loosed
RSVP here to join one or more of the upcoming Stemless sessions:
July 7, July 14
90 minutes (online), 6pm UK
I have sat on the side of several few glossy wood floors while contact improv teachers taught technique. This never interested me.
What interested me personally was solely the ongoing practice of obeying what one tiny, 70-year-old teacher said was the real essence of this dance.
Dance from the point of contact, and follow your own interest.
Do not match your partner.
Do not anticipate your partner.
Do not try to accommodate your partner.
In every moment, find what interests and compels you to move next when you are fully present with the points at which your bodies are in contact.
Over and over in CI, I could find the places I went passive, effaced myself, collapsed into the other person's initiative.
Over and over, I found that the most impossibly (and connected) magical dances occurred when I refused these quiet disappearances, when I exerted my own curiosity, when I "used" the other person, when my world of aliveness moved with full awareness against their world of aliveness, both of us offering, asserting, and choosing.
Quite often it has been my experience in circling and focus circling in particular that the archetypes of audience member and investigator/therapist emerge in the people not being focused. It's subtle, but so often there.
In those who tend to become audience (this often includes me), there is a quiet self-effacing. Writ large, the cartoon thought bubble would say, "This is your time."
In those who tend to become investigative (this often includes me), there is a penetrating understander who might try to fix illegible butterflies to a box. Their thought bubble would say, "Let me get you."
Don't mistake me: love is large in these circles. I have reveled, wept, and been wringingly grateful for the attendance of others in focus circles. And also: there's something more I've come to want and need.
Some magical times, I am loosed into a dance where every person's world of movement is equally full and alive and pressed up against the others. There's a freedom both from others' effacing and also from others' investigation. These two freedoms matter to me equally. I do not want your disappearance so I can spin and express. I do not want you to mistake any expression of mine for a map of me, or even a line on a map.
I am unknowable, as are you.
But I would love to smell the smoke from your chimney and see some light from your windows. I would love to move against the mystery of your warm surface while you move against mine.
A practice where every expression is underwritten with Projection! Only projection! Seek no shared reality here! has, remarkably, often gotten me closer to this warm freedom, and to more fully sharing the dance of reality with others.
beautiful