Teaching Contact Improvisation(CI) in a community that has had little experience with it I have learned to teach social aspects first.  To me this is consent work in the body—learning to navigate where we choose to be in relationship to someone else, and how to actuate those choices, moment by moment.  Our social training and cultural norms around touch, movement, and power don’t necessarily prepare us for this kind of interaction, so engaging consciously with these dynamics has proven to be very empowering for people.  I do this work in the BraveSpace® workshops I teach.

I’m about to offer a more technically focused contact improvisation (CI) workshop in Boise in which we’ll dive directly and deeply into the physicality of CI—sharing weight and organizing ourselves in space and time to create the art of the moment.  This division that I’m drawing—between the physical and the social—is of course artificial: The two are fused in practice, yet useful when considering pedagogy.  I’m excited to have enough of a contact community in Boise now to have critical mass to dive directly into the physical.  I think it takes a few people who have been initiated into the consent aspects to hold the social field with people who have had less experience.  Consent (typically 1-1) and consensus (group fields) co-create in this way.  In my experience the social aspects arise from the physicality—from what our bodies are doing, learning, and creating as art.  That’s the primary way I learned and continue to learn CI.

I write about this all the time, and it bears repeating. As a somatic therapist my role is to connect people with their body from the inside of their experience. I help people become more aware of their sensations, patterns, emotions, images, and stories. Often we also explore how this internal experience integrates with the objective reality of anatomy. We experiment together through movement and awareness, opening up the gap between what is known and unknown. This is a powerful spot—a place of mystery: It is here that new solutions to common problems and patterns emerge. In this video Kelly and I find that her ribs have been held tight, use touch to help them move, and explore implications for her and all of us.

When I was a child I learned to equate masculine and feminine dynamics in an effort to be sure that men and women had equal opportunities and rights.  I learned—whether or not it was what anyone was trying to teach me—that the differences between genders, sexes, and the energetic dynamics between them, were completely social constructions that should be ignored.  From this I gained a willingness to integrate feminine dynamics within my masculine identity.  This is part of what made it possible for me to explore dance so deeply.  And yet, neither masculine and feminine forces nor men and women are actually the same—equal value need not imply sameness.  By recognizing only the same-ness of sexed/gendered architypes, I had missed the value of polarity and difference.  It has been potent for me to differentiate the masculine and feminine dynamics in myself and with others as I have matured.

It’s key to recognize that as men and women we all carry both masculine and feminine dynamics.  These are elemental, archetypal energies that generate polarity with each other.  I shared a video in my last post that explored these dynamics through the lens of Pilates, conceptualizing the masculine as the structural elements of the movement, and the feminine as the experiential ‘dropping-in’ within the container of that structure.  I’d like to acknowledge that this is a limited way of seeing, yet that this limitation offers some benefits—it’s a simplified starting place to dig into something both deeper and ineffable.  The point of sharing this is not that you need to adhere to these dynamics in any way, but rather that if you notice them taking place in your life you may have greater power to affect your experience if you use them consciously.

In this week’s video my friend Jessica Maitri and I explore and speak to using these energies while dancing/moving together.  It has been fascinating to play consciously with this together particularly as Jess doesn’t have much background with Contact Improvisation, yet she has worked extensively with these sexed/gendered dynamics in herself.  We set up these roles physically in our dance and then consciously reversed who was in each role.  The exercise helped us drop in with each other, bringing our dance to life in enjoyable and surprising ways.

Jessica and I will be offering a workshop for those of you in Boise based on these ideas on the Sunday before Valentines day.  Check it out:  Somatic Sexuality:  Intimacy and Power in Polarity.  

Masculine and Feminine Aspects of Movement

On one level the masculine and feminine forces within are ineffable—experiences that can only be felt.  And yet, there is a simultaneous intersubjectivity:  Our internal experiences may overlap with one another and inspire each other when we attempt to describe them. Definitions of energies, like descriptions of divinity, are mysteries that disintegrate when grasped.  They also point back to source—that which manifests through each of us.  I offer the following short investigation from my own body, initiated in me by teachers across disciplines including dance, Pilates, Laban Movement Analysis, and tantra.

For me the masculine in my movement is the direction and containment of my form.  It is the structure by which I organize myself in time and space.  I engage to meet the conditions of the environment and assert my will to participate.  I lengthen my leg, connect through my core, and generate the force that lifts me off the ground.  I may also embody my masculine simply through energy alone, holding space with my intention.  My power is my presence.

The feminine aspect of my movement is receptive and sensory.  I allow myself to drink in the experience of any moment.  I am permeated by my own form—taken by it.  I dissolve into being moved; into being breathed, slipping into the gap between formlessness and form.  As I repeatedly disintegrate, I am simultaneously given myself.  I am beyond form.  My power is my openness.

