Organic, as defined by....

Erich Mendelsohn, German architect in the Weimar era:

Organic means " exterior forms express their interior structure...and use, structure and architectural expression coalesce to an organic whole, where scientific facts and creative vision combine to an unbreakable pattern."

I hear the word organic used in dance these days to mean loose or formless, "natural", pure. Like organic food. But I like Mendelsohn's definition.

Exterior forms express their interior structure, their organs. It means something more visceral, made of blood not air.

Dancers do often stray into architecture as a source of inspiration. Usually it comes through as formal, shape-oriented rather than motion-oriented. Ironically most architects are constantly on a quest for the expression of movement through stationary matter.

Mendelsohn encountered this word when Einstein used it to describe Mendelsohn's "Einstein Tower". He took from Einstein's "Organic!" the idea that "one cannot take any part away from it, neither from its mass nor from its motion, nor even from its logical development, without destroying the whole."

Einstein Tower is a little silly looking now, more than a little phalic, but I guess we should not be surprised coming out of 1920's Germany. Still, these were the architects of modernity, something from which we are only just now emerging.

I think we are due for a revisit of this term organic, reclaim it for things meaty and kinetic, direct and abstract.