Potential Cartography // Pelvis

Today, we were told how to "update the map" of the pelvic girdle in order to make it more adequate for action. Good mapping abilities are needed for planning ahead and we started by drawing a "blueprint map" of that region to precede the action itself. In my experience, this map looked like the first attempts in early cartography, full of unmarked territories filled with the cartographer's imagination and mythical monsters.

Let the bone come to you, I hear. So I open my hands like ears and I listen.

There are the large forms that we can sense as shapes, that mirror the shapes visible from the outside. The iliac crest, steep enclosed chasm at the top of the pelvis and the gentle slope of the iliac wings. The sacrum feels like walking on the moon, and the coccyx is like a tiny unexplored island.

There are various thicknesses, densities and spaces. The greater trochanter signals in its eminence the presence of the hip joint. A few inches diagonally up we can visit acetabulum, meteor crater.

There are harder and softer places. The sitting bones emerge as a V from the hamstrings.

There are tensions, tendencies, and preferences

Beyond this, every cell seem to participate to the personal legend of my partner and narrate stories like old stones. Every bone is a signature and every fold of skin was formed by the corrosion of life.

There are intentions and impulses, pulses and processes, thoughts and decisions.

A potential cartography of the body embraces concrete and abstract notions and how these elements stay in constant motion. As the spine of a cat, spools-on-a-string-like bones in the back, they will keep mutating, opening the gateway to our imagination and its desire for expansion.

Mabel Todd The Thinking Body, A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man