These two states within me co-arise.  They are a tension and play of energies.  Sometimes I am conscious of one or the other, and at times I can feel them simultaneously.  I am drawn to the image of these energies making love within me—this practice brings me wholeness.

I offer you the permission—as much as you may allow me to hold this for you—to feel these energetics in your body beyond the limits of your sex.  We all carry both energies, and each serves the other.  I think it’s worth speaking to the fear (it has arisen in me) that diving too deep into either of these polarities could take us through a point of no return—one from which we’ll become unrecognizable to ourselves or unable to function.  Perhaps this risk is real, but my experience has been one of intrinsic balance.  As one side of me has grown so has the other.

There’s an aspect of personal healing that requires others and serves others.  We are communal beings.  Witnessing and being witnessed is often potent medicine for both parties.  I find that the vulnerability of being seen—the potential to completely embarrass and shame myself—is also a form of humility.  I grow and heal by revealing myself so long as I am not clinging to a particular way of being received, genuinely taking the risk that you will or won’t approve.  This isn’t the same as attempting to confirm disapproval—that’s defiance.  It is also most likely to help me heal and grow when I show up to the collective healing I sense between us.  Often this comes through as play—it need not be ‘serious’ to be healing!

There is a charge for me in sharing experiences where my body responds to conditions without my mind being in control.  The video attached is one such state—moving outside, wearing very little, in the snow.  I was moved by the cold.  Filming it to share was both enlivening and brings about my inner critic.  What is it that’s offered here?  I have so many thoughts, but writing them seems to diminish the power of the movement itself.  The authenticity is not in the words.

Public healing feels to me like something media technologies such as this can support.  The next Body Conversations—a guided low-pressure forum to speak to, from, and about our bodies for an hour on zoom is January 18^th.  The experience of the last two has been delightful—there’s been honesty, ease, laughter, and a few tears too.  More info and signup here.

One of the most powerful experiences I had in graduate school for dance was an exceedingly simple exercise presented to our class by choreographer Stephen Koester.  He moved into a position and said “There’s this.”  Then he moved into a different position and told us “and that.”  He continued showing us ‘this’ and ‘that’ without further explanation until handing it over to us.  It was the day I finally got out of my head in his class and let my body take over.  He helped me see the unseen that’s always right here.  There’s so much that can’t be known by the mind, yet can be felt in the body.
 
In writing the rest of this post I have felt stuck in my head.  I wrote the above in a few minutes, and what’s below took hours.  Rather than censor it out, I want to share the process.  It’s the processing below that helped me recognize the depth of what Stephen Koester taught me.
 
Over the past decade my experience of dance has shifted from a focus on technique, performance, and choreography, to a focus on exploring and sharing the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal wisdom available through movement.  I have always danced for the medicine it brings to me and through me, yet I’ve recently been struck by the ways my training in dance has given me tools linking physicality and consciousness.  I think of these tools as shamanic in the sense that they connect with the nature of the body, acknowledging ties between our bodies, spirits, and the living world.  The dance practices I learned in the context of artistic performance taught me to interact with space, time, and consciousness in ways that have power—power I have learned can be used to create joy, love, and grace in the world and with people around me.  Dance in this sense is a technology of power among and between people.  This power can be felt when someone who has it enters a room, or when entering a group space in which these technologies are being used.  I have grown accustomed to hearing this kind of power attributed to cultural practices such as yoga and chi kung—practices that come from other cultures—yet what has struck me lately is how we have been using them for a while in our own cultural lineages too.  Ballet and Modern Dance are incredibly powerful lineages of somatic technology.  There are also many ways in which these forms have incorporated practices from other cultures—we are all connected.
 
Why does this cultural heritage matter?  When we recognize these performative forms—ones that we may take for granted—as a somatic medicine lineage, we can stop worrying about whether we are ‘good’ enough to make use of them.  I sing because it vibrates my organs and brings me alive, not because I’ll ever show up on Spotify.  Similarly, we can dance for how it brings us alive and connects us as beginners and ‘professionals’ alike.  We can dance to gather sacred power.  Within a single person this power may manifest as an alignment of parts of the body that heals pain and dysfunction, or a way of gracefully connecting one movement into another that generates a meditative state.  In a group it might be the ability of each person to express themselves while also leaning into the group as a whole.  We are social beings who require connection with each other to thrive.  Our cultural lineage has focused on using spectatorship for this community element—watching the ‘professionals’ do it.  It’s a ripe time to shift into participation, and this is exactly what’s happening as more and more people come to ecstatic dance.