12 tweets · January 2025 · 288 likes · 6 retweets · read on Twitter
my hobby: trying on ppls' stances when I'm walking on a busy street. I pick a person & just adopt their tension for 2-3sec. then next person. started w faces but now I do gait too. bizarre to realize how many stances I can hold but never do hold aside from this game learnings 🧵
I started doing this 12 years ago randomly, maybe in response to it being my first time living in a big city (SF, where I was an intern at the time; now my home city) I guess I wanted to get a sense of the vibe of the city. wrote this verse then 👇 x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
learning 1: I get an immediate sense of what is going on for the person. low-res (idk what they're worrying about) but high-fidelity (I know ~exactly how they're worrying) I didn't have @johnsonmxe's word "stance" at the time, or the idea of Mask-work from Impro. but both fit!
learning 2: as I said in the top tweet: it's bizarre to realize how many stances I can hold but never do hold aside from this game. tension appears in muscles I've never noticed. I feel like I'm stepping into completely alien lives, and yet they all make sense internally.
learning 3: it feels surprisingly liberating, like stretching after sitting still for awhile. sense of like "oh, it can be like that? wait, it can be like that?" ...most of these are somewhat unpleasant, but it's still interesting!
learning 4: this process is extremely natural. I don't pause or consider or think for any amount of time before trying on their stance. I just do it. I don't narrativize it. I don't try to figure out how to do it. x.com/Malcolm_Ocean/…
learning 5: my body—or whatever part of me does this—is shockingly opinionated. I merely intend to try on a stance, and I end up with changes in places I can't even SEE on that person. first noticed this when in order to be one guy I suddenly screwed my tongue into my cheek 🤨
these learnings are in my body. you are not learning them by reading this thread, any more than you would learn to ride a bike by reading a thread about it. it might show you something useful, but the core here is a first-person experience to be had, of how it affects you
but it's easy, so try it and see what you learn! (& report back 🖋️) in case you're worried: of 100s of ppl, nobody's ever noticed. 🔑key: I'm not caricaturing them, mocking them, or mimicking specific large motor movements. I'm just adopting their pattern of muscle tension!
@johnsonmxe's theory says that people who are more stiffly stuck in some stance will have trouble adopting other(s') stances, but the point isn't to "succeed" by some metric, just to find out what happens if you try, so even if that's you I don't think you'll "fail"!
I like the verb "try on" for what I'm doing here, and I think that highlights the non-failure-ness. if you go to try on a shirt, and you can't even remotely get it over your shoulders... you still tried it on! even if you guessed it wouldn't fit, you still experienced how.
oh, two other little things: 1. walking helps it be unnoticed, because often by the time I've adopted someone's stance we're already passing each other! 2. I had most of these learnings within a minute — like 5 instances of doing it. now I just do it for fun and for stretching