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 to sharpen 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.

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 proficient, improvisational performance becomes more challenging… that the authentic engagement can be overshadowed by technique, and it can be harder to just follow your interest, because this is vulnerable.  It is you out there.   I had the great joy, (and I noticed my fear-thoughts, of my ego getting in the way, passing thru my ecos) to be partnered with her for a final excercise that involved watching each other solo.    I let the thoughts slide by, and focused on how beautiful she was, that beaming energy and glint in her eye, as we danced… and I say: WE danced… because I really felt that we were both dancing together, though, technically, one of us was soloing and the other witnessing in relative stillness.

And then there was Auriol.  Auriol, for those of you who don’t know her, (and I didn’t actually know her til last night) happened to live on the same land as my grandfather, grandmother, and father and his sisters in South Africa, and also happens to be the great aunt of a friend of mine, who now lives down the road from my parents in Kingston… two unrelated connections at first!  Auriol now in her 80s, lives in a whiskey barrel at Findhorn, and has been part of the community for 20 odd years, I might be remembering that number wrong.  She was an instrumental part of the Steiner School here, mainly as a teacher.  I visited her for dinner, and showed her the photos of Pops’ pictures.  We spoke of many things.  She fed me courgette (zucchini) from her garden, which she tended single-handedly for the most part.  She has a little Siamese cat named Merlyn that she oufittted with bells, but is an adept killer anyway.  Then she told me about my grandmother being a very spiritual woman with a powerful presence, who belonged to a spiritual community called Subud.  Now I knew this much, but I still hadn’t gotten the scoop on what Subud really was, as mostly all my great uncle Id remembered was a young woman with bare feet and legs who he was in a Subud group with,one time when my grandmother took him along.  Auriol said that Subud was started by an Islamic man named Bapak Muhammad Sumohadiwidjojo.  I just looked it up on the internet and Subud Canada described it as:

Subud^® is an international, spiritual association of people who share a unique experience known as the latihan kejiwaan. Latihan is an Indonesian word meaning training or exercise and kejiwaan means spiritual.

Through practising the latihan kejiwaan, one is able to come in contact with the Great Life Force, the prime mover of the universe which permeates all that can be seen as well as all that which cannot be seen.

Over time the latihan may bring emotional and physical well-being, clarity of purpose and deep understanding, yet there is no doctrine or study involved.

Thousands of people from all cultures and backgrounds practise the latihan today. The process provides a significant opportunity for people from all religions, and also those who do not conform to an established religion, to follow a spiritual path together and in harmony.

Here is the link:  http://www.subud.ca/home.jiwa

Auriol said that you have to wait a while, months, before you join to see if you want to make the commitment to the practice.  The the practice is a sitting meditation followed by standing with eyes closed and opening to the life force, or God to move through you, however that shows up.

The website says:

When practicing the latihan, we become quiet and open ourselves to the possibility of change and development as a human being. Then, spontaneously, a new life awakens within us. Some may talk of a “vibration”, others of a “life that is within our life”, others simply of an “energy”.

During our practice, we may move around physically; we may not. We may be noisy; we may be quiet. What we do and what we experience is not planned and not taught by another person.

We try to follow that feeling or experience, in the growing understanding that it will guide us and show us how to live to our full capacity in this world. Members who believe in an afterlife believe this exercise is very valuable in the life after death, though there is no agreement in Subud as to what shape or form this life may take or whether it exists. Subud has no teaching or dogma.

Auriole said she went for a while for the practice of Subud and then there was this time where it was fundamentally different, and she believed that it had to do with her intention to really open to that energy or spirit.  She realized that up til that point she had been coasting.  She said it was very powerful and had a profound effect on her, moving her to dance from a different place.  She imagined my grandmother had had experiences like this as well.

The next morning I went to the Teze (pronounced Tehzay, I think), because she told me about it, and that she usually read a poem she wrote for it, there.  She said she usually arrived late.  The Teze is a spiritual singalong, and I can’t remember the origins of it.  Anyway, I arrived early and Auriol had not yet arrived.  The man who appeared to be hosting the Teze, had everyone arrange themselves according to the element they most identified with , in general, or that day… I migrated over to earth along with the majority of the group, revealing a lot about the elemental composition of Findhorn, perhaps.  Then we began to sing in round.  A short sweet song in some other language – Italian? Latin?  Didn’t matter.  The host, with bright smiling eyes, gestured to us to draw closer to the centre, becoming a close knit huddle of concentric circles around a small table with a candle surrounded by wildflowers.  I should’ve been in the water group, because I was overcome with emotion and the tears began to flow and flow… it felt like I was being held by something so beautiful, so all encompassing, that I could touch the pain of the inevitability of loss, aging, and death, that I know I have been feeling, but unable somehow to allow fully into my awareness to be felt and released… I thought of my kind cousin Olly, and those who he has left behind… Sam, Renata who talked about him s much as she could, it seemed… and Id, truckin’ along at 98, and knowing he does not have long before he is gone… and all the people I love… and myself… watching feeling this body changing, what it can do changing… and not just my body, my mind too… but moreso, the thoughts that resist these changes, that regret and see the limitation and the lack… some of the tears are for the affect of those thoughts… on me and on others… those thoughts that are in me and in the larger consciousness I have been steeping in.

I watched my embarrassment.  I closed my eyes and struggled to keep singing and it was torture.  I realized I had an idea I SHOULD sing and I SHOULD not be crying right now.  I stopped struggling and listened.  I let the voices, and the energy that was moving through them, fill my awareness.  The constriction in my throat relaxed and, after a time, I could sing again, joining them as their voices gradually became softer, and finished.  I looked into gentle open eyes.

After the second song, Auriol arrived and not long after they asked her for her poem which she read twice, claiming that it was a hard one to communicate and wondered if she had captured the feeling that she had wanted to express.  It communicated very directly to me.   And I believe I was not the only one.  I have attached a recording of Auriol reading it here.  Though I typed it out too, not trusting the file to be openable.  Still new to this recording technology thing.

Flowering

On silent feet you came

And laid into my open hands

A crucible of flame.

A flowering of flame

Which seemed as though by chance,

For I had trod that way before

But never been committed to the dance.

Flame of attention in me, in you,

Pass light between us, through the eyes glance.

~~~~~~~~~~

In life and death, may we tend the garden of attention in our dance,

Tanya

The land is rich in topsoil and has stands of old growth trees.  It is also a significant place of recharge for the city’s groundwater.

We decided to create a dance film to explore our connection to the land and what is happening to it.  I have learned a lot about the process of creating a dance film, and also about how the current system is structured to support our representatives to make decisions based on short term thinking (balancing the books before the next election).

How can we change the system to respond to our longer term values for clean water, fertile soil, and healthy diverse ecosystems for our children?