PHASES OF MOVEMENT FOR A LIVELY WALK.
Lower diagram shows how the drawings, on separate sheets of paper, are placed with respect to each other to continue the figure across the scene.
A fancy dancer, especially, is a rich study. To follow the dancer with his supple joints bending so easily and assuming unexpected poses of body and limbs, requires attentive eyes and a lively mental photography. The limbs do not seem to bend merely at the articulations and there seems to be a most unnatural twisting of arms, lower limbs, and trunk. But it is all natural. It simply means that there is co-ordination of movement in all parts of the jointed skeletal frame. This co-ordination—and reciprocal action—follows definite laws of motion, and it is the business of the animator to grasp their signification. It is, in the main, the matter already spoken of above; namely, the alternate action of flexion or a closing, and that of extension or an opening.
With these characteristics there is also observable in the generality of dancing posturing a tendency of an upper limb to follow a lower limb of the opposite side as in the cases of walking and running.
Very strongly is this to be noticed in the nimbleness of an eccentric dancer as he cuts bizarre figures and falls into exaggerated poses. For instance, when a lower limb swings in any particular direction, the opposite arm oscillates in the same direction and brings its hand close enough to touch this concurrently swinging lower limb.
PHASES OF MOVEMENT FOR A QUICK WALK.
This symbolical phenomenon of the activity of living things—the negative quality of a closing or flexion, and the positive one of an opening or extension—is not a feature entirely confined to human beings and animals, but is a characteristic showing in the mechanics of many non-living things.
WALKING MOVEMENT VIEWED FROM ABOVE. Illustrating how the diagonally opposite limbs move in unison.
NOTES ON ANIMAL LOCOMOTION