Physical Therapy Ballet
Today, during physical therapy, I was walking across the room. Swinging the three-pound weight that I need to be better at swinging in order to straighten my arm back out fully. At least the flexion and the other one was getting better. Let me tell you this triad is terrible...
But I digress. As I was walking across the room another patient was pushing two hundred and some pounds across the floor. I needed to stop, swing the weight, wait, and then continue across the room.
At the same time, on a different machine, yet another patient was pulling weights while walking forwards. At first they didn't know where to go but their PT told them they could go diagonal.
So there was me walking across the room, needing to make my way around everyone else-- not to the PT's with their computers and information on rollers that float across the floor-- in the scope of the routine.
The idea takes time to boil up, to fully dawn, but as I move to the next set of exercises, pulling rubber bands until my arms shake (it had been a rough early part of the session, trying to see how far my arm could bend correctly), it comes to me. I'm watching the PTs spin around from place to place, the patient pushing the weights. I watch two other patients as they work on walking on the parallel bars.
This is ballet, I thought.
Like a Pina Bausch work but more natural. (I got rid of an Isadora Duncan joke here, it was a little too wrapped up in itself.)
Actually, I thought more about Cinema Verite, the idea of direct cinema without giving an authorial voice. But actually on reflection, Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda is a better concept. Using film to collect and organize fragments of truth that cannot be seen at the moment. That of course is the power of film, in the editing: to cast a spell that says "this is a truth overlooked". Do you know Dziga Vertov? I highly recommend Man with a Movie Camera. I similarly just shot and edited film all over town when I was a teenager, but I never became a famous Russian touchstone of film.
AnywayZ, imagine filming the routines, maybe 12 minutes of people working on their physical therapy. Show them in action, in full motion. Show as they struggle and succeed. Show the interplay of the PT with their patients, the patients as they move about the space. Recontextualize the effort of physical therapy to see it as a dance, just as important and artistic. In fact, the film makes the PT into a readymade or found poem of film. Of course, the editing is a trick of focus, but think of the scene in Man with a Movie Camera where the film of a horse becomes a still and then we see the editing process.
This is what I mean, what I would love to see. A Verite Ballet if you will, with lively contemporary and slightly avant garde classical music underneath, the rhythms of the therapy, the therapists and patients all becoming a dance of life. Another high art ballet.
Isn't that a fun way to see the world?
It certainly helped me feel better about having to painfully have my bones stretched out.