Thought this news item(LINK EXPIRED) was interesting. I had probably told you guys that the swinging of arms had to do with keeping one's equilibrium by providing a dynamic counterbalancing to leg motion. Evidently it has more to do with conserving bodily energy and providing a redirection of mechanical energy away from our vertical axis--to keep us from stressing our legs by bouncing up and down so much. Wait. I think I just explained that better than the article. I am awesome. Just as I suspected.
If you don't believe me when I say that paying attention to this sort of stuff (contrapposto, opposing motion, etc.) is essential for making your characters look alive and normal, consider how mysterious and impossible my late contemporary Michael Jackson's moonwalk looked. Just by raising a heel, the moonwalk confounds our expectations about how it looks when someone shifts their weight from one foot to the other.
We can grasp the idea of a foot sliding back, sole pressed to the floor, until a King of, say, Pop throws in the apparent shift of weight to the sliding foot, by lifting the opposite heel! This triggers what scientists call the whatthefuck centers of our brains. Looking at that clip, BTW, I am utterly convinced that MJ's loafers were artificially stiffened--like a pretty ballerina's shoe--to further the illusion. How could the stationary foot possibly be the one his weight is on, our brains tell us--only the toe is touching and the shoe isn't even flexing! Ergo, it's clear Michael's on an invisible backwards treadmill. It's the only reasonable explanation.
All of which goes to show how deeply held are these unconscious expectations of human movement. Not so very different from the way we can precisely read an emotion from an expression passing over someone's face even if we have no articulatable awareness of the specific changes in the face that signaled it.
Incidentally, the moonwalk has been around since at least '20s icon Cab Calloway.
JH
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