Initiating, Supporting, Witnessing

Following the arms and hands mythology, today’s score was to support and respond to our partners dance through mirroring, contrasting and challenging the movement. The theory that lay behind these movements scores, and indeed sets a basis for the training itself, is that the wider one’s repertoire of movement, the wider the range of emotional material and thus creative choices. Certainly, the act of supporting a partners movement  provides new resources for the dancer to work with, enabling them to develop a movement  and stretch their creative capacity beyond that which is patterned or ‘normal’. This step into the unknown of the body's wisdom is both exhilarating and overwhelming. Our trio started with myself as the initial mover, partner A as my movement support and partner B as my voice support, of who’s job it is to respond to my movement and offer direction in places where my movement becomes stuck. Slow, silent directional slices of my arms quickly morphed into frantic surging of the right arm and chaotic jumps in the air with the reddish reasoning of the right leading…partner A entered and exited the negative space and confronted me with her own mirroring of my body and together we were dancing in each others chaos…at the same time partner B with her highly trained voice was offering warped, eerie sounds that resonated from deep within her throat…as the movement developed into even more momentum, her voice drew me along and she quickened into a frantic beat box that plunged deep inside my body. In this moment of bursting chaos between the three of us we had reached a point of understanding - both partners knew instinctively what needed to be done to offer resources to develop my movement, stretching me physically beyond the constant struggle between left and right…what next?!

Unmasking

The most revealing score of the training so far. After an initial 30 min warm up using the head and face and the metaphor of mask and unmask, 15 movers stood in a line, facing the witnesses and performed a solo piece, a story of the head. What happened was a extraordinary enactment of internal struggles, processes, stories, patterns, emotions both tender and traumatic that were expressed using the internal (eyes closed) and the external (eyes open) environment. Without the entire range of the body to rely on, what emerged was a raw unmasking of the self and a sense of pure curiosity, as if I were seeing my body in all its entirety for the first time.