Tag Archives: listening.

Mar7

diving deeper

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I want to offer a bit more information about my eBook.

I developed Breaking into Blossom:  Moving into an Improvisational Life as an online class because I wanted to offer some fresh ideas on how to close that gap from my perspective as an improvisational movement artist.  It  is designed to inspire you to become more daring, more visionary, more playful and improvisational in all aspects of your life.

I am now offering the materials that I developed for that class in an eBook that contains ten carefully designed chapters integrating photographs, writing and movement prompts, guest artists and specific strategies to help you find a deeper creative engagement.  Here is what you will find:

  • Change:  Developing a vocabulary for making change from subtle to dramatic.
  • Underscore:  How to develop an intentional underscore for your day or for a project.
  • Segments:  How subtle shifts in activity and attention throughout the day can create greater focus and engagement.
  • Play: From meandering to galumphing, how to foster a playful attitude and practice, including specific strategies for play-making.
  • Practice:  Discovering your meta-practice and how it can support your work and goals.
  • Moving and Listening:  Delicious strategies for engaging the senses and the body.
  • Movement and Stillness:  The power of attention and recuperation.  How to develop a movement/stillness score in your work and play.
  • Letting Go:  Learning how to drop it (even if you are going to pick it up again).
  • Flow:  Observing and harnessing the interplay of improvisation and flow.  How to cultivate a consummate creative state.

The book is available at the end of this month.  You will receive the book as a pdf.

The cost is $15.  You can pre-order it here.

For those of you who are interested, I am also offering one-to-one creative jump-start sessions.  To learn more,  form.

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Feb19

trust

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When I first met Nelson, the almost formerly wild Mustang, he did not want to be touched.  He was nervous, and that made me feel nervous, and we did a strange nervous dance for quite a while.  Both of us prickly and alert, sympathetic nervous systems on orange.

I wish I could say that I found a magic key and that suddenly Nelson was easily touchable, but I did not.  What I did find was horse time.  Horse time is biologic, sometimes even geologic.  It does not have to do with any kind of human time measurement.  It has to do with listening and with waiting.

I got very good at waiting.  One day when I came to work with him, Nelson would not let me anywhere near him.  So I sat leaning against the fence for about 2 hours until he finally came close enough to get a treat.  I had a lot of time that day to think about taking that personally.  A lot of time to feel my impatience and what I assumed was my ineptitude.

The real thing that I have learned from Nelson is that if I listen and wait, he gives me everything.  And the lovely thing is that I have also found that to be true about myself.  If I listen and wait, then what I want unfolds and offers itself to me.  All in good horse time.

Dec3

pony dances

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Escorial from Paula Josa-Jones on Vimeo.

For those of you who have not visited the RIDE site, here is a bit of what we call horse dancing. What I want to call attention to is the attunement, the listening, and the conversation between bodies. That is what has always been important to me about this work.

Escorial (aka Pony, and yes, he has his own page) is the equine performer. He is trained as a liberty horse (no restraint) by the brilliant Sarah Hollis of Tintagel Andalusians.We have worked with Pony and Sarah for nearly five years.  I think of it as the yoga of the herd.  Learning how subtle a signal is required to create a profound shift in Pony’s movement.  Rehearsals are humbling, because despite our  dancerly skills, our ability to communicate in herd-speak is always in need of improvement.  Sarah, being the alpha mare, keeps all of us in line.

Why this might be important to non-horse people: Since 87% of our communication is non-verbal, figuring out what we are communicating with our movement seems like a good idea.

For example, my horse Amadeo is majorly spooky. For a long time, I thought he might be autistic because his reactions seemed so disproportionate to what was happening around him. My godson is autistic, and I have had a similar difficulty in decoding his responses. What I finally understood is that Amadeo’a responses were precisely calibrated to his perception of the situation because he is hyper-aware of movement and the underlying emotional landscape. And in order to be around him, I had to become hyper-aware too, but not tense, not nervous. That is a very nuanced and subtle dance, requiring some deep inner and outer listening. And that is horse dancing.

When and with whom are you horse dancing?