I’ve been noticing women, of late. Women walking, that is. Quite a few times I see a woman walking along the fair streets of Montreal in summer wearing a lovely summer dress and fetching footwear, and then I notice the walk. Too often it’s a waddle or a swagger or a lope or a shuffle or a trudge, which completely ruins the effect of all the other nice things about them. Beauty is in the gait. Did they not get the memo, I wonder? Is our current society even sending out these memos anymore?
A woman’s gait (and a man’s for that matter) is what carries off the rest of the personality; walk all sloppy and it won’t matter what you are wearing or who you think you are. Perhaps it’s easier for me to say this, being a dancer. I’m always walking as if I’m about to enter from stage-right, and propelled by delusions of grandeur I also walk about as if I own the joint and as if to say “I have arrived,” even somewhere as mundane as the grocery store. But it feels good to have a dignified and intent-filled gait, you feel like you own yourself and are at harmony with the environment around you. I think more attention should be paid to how we mindfully move through space, that’s what it is. So step up, peeps, step up.
Once upon a time, such things were actually taught, either from mothers (or governesses) to their daughters, or in school. Now it’s not taught at all; neither is dance nor physical education. Slouching is democratic, apparently, as it doesn’t make you “better” than anyone else.
People are now spending decades in their heads and ignoring their bodies. Doesn’t it seem like people in their 30s are now in a great rush to rediscover their neglected bodies via tango lessons, yoga, rock-climbing and the like?
And yet physical presence is still rewarded because it is a marker of dominance and status, as we learned in Keith Johnstone’s Impro.
I used to be a slumper and a shuffler (very sexy combo, you can imagine), but once I started with the yoga and my posture improved, my walking naturally improved as a result.
It’s all about the posture – something that you can’t learn (as AJ pointed out) while slumped over a game console or computer keyboard.