A Symposium on Hands and Feet
DON’T LOOK here for science, as it’s not what I do. (I’m a choregrapher.) However, I do have quite a long and deep familiarity with the human body, and I’ve grown particularly fond of the manual and pedal extremities. I can’t defend the natural selection of the number of phalanges, or solve the puzzle of handedness. Life-lines and fingernails are mysteries to me. I can’t explain the great toe or the thumb.
Not that long ago we preferred to walk on all fours. I believe that, on account of our awkward transition to bipedalism, the hands were freed to become amazing and the feet became barely adequate supports for a big, living system, gaining stability while forfeiting subtle articulation. From the very important trunk, all four of our limbs branch, narrow, and smallen. They get more specialized as they travel away from the torso: from big, strong, and blocky through a narrowing specificity to refined and accurate, achieving a range of pivot, swivel, and sensitivity; from one big bone, to two, to more, to many. Like a tree, like a river, like a family.
Tap your toes in time; crush a wineglass; kick down a door.
Read Braille with your fingers; knead the dough; punch through a wall.
Toes are adorable and helpful for balance, ankles are fragile and complicated, knees are hopeless, hips need to hold the whole package upright. These joints aren’t meant to last as long as we need them to. Replacements are available.
In dancing, a foot can be the serif at the end of the long reach of a leg to imply the grand arc of arabesque. The feet in tandem can produce uniquely ornate rhythms. They help get you from here to there, and fast. Feet never stop with the micro-adjustments of balancing a large animal. Beautiful or hideous, big or small, right and left: they work hard. They hurt sometimes.
Shoulders are sexy, versatile, and subtle; elbows are over-designed; wrists do too much work; fingers are miracuously versatile, talented, and elegant.
Hands are nearly infinitely skilled. I think that only the face can approach the fine details of communication that the hands can effortlessly achieve. Cultural differences are nowhere as varied as in hand gesture. ”Come here” here can mean “Go away” there.
Hand shapes and signs are also universally symbolic, mimetic, abstract. Hands do the writing, signaling, drawing, cooking, greeting, comforting, punishing, sharing, counting, seducing, eating, making music, and dancing. In many of the most sophisticated traditional/classical forms of dance and theater, the hands are the most important element in the performance of emotion, continuity, and meaning. They are able to convey the differentiation between past, present, and future; the cardinal directions; fact, fiction, magic, gender, age; the mundane, the divine. Hands and arms are nearly perfectly symmetrical, and thereby impose the responsibility to complete the human circle (the literal meaning of “embrace”). We’ve got the whole world in our hands.
—Mark Morris
AT A RESTAURANT in Philadelphia I sit across from my mother, watching her as she watches me. What she is doing is nothing new, but I am still amazed to see her manipulate her hands before her into the likeness of her thoughts. How does her brain do that? Before I was born, she had no reason to move her hands this way. Then, her hands must have moved as I see everyone else’s hands move at the tables around us, only to pick up a glass or a fork.
Meanwhile, I move my hands as well. Together, watching each other, we carry on a conversation, as if we were letting the shapes of the phrases fall from our hands as a seasoning over our plates of food.
