Why Vertiginous?
July, 2023
People are sometimes puzzled when I tell them my website, or share my instagram handle: "Vertiginous?"
One of the ways that "vertiginous" is defined as an adjective is "causing or tending to cause dizziness." There is perhaps an obvious allusion to my own practice: much of my movement tends to be built upon rotational or spiraling momentum, and even in class there is truth in advertising when new students discover that some basic soft acrobatic movements do indeed make them dizzy!
But staying at the surface definition leaves little to the imagination. It doesn't go anywhere. It's too literal. A less common definition is "inclined to frequent and often pointless change : inconstant." When tacked on to "movement" this becomes a little more interesting. I've written in the past about the futility of insisting upon utility in everything you do, so already the designation of change being "pointless" is interesting (sometimes the seemingly "pointless" is radical). But, what I like most here is the final description: inconstant.
My first attraction to the word "vertigo" itself was as a teenager, when I experienced what I often described as "the opposite of vertigo." By this I meant that when I was perched on the edge of a precipice from a sincere level of height, I started to encounter a sort of quiver of excitement rather than fear; this vibration was an opening into an encounter with something beyond normal sensation. When movement makes its way into something inconstant, this gives recourse to something either novel or unexpected. And within both of these frameworks, we can encounter a space where we can experience something that we have not experienced before.
The idea here, I should insist, is not to push towards an uncommitted approach to training where one drifts from subject to subject (training modality to training modality) at the drop of a hat--and this is, perhaps, why I often find myself somewhat at odds with the generalized "Movement" framework that often trickles down from the usual channels: I don't want to experience something for the sake of novelty, I want to go deep enough into new sensation that I can, maybe!, approach transcendence, the impossible.
This desire is where the “vertiginous” comes into play: novelty for the sake of novelty (what Grotowski calls the "dilettante") doesn't take you to the depths of the unknown. You can get a nice rush of endorphins, maybe some somatic catharsis, and then move on with your life. While this sort of approach can be what we need at times, it can never offer anything outside of the present moment in which it occurs. It refuses a potential for growth. To let the unknown truly move us beyond the present moment in time, we must actually commit to the unknown: we must do the work that lets us carry on. We must be open to real change.
Return to Writing
One of the ways that "vertiginous" is defined as an adjective is "causing or tending to cause dizziness." There is perhaps an obvious allusion to my own practice: much of my movement tends to be built upon rotational or spiraling momentum, and even in class there is truth in advertising when new students discover that some basic soft acrobatic movements do indeed make them dizzy!
But staying at the surface definition leaves little to the imagination. It doesn't go anywhere. It's too literal. A less common definition is "inclined to frequent and often pointless change : inconstant." When tacked on to "movement" this becomes a little more interesting. I've written in the past about the futility of insisting upon utility in everything you do, so already the designation of change being "pointless" is interesting (sometimes the seemingly "pointless" is radical). But, what I like most here is the final description: inconstant.
My first attraction to the word "vertigo" itself was as a teenager, when I experienced what I often described as "the opposite of vertigo." By this I meant that when I was perched on the edge of a precipice from a sincere level of height, I started to encounter a sort of quiver of excitement rather than fear; this vibration was an opening into an encounter with something beyond normal sensation. When movement makes its way into something inconstant, this gives recourse to something either novel or unexpected. And within both of these frameworks, we can encounter a space where we can experience something that we have not experienced before.
The idea here, I should insist, is not to push towards an uncommitted approach to training where one drifts from subject to subject (training modality to training modality) at the drop of a hat--and this is, perhaps, why I often find myself somewhat at odds with the generalized "Movement" framework that often trickles down from the usual channels: I don't want to experience something for the sake of novelty, I want to go deep enough into new sensation that I can, maybe!, approach transcendence, the impossible.
This desire is where the “vertiginous” comes into play: novelty for the sake of novelty (what Grotowski calls the "dilettante") doesn't take you to the depths of the unknown. You can get a nice rush of endorphins, maybe some somatic catharsis, and then move on with your life. While this sort of approach can be what we need at times, it can never offer anything outside of the present moment in which it occurs. It refuses a potential for growth. To let the unknown truly move us beyond the present moment in time, we must actually commit to the unknown: we must do the work that lets us carry on. We must be open to real change.
Return to Writing
Mike Kitchell, 2020-2022