Category Archives: improvisation life

Feb5

pina

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Dancing is not getting up painlessly like a speck of

dust blown around in the wind.

Dancing is when you rise above both words, tearing

your heart to pieces, and giving up your soul.

                                                  Rumi

I saw the film Pina yesterday.  If you have not seen it you must. What came shining through for me is connected to what I am writing about for my class, Breaking into Blossom.  In the words of Stephen Nachmanovitch in Free Play:  Improvisation in Life and Art:  “The noun of self becomes a verb.”

I do not see a lot of that in dance performance.  I often feel too much self in the performance, as if a mirror is always there, reflecting the performer back at himself.  Something a little too ironic or clever.   Movement that is too opaque, too filled up with the performer.

What Wim Wenders’s film captures and what I saw time and time again in the theater with Bausch’s work, is the complete, exquisite surrender of the dancer to the dance.  Movement and mover inseparable, incandescent.

 

 

 

 

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Feb4

landscape, bodyscape

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Laura Von Rosk

Tamara Lempicka

I have been writing about the landscape of the body and its relationship to the body of the earth and the bodies of other creatures.  About the sense of our own bodies as landscape, to be discovered, explored, savored.

These two paintings are by two of my most favorite painters.  I met Laura Von Rosk many years ago during a residency at Yaddo.  Her landscapes were the most sensuous I had ever seen.  I bought one she had done in Minnesota.  It had a perspective of gazing up the hilly thighs of a woman, across the fields of belly and breasts and into the sky beyond.   I recently reconnected with her work at a show in Hudson at the Carrie Haddad Gallery.

Lempicka’s work invites us into the contours, the hills, valleys, the hidden caves of the body.

If you lie on the floor and roll very slowly from back to side to front, how do you feel the landscape of your own body?  How effortless can you make that movement?  Continue on, rolling to your side and then ending on your back.

Imagine this as a little meditation, a way of calling the earth of your body into awareness.

If you are a rider, can you feel a deepening harmony of your body and your horse’s body as you ride?

Feb2

perfection

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Photo:  Pam White

Nothing needs to be fixed. Everything is unfolding perfectly. So when you stand in your now accepting that all is well, then from that vibration, you become surrounded by more and more evidence that all is well. But when you’re convinced that things are broken, that there is pollution, or that things have gone wrong, or that the government is doing conspiracies… then what happens is you get caught up in that vibration, and you begin to manifest that kind of stuff, and then you say, “See, I told you that things were going wrong.”

— Abraham, Excerpted from the workshop in North Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, March 7th, 2000

I got this in my inbox from Abraham last week.  It sums up pretty perfectly what I have been practicing.  Appreciation and being ok with what is here now.  To not focus on what I don’t want to bring home with me.

Two nights ago I started to read a story in the New Yorker.  It was about the Rutgers student who committed suicide because of online bullying.  I read less than one sentence, and then closed the magazine.  I know about it and that s enough – more than enough.  I don’t need to explore it.

The same thing goes for the pre-election scuffling, posturing and ranting.  There is really nothing there for me.  I will probably work for the candidate of my choice, but I will be looking to frame things in an expansive, positive way, rather than getting caught up in the fear-rage muck.

I realized a while back that there are certain chronic vibrations/mind states that are very hard to shift.  The scarcity mentality is one of those. If I am convinced that there will never be enough, there certainly will not be enough.  If I cannot feel my way toward a sense of plenty, then that fullness cannot find me.

So here is what I do.  I do not focus there.  I pet a dog/cat/horse or put on some music and dance, or drink a lovely cup of tea, have lunch with my honey or watch a movie.  That kind of distraction is a very good strategy for creating a feeling of appreciation, which is where the good stuff can find me, every time.

 

 

Feb1

more play

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I took this picture of Capprichio last September.  I lay in the grass and let him move around me.  I loved seeing him from this angle, down where he grazes, one eye on the farm, one eye on me.

Last night I spoke with the animal communicator Kate Reilly, and when she spoke to Capprichio, the first thing he said to her was, “It’s been a long time.”  He was talking about his long working life.  She said he sounded solemn – not depressed – but like an elder statesman.  She also confirmed that he is not comfortable.  Nothing catastrophic, just a number of things that add up to not feeling great.  I had been feeling that.

Capprichio will be twenty this year.  That is not OLD for a horse, but it is often when a horse who has worked for many years competing or performing will retire.  He has been “retired” for several years, but I still ride him lightly.  My antenna are always out – feeling for his legs, his back, how is he stepping? And mostly for his heart and mind – is this still fun?

Two weeks ago, after he recovered from his abscess, I felt something different.  Almost as if he did not want to put his feet down.  it was a new kind of tenderness.  I was listening.

Kate suggested letting him take February off and doing body work with him – energy work and TTouches.  She said, “Don’t do what you know.  Play.  See what happens.”  I have been writing about play in the blog and also in Breaking into Blossom.  And here is that theme again!  Kate telling me to play in an intuitive, improvisational way.  No map.  Just feeling and listening.  Letting myself be led – by my hands, by my heart, by him.  By love.