Stany Foucher keeps circling back to the same question: How do you transmit Art du Déplacement culture when it’s not about movement techniques? He identifies the problem clearly—”those elements of culture are kind of hard to pass on, only on a class or only through movements”—but the mechanism that makes culture stick remains elusive throughout the conversation.
He offers examples. There’s «partage»—the French concept of sharing that extends beyond technique into meals, walks, and stories. There’s coaching that ends every session with open questions about your state of mind during movement. There’s the slow digestion that books allow compared to the scroll-past nature of video. But naming these practices doesn’t explain why they work when hour-long classes teaching actual skills somehow don’t.
Constantine provides the clearest glimpse of what’s happening during a story about a five-day training event. After describing a situation where feedback from training partners landed differently than expected, he identifies what made the difference: five days of “literal blood, sweat and tears together” meant that when someone said something, “it’s really taken, it’s actually heard. Maybe that’s not the right way to put it, not actually heard, but they hear it the way you intended it.”
This gets closer to the mechanism. The five days created context—not just familiarity but accumulated shared experience that changed how communication landed. When someone knew what you were afraid of and what you were strong at, their words meant something different than the same words from a stranger. The culture wasn’t being taught during those five days. It was being lived together in a way that made later transmission possible.
Foucher describes something similar from his early days in ADD: someone left the group to pursue music, and Yann Hnautra said the person was “still a yamak because he got the spirit.” The spirit showed through the music even without jumping. Foucher calls this realization important for understanding that “this goes way beyond movement,” but he immediately adds: “maybe those are the kind of things that we need to hear also to experience.”
That “also to experience” qualifier matters. You can be told that culture transcends technique, but that information doesn’t transmit the culture itself. The question Foucher keeps returning to without fully answering is: what has to happen during those experiences that makes the culture available to be transmitted?
The conversation identifies several candidate mechanisms. Foucher emphasizes the questioning practice—every training session ending with reflection:
I cannot think of a training that would not end with a question—[an] open question from—especially from Yann Hnautra—just reflecting on what you did. Why were you in that state of mind when we’re doing this movement? Why did you want to stop when you were doing the QM?
This creates a pattern where movement becomes material for self-examination rather than just physical achievement.
Constantine points toward time spent together outside formal training—walking from one location to another, sitting and talking on rocks after scrambling up something, spending enough time that you stop treating every moment as structured training. He describes a ten-minute conversation during what was supposed to be a training session: “we start talking, and that’s like a minute, turns into two, turns into four. It turns it and like we’re sitting there for like 10 minutes.”
Foucher describes informal education from friends as a significant part of learning—not just receiving tips on movement technique, but sharing experiences and stories about training together, remembering specific moments and situations that shaped understanding.
The pattern across these examples suggests culture transmission happens in the gaps—the unstructured time between structured training, the conversations that emerge when you stop trying to be productive, the accumulated context that makes later communication land differently. But that still doesn’t explain the mechanism. Why does sitting on rocks talking for ten minutes do something that an hour-long class can’t? Why does five days together create the conditions where feedback can be “heard the way you intended it”?
Foucher names three words to describe his practice: “Nature, patience, and partage.” He offers partage last, emphasizing it has to stay in French—”you have to go looking for what partage means.” That insistence on preserving the French term suggests the concept doesn’t translate cleanly. It’s not just “sharing” in the sense of distributing information. It’s something closer to the English “breaking bread together”—a phrase that points toward communal ritual without fully explaining why eating together matters for group cohesion.
The unanswered question hangs over the entire conversation: What actually happens during partage that makes culture transmissible? They’ve identified that it works. They’ve described practices that embody it. But the mechanism—the reason why time spent walking and eating and sitting on rocks enables something that technique training alone can’t—remains more intuited than explained.
Maybe that’s appropriate. If culture transmission happened through explainable mechanisms, it could probably happen in classes. The fact that it requires something else—something that emerges from unstructured time together and accumulates over days into the kind of context where people hear you the way you intended—might be exactly what makes it culture rather than curriculum.
This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “«Partage» with Stany Foucher,” published July 14, 2025.