No Ugly Movement

As if there wasn’t enough to learn during the second year of the Amherst Feldenkrais teacher training, I decided to study Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation (EWMN) with Amos Hetz that summer. I was curious about this approach to observing and documenting action; more importantly, I thought it would help me become a better movement detective.

That’s why, while in Paris this spring teaching a postgraduate Feldenkrais training, I was so excited to find out that a showcase of Noa Eshkol’s work had just opened. Some 25 years after my first encounter with the approach she devised and co-developed, going to just the exhibit didn’t feel like a gallery visit; it was a pilgrimage of sorts, a way of connecting with my roots.

The story of Noa’s notation begins after she studied dance in Tel Aviv. She realized that to describe and capture the fleeting moments of dance, she needed a way to register motion, much as music notation identified and recorded the rich and complex aspects of sound. Her abiding curiosity eventually led her to Manchester, England, to study directly with the pioneer of movement analysis and notation, Rudolf von Laban.

To become a better movement detective myself, I had to learn this new way of seeing. Rather than using a linear Cartesian frame of reference (as Laban did), EWMN uses polar coordinates: limb movement is not linear, but curved and inscribed in a sphere. Written like music on a staff (or stave in British English), the notation consists of symbols that document every visually discernible movement of a body.

Studying with Amos inspired me to explore Rudolf von Laban’s work in depth. I first studied Effort-Shape and Space Harmony at the University of California, Santa Cruz under the guidance of Scott Clark — who studied Moshe’s method with me and went on to become a Feldenkrais teacher and then a trainer — and Shirley Wynne, the brilliant choreographer who brought that same rigor to opera. Later, during my doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I earned first-level certification in Labanotation (Kinetography) with Rebecca Nettl-Fiol.

Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation is a thinking tool
that can teach people the art of observation,
i.e., encourage them to aspire to the ultimate level of seeing.
It does so by organizing the ‘material’ known as movements of the human body
in relatively simple categories,
thereby allowing us an insight (in-sight)
into the complexity of this phenomenon as a whole.

As such, the notation applies to all aspects of motion, including all styles of dance, physical education, martial arts, movement-based therapeutic systems, sign language, computer graphics, and even animal behavior. When he nominated Noa for a Nobel Prize, Philip Teitelbaum stated that EWMN “enables the detection and understanding of patterns of movement, which otherwise are impossible to conceive, analyze, and understand,” adding that it “meets the need for a universal framework that offers a common language for workers in zoology, psychology, neurology and medicine.”

I learned that, for Noa, movement was a primary art form; it didn’t need a story, a character, a costume, or even musical accompaniment to be meaningful. This is where her use of the metronome came in. In performances of her choreography, Noa famously swapped orchestral scores for the neutral, relentless click of a metronome because music is an emotional steering wheel — it tells the audience how to feel. By removing it, she forced the attention back to the movement itself. The neutral, objective metronome eliminated all sentimental and narrative bias while prioritizing spatial and anatomical precision. She believed pure movement had its own emotional capacity, without needing to act out a feeling.

In the somatic world, we often talk about non-judgmental awareness, and Noa certainly embodied this completely. She famously insisted that “there is no ugly movement” — only movement organized in a certain way. To her, every gesture was a geometric event, and therefore possessed its own intrinsic value.

We renounce the use of all tools
not intrinsically linked to movement.
The works tell the stories of movement . . . .
There are no other stories intended.
No narrative to look for.

This philosophy is where her path merged with that of Moshe Feldenkrais. He and Noa met in England in the 1940s, early in their respective careers, and in many ways, they developed their approaches in parallel. While Moshe and his methodology are recognized as historically central and significant in the somatic world, Noa may have been one of the few people he truly considered a peer. They both viewed movement as a functional organization rather than an emotional expression. They weren’t interested in the theater of sadness or joy; they were interested in how the body organizes itself to move through space.

Their lifelong relationship left a lasting legacy on how we study Moshe’s work today. Noa’s students undertook the monumental task of transcribing roughly 600 of the Alexander Yanai lessons and lectures that Feldenkrais had recorded. These transcripts now serve as perhaps the most significant reference material of Moshe’s work (although, so far, only 550 are available). Without Noa’s rigor and her students’ diligence and heartfelt dedication to preserving movement, a massive portion of Moshe’s intuitive genius might have been lost. Without the texts they created, his lessons certainly would not have been available to translate and disseminate worldwide.

Noa’s life and work changed drastically in 1967. When the Six-Day War broke out, one of her dancers, Shmulik Zaidel, was conscripted, and Noa stopped dancing. In a spontaneous, passionate reaction to the violence and human suffering, she shifted her creative energy to creating what she called “wall carpets.” Unlike making quilts, she refused to cut the pieces of fabric she collected and was given. Instead, she constructed large, soft planes of material from what she had at hand, exploring yet another aspect of the laws of combination, harmonics, and composition.

In those fabric sculptures, Noa had to weave disparate fragments together. Looking at the current devastation, I can’t help but wonder what she would have thought about the war between Israel and Hamas. Given her lifelong pursuit of universal languages that ignore prejudice, politics, and national borders, I expect she would see our current conflicts as failures. After all, she spent her life creating ways for us to notice and see one another beyond the narrative and the noise.