December Asides
Being in Conversation with your World
Countless times this past year I have suggested to artists that they “be in conversation with their world”. What could this mean, how could it be? I realize that it could be so many things – there’s no right way. I’ll tell you what it is for me. It is a kind of conversation across scales – levels of being. A conversation with my world could be a “hello” to a tree when I recognize the particularity of its liveliness in the way it moves across or against me as I walk past it, or even just in my eyes feeling the form of its relationship with other trees and the ways they protect one another. I assume relationship. I assume intelligent life. I assume there is something there for me to attend to and because of that I hold the possibility of attending. I assume the ability to converse even with the full knowledge that I have no idea how that could or is happening. I assume there is a part of me that knows how to do this. I listen with my flesh and I speak with it too. I speak intention, need, recognition, feeling, especially joy because joy is what is most needed for vitality. Why would I do such a silly thing?
Not many years before Contact improvisation I was a child dancing and moving a lot with my brothers. My father wouldn’t let me walk on walls, but the boys, could. Luckily he couldn’t keep me from fighting with them physically. So, we’d wrestle and play out in the tall grass of the vacant lot next door and do all kinds of crazy wonderful things climbing trees and digging out forts. This play counter weighted my ballet classes, which I also loved.
I was a very well trained dancer with years of experience by the time we started developing Contact Improvisation with Steve Paxton. CI was a whole new way of moving and with Steve’s inquiry, we started to seek the underlying principles of what allowed us to move well together starting with attending to the laws of physics playing within our bodies – a physical physics. This unfolded an immense array of somatic experiences we didn’t know were there but which had been there all along, in my play and in my dancing. What happened when we started unearthing the deep somatic practices of Contact Improvisation was that I realized there were sensations and experiences that went unrecognized in all those classes and all those years of dancing. It was stunning to realize the limits of our cultural knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the whole development of CI has been one of uncovering possible levels of experience that allow dancers to converse through the utter brilliance of their relationships to one another and the more than human world, starting with the earth herself.
So, have I uncovered them all? Not nearly. I am often “blind as a bat” (which is a metaphor that makes me laugh because eyes are often overrated in the making of relationships). What experience tells me is that when I recognize a relationally meaningful experience as a sensation, it can grow. I want it to grow because it is tied to my capacity to be in relations - and this is not set, predetermined. I bring my flesh and my organs to it. I bring all of me to this effort to commune with the very small and with the whole universe. And, I get results. They often show up as synchronicities and things unfolding just in time. I hold myself lightly, not always, but as often as I can so that I can be in a dance relationship with the world and so that I can be listening even before I know how listening is happening. And, I assume I am not the only intelligent being on the planet. Since all intelligence is collective, I look from the very small to the very large to anticipate brilliance. But I also try not to assume anything other than this possibility of communication, in order that I know I have more at play than just my imagination. And, that takes balance – more on that later. Meanwhile, we live in an intelligent universe, how fun!
