Tanya Williams

When I lay down to go to sleep last night it really, really hit me. I am humbled by the mysterious way grief unfolds itself. I had thought I was relatively immune, only having shared Nigel’s sweet company on a few occasions. I realized it isn’t a matter of quantity. And there was a power underneath that sweetness. Just the memory of the quality of Nigel’s presence is woven into my deepest sense of hope for all of us. Nigel, seemed to me, to share a possibility of a way of being that felt rooted in his simultaneous unabashed embracing of what he valued and loved, along with a passion to create and nurture more of it. When he discovered contact dance, he invited me to teach in Guelph and organized the workshop to make it happen. He excitedly told me he wanted to get a contact jam going there, to share that quality through the dance with his community. I wish I could be there Thursday night to connect with the people that have been so affected by him and that quality. And I will be communing with his joyous spirit on the dance floor listening for his guidance as I teach my class here in Kitchener. With all my heart, thank you Nigel.

This is outdated, but I had trouble posting it before.

Thoughts from The Listening Body Contact Class #1 (Oct. 8, 2009)

Our first class left me with many thoughts!   Here are a few…

Tension masks sensation… both physically and emotionally!   I loved that Dion and Todd pointed at this in both these realms!

And it is amazing to me how they are connected.  I have sometimes felt anxious and realized how I am pulling into myself physically, and that by coming back into my body, releasing into my chair or my bed, or the ground, or wherever I am, the emotional anxiety shifts.   And vice versa… I am amazed at how my interpretations of what is happening plays out in my nervous system and emotional body, tying up my awareness, or leaving me free to notice what is actually happening.

At a contact improv lab in Toronto this past weekend, we explored an excercise tosharpen our awareness of how our thoughts and feelings in the moment might affect our dancing with each other.  And I realized that this is what Nick and I had been doing to generate material for the dance-theatre piece KitchenSync.  This is an area I am excited to explore more!

I loved Adam’s question:

How do we find out or let each other know what is happening during a dance? I find just asking this question supports an opening for us all to explore the infinite ways we might do that.  Including saying: “Um… I am noticing I am feeling tense and not really in my body right now.”   And it’s amazing how just embracing or naming something that is happening can cause it to shift in fascinating and exciting ways.

Oh my… where shall I begin?  I feel such opening here. So many connections between people, between ideas, movements, practices… now, and coming up from my roots.

I will begin with Kirstie Simpson and the contact improv workshop here.  To give you a picture, Kirstie exudes joy and a wellspring of deep strength.  She has studied aikido, and her centre moves clearly in connection with the earth.  Kirstie was an athlete before a dancer.  She wanted to do something physical, but wasn’t thrilled about the competitive context of sport.  Her mom suggested she try dance, and since she adored her mom, she decided she would.  After trying to learn to do modern dancing for a while, she ended up in a class with Steve Paxton.  In the second or third class she had a moment in a simple exercise of just leaning up against someone, when she realized that that was all she needed… that the fullness of that quality of experiencing was available to her at any moment ( I paraphrase).  So much of what she spoke touched directly in with why I do this work… her love of improvisation, that she does not like to teach people HOW to improvise, she believes this is something that people discover… they discover how they improvise… Instead she likes to do what she calls “tuning” and then let the body go do it’s thing.  In those early times of improvising in classes, she LOVED it, and then she would go out onstage with people to perform, and some people would turn into “maniacs” – she said this in the most loving way, I kid you not – that, something about that pressure of the performance would bring out people’s egos and it was scary to be out on the stage with them.  She shared that her father was a wonderful man, but he was also an alcoholic, and would turn into a maniac… so… (this is the part that struck me to the core) she vowed she would find or create a practice that would keep her from doing that to other people, onstage or in life.  Dammit, I said to myself… I had watched myself become a maniac in a conversation with my partner on the phone just a couple nights before… This is what I aspire to.     The next day, she said that for the longest time she didn’t consider herself a serious dancer because she was having too much fun… she was just doing what she wanted.  But then she realized that that was core to the practice.  In the improvisation, she calls it: following your interest.   This makes sense to me… I believe that if I tune into the whole and follow my deepest interest, it will serve the whole.

On the last day, in the last score or exercise, she talked about offering her body and her energy to other improvisers and the audience, even when not in physical contact, and offering her interest in what others were doing in the improvisation… and that often as people become more experienced and technically