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As the choreographer and dancer Wendy Osserman, 81, began to contort her body at a recent performance<\/a> in Queens, her hands shook. Her fingers flapped back and forth. She threw one arm away from the other \u2014 tossing and releasing, flailing and returning \u2014 and hopped into one-leg kicks before sticking her tongue out and coiling it into a tunnel.<\/p>\n She was trying to shake something off, it seemed. But what?<\/p>\n Animals, according to somatic therapists<\/a>, tremble and quiver to discharge stress. The shudder is a trauma response, a kind of biological palate cleanser that allows a return to a sense of normalcy after duress. Human bodies, on the other hand, tend to store up rage and grief and panic like a pressure cooker. As a dancer, Osserman lets her intuition guide her movements to release some of that pressure.<\/p>\n Osserman\u2019s daughter, the video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser<\/a>, has been fascinated by how the body expresses psychological distress. For centuries, medicine viewed shaking as a symptom of hysteria; spasms and fits as evidence of delirium. Today, shaking has become a therapy for a range of ailments, physical and mental.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Can you convulse your way to insanity? To spiritual restoration? In her exhibition \u201cConvulsive States<\/a>,\u201d on view through Sunday at Pioneer Works<\/a> in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Laser examines the shaking body as both a symptom of trauma and a possible antidote to it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI think it is probably my mom that has stimulated my interest in emotional expression\u201d and its physical manifestation, Laser said. \u201cAnd I have a really intense push-pull with that.\u201d<\/p>\n The exhibition opens in a dimly lit hall of mirrors, where eight reflective \u201cexorcise\u201d monitors \u2014 a play on home fitness smart mirrors<\/a> and on the quaking of spirit possession \u2014 present shaking practitioners, one of them Osserman, demonstrating therapeutic movement like gyrokinesis<\/a>, qigong and holotropic breath work, with its quickening inhalations and exhalations.<\/p>\n In her video, Osserman \u2014 stomping, swaying and swiveling \u2014 teaches an improvisational practice known as Authentic Movement<\/a> in which dancers, often with eyes closed, become attuned to thoughts, emotions and memories and follow the body\u2019s instincts to move. Laser grew up observing it at home.<\/p>\n \u201cShe told me, \u2018Mom, I was trying to grow up and you were crawling like an animal,\u2019\u201d Osserman, who used to host rehearsals in their Manhattan loft, said in a joint interview with Laser.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt was horrendous to hit puberty and to have people, like, writhing on the ground in your living space,\u201d Laser said, laughing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n One image sticks out in her memory: her mother fighting with her own foot, a motif Laser had Osserman include in her video to capture \u201cstruggling with another part of yourself as if it\u2019s your counterpart that you\u2019re in a relational angst with.\u201d<\/p>\n Toward the end of the hall of mirrors, the sounds of breath and grunts from the shaking healers gradually fade into the cries of asylum patients. Viewers proceed from the hall to a den-like space with oblong bean bags for Part 2 of the exhibition: a 53-minute documentary created by Laser with the French journalist Laura Geisswiller<\/a>.<\/p>\n The film, \u201cConvulsive States,\u201d which Laser describes as \u201can investigative report that goes off the rails and becomes hallucinatory,\u201d features interviews with psychologists, neurologists, priests and dance therapists at Piti\u00e9-Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re Hospital in Paris. It was there that the 19th-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot became famous for his research on hypnosis and hysteria, including weekly theatrical presentations of female patients twitching in fits to gawking audiences. (Charcot\u2019s work influenced Freud<\/a>, who spent six months studying at Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re.)<\/p>\n Laser became interested in Charcot not in a history or health class, but in a photography class \u2014 one that she was teaching. In 2008, she found a book with an image that would obsess her for years. The French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman\u2019s \u201cInvention of Hysteria<\/a>\u201d features pages of black-and-white photographs of young girls at Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re seizing and spasming. In a photograph that Charcot commissioned called \u201cBeginning of the Attack: Cry,\u201d a woman strapped to a bed convulses, her mouth agape. It stuck with Laser.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt kept cropping up,\u201d she said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t get away from it.\u201d<\/p>\n She envisioned creating a lexicon of hysteria \u2014 \u201cConvulsive States\u201d reminds us that the word comes from the Greek for uterus \u2014 with her friend, the poet Ariana Reines, before landing on film as the best medium to do justice to the eerie, often disturbing archival footage of Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re and soundscapes of psychosomatic disorders and healers.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re two very different visual languages, the news and a fitness training video,\u201d Laser said of the two parts of her exhibition. \u201cHowever, they both kind of have this faux claim to neutrality.\u201d<\/p>\n The two-part format clicked for Gabriel Florenz, the founding artistic director of Pioneer Works, who curated the show and appreciated that it didn\u2019t \u201cfit into the art box exactly.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI really am into people who blur the idea of what being an artist is \u2014 and Liz really blurs those lines,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019s a performer, she\u2019s a choreographer, she\u2019s an artist, she\u2019s kind of an educator, she\u2019s a researcher, she\u2019s a journalist in this project.\u201d<\/p>\n The documentary begins as a talking head-style news telecast, with the reporter and historian Virginie Girod<\/a> at the helm, but it quickly pivots. Laser becomes the host \u2014 and then the subject: practicing tai chi; learning bodily configurations to regulate the nervous system (\u201cYou are in the cave, you\u2019re a bear, you\u2019re solid\u201d); shuffling her feet and creating a tremor in her legs to learn how to role play the symptoms of a patient with Parkinson\u2019s disease.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n For the role play, she consulted with Dr. Emmanuel Flamand-Roze, a professor of neurology at Piti\u00e9-Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re University Hospital, who teaches medical students how to act out the symptoms of neurological conditions in a theatrical tournament called \u201cThe Move<\/a>,\u201d based on the TV singing competition show \u201cThe Voice.\u201d<\/p>\n Using mime, his students learn to embody the suffering of patients with multiple sclerosis, dementia, seizures, aphasia and other disorders, a process that helps build long-term recall as well as empathy.<\/p>\n In an interview, Flamand-Roze said that Laser would \u201cnever forget\u201d the symptoms of Parkinson\u2019s after mirroring its physical expressions.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s immersion,\u201d he said. \u201cYou live it and you know it.\u201d<\/p>\n Charcot used theater to teach neurology. \u201cSo in a way it\u2019s a modern version,\u201d Flamand-Roze said, adding, \u201cbut this time without the patient, only with the students and teachers.\u201d<\/p>\n Laser\u2019s mirrors are also a kind of theater, displaying how the mind manifests in the body in sometimes dance-like movements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She directed her shaking practitioners to lean into uncomfortable experiences and then \u201cpatch them to a positive memory or a positive experience,\u201d with improvisational movement.<\/p>\n As a teenager, Laser said she had \u201cthat classic rejection\u201d of exploring the anguished mind, finding it \u201cfreaky,\u201d she said, \u201cFreaky deaky.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBut not anymore,\u201d her mother replied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n