Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Oct16

a different kind of horse

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A new feature of this blog is that each week I am going to point you toward something delicious.  This week it is the strandbeest of Dutch artist Theo Jansen.  Many of you probably know about him, but when I saw this I thought, “This is a different kind of horse!”  A windhorse.  And of course I wanted to dance with it.

The beest has a sophisticated anatomy with muscles and even a stomach, with names like Animaris Percipiere!  There is even a rhinoceros beest.

What I love about horse dancing is that it is unpredictable.  I imagine that the strandbeest on a good windy day would give us a lot of improvisation opportunities.  And that a group of about 20 dancers would create a pretty interesting beest themselves!

Get the picture?


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Oct15

being animal 2

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Photo:  Ashes and Snow

Being animal is the hardest thing to sustain in the digital maelstrom.  Leaving the body is so easy . . .

Here’s a simple way to re-enter the animal body.  Even with your fingers on the keyboard, close your eyes and feel your paws resting on the landscape of the keys.  Breathe in and notice what you are smelling.  What do you hear?  Sounds far, sounds near.  Notice the exact position of your feet, your spine, your tongue.

I think that being animal demands that we cultivate prey sense – the way a horse attunes to every signal – it is protection.  All the senses ask:  where is the danger?  For the predator, it is more of a map.  All the senses ask: where is the food?  When I drop in this way, all of my senses ask:  where am I?

What do your senses ask?

Oct13

being animal

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Photo:  Ellen Sebring, from the film Dive with Paula Josa-Jones

David Abram is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal. He came to mind as I was listening to Tim O’Reilly’s speech at Google Zeitgeist.   (recommended by Ev Bogue).

The speech was about the global brain and communication technologies.  About how we are becoming sensor enabled humans, gps enabled humans.  I started feeling itchy.  When he talked about our senses being augmented in ways that we are not aware of and the ongoing Google harvesting of our intelligence, I needed a breath.

I opened Becoming Animal at random to page 189 where he says, “Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.”

Cellular intelligence is hardly new science.  Candace Pert has been talking about this for years.  The way in which our brain lives in every cell or the body, and that every cell is emotional, intelligent, sentient.  I have spent my life enlivening my body, expanding senses, finding more ways to feel, open, receive.  Digital disembodiment makes me nervous.  Digital enhancement of the senses makes no sense to me, at least not yet.

To be continued . . .

 

 

 

 

Oct12

The Tail

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The other day, Pam said to me that we all want a tail.  That in our heart of hearts, at some point in life, we want a tail.  I thought back to my fifth grade Halloween costume.  I was a skinny black cat with pink ears and a delicious, heavy , very long tail.  I can remember wagging it, waving it, dancing it.

One of the things I teach in movement classes is how to feel the connection between the head and the tail.  How to feel it in all dimensions, how to initiate from the tail, how to let the tail talk, the head respond, and how to have a lively, unpredictable conversation between head and tail.

Try this:  Sitting at your computer, move from your tail.  Small, slow, playful.  Don’t think about it.  Just let it move.  Can you feel that movement going up your spine?  How far up your spine?  Now move from your head, as if you were answering your tail.  Don’t stop the movement at your neck, but let it spill down the column of your spine.  Now try moving them simultaneously.  Just little movements, subtle, slow.  See what happens.  Let me know!