Music Raises My Hands

In the film I Carry Fire my nine-year–old Orsi faces the camera shows her hands and says: “Music raises my hands and plays with them”. The seven-year-old Bulcsú gave the following explanation: “Music rolls me and then I roll”. Music is born out of movements and stimulates movements. What happens to our musical movements?

In ancient cultures movements and music coexist. In our European culture they have grown to be separate branches: dance and other forms of motion. They have become art, entertainment and means of expression within the frames of genres and styles: ballet, folkdance, and within these several categories of tradition, creation and fashion.

Dance, as eurhythmics, makes an impression as it aims at an aesthetic quality of movement that develops the ability to express oneself.

Movement is the centre of the training; it is served by music, too. However, we don’t dance for movement’s sake, but assist the experience of the music through physicality, with our free movements.

The teaching of dance presupposes certain abilities: force, skilfulness, swiftness, flexibility.

We don’t care about these. We can reach our objectives weakly, unskilfully, clumsily, fragmentarily, partially, with a disabled body or even with a paralysed one. Inspired dances come into being through the movements of one finger. We move with what we have and what we would like to move. And if we don’t want to move, we can dance from the inside, keeping perfectly still.

Movement for us is not an obligation, but a possibility. When we get absorbed in music, we can rest in any bodily posture. Our movements are relaxed, too, because they are not dictated by any situation, nor prescribed by any tempo, choreography, or form of motion. Some children will immediately start to dance to the first music, others will lie around until the fourth or fifth piece. They get a chance to satisfy their natural need of motion with music, or to receive music in a restful, relaxed position, according to their fancy.

When I began to look most closely at the movements of my children, my discovery was a revelation: the recognition of something natural and very simple. I have wondered since then why I hadn’t discovered it earlier.