement of matter.
2. *adjective* Having movement as its principle. Kinetic energy (of a material point in motion).

1+1=2.

Eureka!

Forms + movement = MORPHOKINETIC!

So I had found this perfect assembly through my own reasoning, but SURPRISE! searching even deeper on the web, I FOUND this word that had just assembled itself in my brain like the discovery of a continent, in an old university article. Incredible!

It’s strange, because I was super proud when I had the stroke of genius confirmed in the dictionary, and almost disappointed at the same time that it exists, but even prouder to have myself assembled this neologism from the Greek and etymological roots, only to finally confirm its exact precision, in a 43-year-old article!

And so it was confirmed: The dancer’s motor activity has also been called « morphokinetic » by Paillard (1980).

In a university article titled La motricité du danseur : approche cognitive, Marielle Cadopi states that “the dancer’s motor activity has particular characteristics. This motor activity is said to be abstract, morphokinetic, it unfolds in a closed environment and rests essentially on an expressive dimension. Motor skills in dance rest on bodily forms and/or “drawings in space” (Paillard, 1980)” (ref https://www.cairn.info/revue-bulletin-de-psychologie-2005-1-page-29.html )

There!

That’s the point: each musical structure imposes or dictates on the body postures that are articulated or expressed intuitively, according to rhythmic and musical rolls. And for me for example, when I’m immersed in Afro-beats with ritual dancers, we tend to lower the centre of gravity by bending the knees, in order to move in the sequence through all the textural and tribal ranges, ritual down to the earth.

The aspect tied to the morphokinetic factor comes from the obligation to dis-articulate entirely to embrace the rhythm through the movements of the body and, in my humble and very subjective opinion, the key to open this field of movement and this very particular groove was in the structure of the baseline, located extremely low in the bass and characterized by a very progressive roundness. You’ll understand by taking the time to listen to his music.

So it is that through a remorphologization of my technical dance, I recovered rarely used movements to best express the manifestation of the music through my body, and thus honour the divine frequency passing through us. This amounts to a renewal and a rejuvenation of our dance memories. Remorphologization helps to review your basics and to rediscover your soul in the rhythmic dive of the body.

That’s why the concept of Morphokinetism was important to raise to human consciousness in my opinion, and why I wanted to push the concept all the way.

(Whew, quite a journey huh? If you’ve made it here, you’re good, I hope it was worth it)

Every Stereo is unique and full of lessons. Though it may seem futile, this one was an important one.

An immense Thank You to our friend Cesar, aka Simply City, for his openness and his candour. My friend, may you resonate forever xx

Download the superb remix of Hans Zimmer – Time (Simply City’s Full Circle Interpretation) FREE DOWNLOAD here https://on.soundcloud.com/Ji7Qk

Sudbeat showcase https://www.amsterdam-dance-event.nl/en/program/2023/sudbeat-showcase-with-hernan-cattaneo-6hrs/2029423/

Want to discover JEREMY OLANDER?

INSTA https://www.instagram.com/jeremyolander/?hl=fr

Website: https://musicalyst.com/genre/high-tech-minimal

university ref https://www.cairn.info/revue-bulletin-de-psychologie-2005-1-page-29.html

The dancer’s motor activity has also been called « morphokinetic » by Paillard (1980), as opposed to topokinetic motor activity.

Extra knowledge: Topokineses are movements projected into space, receiving their instruction from a spatially located target to be reached. (Costa’s note: in other words, topokineses are choreographic movements to repeat)

Morphokineses, on the other hand, are movements that receive their instruction from an internal model, generating multiple motor forms, as Paillard already pointed out in 1971. (Costa’s note: morphokineses are your intuitive movements)