Here is a statement from an article on Body Language:

“Your upper-body posture is controlled primarily by what you do with your arms. Your posture and your gestures are difficult to separate. They make a total statement. ”

This is supposed to be helpful to executives trying to understand how they present to others.
Try actually moving from this place!

Is your upper body posture REALLY controlled by what you do with your arms??

What happened to all the talk about how posture comes from “core” muscles in the spine and abdomen?

If presentation is all about posture and gesture, and nothing coming from the gut/no foundation, we are surely a flimsy, floozy-looking, flat, fake species…….totally untrustworthy. That is the total statement that we make.
The creative mover begins from core, from “seed center”, from grounding. Flailing your arms around in space creates/echoes/mirrors chaos. Moving from a sense of weight leads the mover into space with a feeling of reliability and stability. Creative presentation also derives from stable grounding, not pasted-on postures and gestures, from organization and sequence, not static poses.

When i dance with my friends, one of the great joys is to keep moving, to keep a phrase of motion alive and carried into the next phrase, just as the music flows from phrase to phrase. There are transitions and connections, but the aliveness of moving never stops, even if the movement is very small, subtle.
When i speak to an audience, in a presentation, as a guest on a talk show, in a lecture/demonstration, i’m aware of phrasing in the same way. There’s a thought/idea/concept, breathing, perhaps an emotional response or question that acts as a connector or transition, and the next idea unfolds in what is hopefully a logical sequence. Though i may not be speaking at any given moment, i’m still alive in the process, ever-moving as it were, in this case processing, thinking, preparing the next statement, maintaining eye contact with my audience, checking for responses. If i am adequately prepared, the sequence unfolds and flows. If i am not prepared, static poses ensue. i get logjammed, the phrasing becomes choppy, i break contact, i stop monitoring and processing smoothly.
so, in teaching/training others and using movement as a metaphor, having people experience ‘phrasing’ in the body, in time and in space translates into phrasing in communication.
this is somethign to return to…