- Making space
- The Arrival of Soul
- Body Thinking words
Making space
‘Cain Movement/Dance group Galeri Theatre Caernarfon
I have always danced, always had a deep curiosity about movement and the sensing body as far back as I can remember. Moving was linked to the feeling of vitality as a young boy. I would like to illustrate this with a few movement stories that speak to this curiosity, vitality and search for aliveness, which is, still a value I hold dear in my work today.
When I was 10 I was given a camera on my birthday, this camera had a 10 second timer, and Curious as I was about feeling movement, I was also fascinated with seeing it. So I set my intention to try and catch an image of myself suspended in flight. I lay down the mattress of my bed on the stairs in preparation for my landing. I would set the timer, run to the top of the stairs and with a big breath jump into the freedom of my body in flight.
Not much has changed since then, this purist for freedom and aliveness is still as active. This moment of jumping serves as a metaphor for my interest in this suspended place, this place of not knowing and of fearlessness, that we can enter in our dances. The place where we can experience true aliveness.
Over the last years I have been weaving together the threads of my experiences and questioning the place of dance in my life. In 2011 I visited Anna Halprin’s Mountain home studio in California for the first time.
I was attending a tamalpa institute summer workshop she was leading, and here I had opportunity to experience her work, and the rich environment in which her work is placed, outside surrounded by the redwoods, the call of the birds, this environment, has a way of drawing the body into its inherent spaciousness.
My interest in working with Somatic approaches to movement, is about harnessing this spaciousness, and using it to bring more conscious awareness to the interior of our body, our mind and spirit, to each and every dance. During this time with Anna I had an experience that enabled my work to continue to change and evolve.
The moment itself was simple. So so simple. I had my hand in the sun, feeling its warmth, its light on my hand, my fingers playing in duet with the sun through unfolding sensations. There was a freedom from form and from everything I knew or thought I knew about dancing, something was suddenly subtracted (-) from myself. The body dissolved. Leaving nothing but a freshness of perception.
Coupled with this sensation was a memory. I was a young boy, sitting high and breathless at a top of a sycamore tree back in wales, red faced, legs dangling over a branch, I’d climbed to the top, with pockets full of acorns. I looked from this place of freshness, those two different moments intertwined, and the feeling of time and space and any linearity was suspended briefly.
Was I Remembering this body, or the body remembering this me.
I realised that the environment at Anna Halprin’s mountain home studio had supported a coming home to the body, a remembering of the body in a profound way. Questions around identity, memory, who I am, who I think I am, and who I can become, surfaced from this deeper connection to the body at this time.
It reminded me of the relationship to the landscape back in wales and to the beginning of my journey in dance.
I was 7 years old. In Dolgellau, North wales. Building dams in streams, with old rusty guttering channeling the water in order to place a little red plastic boat down the stream. I would spend most sunny days doing this, I did not realise at the time that I was dancing. Each time I moved a stone, or built another dam, I was moving and building parts of myself. I would watch the boat traveling down the stream, in my imagination I would place myself in the boat as the driver, sometimes the passenger, and in turn I would dance the dance of imagining the movement inside the boat, corresponding in my body and mirroring the way the boat rocked and swayed. I stood, knee deep in the stream dancing.
When I dance, and listen deeply through my senses, I often experience a kind of freedom and aliveness that feels like I am forgetting myself and remembering myself simultaneously. It is this freedom, and the experience of it that breeds curiosity, but also a commitment to the inquiry into the power of the arts as a potent tool for renewal, whatever age we are.
My imagination was vital for growth then as it is now 28 years later.
(Excericise)
I would like us for a moment to invite our minds to collaborate with us in using our imagination to recall a time when we felt a true aliveness in our body. We allow ourselves to breathe, as the breath serves as a bridge to the interior of our body. And as we remember we connect in to the physical, emotional, and mental- any imagery that arises out of this. Allowing ourselves to track our experience of these 3 levels.
If we were to deepen our inquiry here using movement, we might move from connection to sensations that arisen from this memory. Or we might draw an image and begin a movement dialogue with our image. Deepening, expanding and embodying our awareness.
Working with embodied inquiry in this way raises questions about the notion of self perhaps as being something very fluid, and in the act of dancing, a space can appear in us, where we are suspended temporarily so that what was previously unknown or hidden about ourselves, becomes a little more known. Developing awareness, and having time to listen to our bodies’ wisdom. In each dance, there is the possibility of renewal, but also a deeper understanding about our ‘beingness’.
I would like to speak to this notion of renewal with a short story about a session a few years ago that has stayed with me.
A woman in her late 70s arrived for a dance and movement session that was taking place in the afternoon. It was the first of such sessions in the local area. As she walked in, she seemed a little confused and a little irritated. Her understanding was that she would be watching dance, not participating and dancing herself. After the initial confusion subsided, she gradually joined in the activities. As the session drew to a close I asked each member of the group to share a word and a movement that described something about their experience at the end of the session. We went round the circle each person speaking and moving his or her truth. Each with their own gesture and tone. It came round to the lady in question.
She looked somehow different now, softer perhaps. With tears in her eyes, she said ‘belonging’ her fingers and hands meandered down like roots from a thirsty tree to clasp the two hands of the participants either side of her, she squeezed these hands with a punctuated silence that left a resonance which filled the space with an indescribable richness.
Engaging with the creative and artistic process allows us the opportunity to get to practice knowing about our life and ourselves in another way.
Art can be a way of orientating us to what is important, and often, to what is hidden within us. Whatever age we are.
In relation to the creative process, I would like to speak about ‘Cain’ and its development over the last few years.
Cain is a movement group that has developed over the last 5 years at Galeri theatre Caernarfon, north Wales.It grew out of a regular monthly movement and relaxation group called estyneto (reach again). Cain was developed out of a desire from the participants to explore performance, for many, for the first time. The group work mainly through improvisational movement practices that invite a listening to the inner life of the body through creative movement and group exploration.
In our first meeting the group were very clear about their intention when we first started making a dance together. They said that the feeling of ‘invisibility’ as women, and as women over 60 was a pertinent issue that they felt their dancing could address. They felt that moving through the threshold of invisibility to visibility in the dance was vital. Over the months this theme was grappled with in the choreography, stories about being seen and unseen in life were related to each other. The choreography came from a deep connection to the intention of what they were doing, tracking this in the process was vital, feeling into the movement beyond the form, the shape, but allowing that intention to be kept buoyant in each moment.
The result of the dance was a powerful experience. Both in the making, but also in the work being witnessed in performance. A threshold was crossed that brought to light the very essence of this struggle of invisibility that was hidden in the dark. Following the performance the group huddled in the corridor of the theatre, red faced and tearful there was a sense of such a palpable aliveness.
The group and I were reminded about the power of movement to communicate those aspects of life that transcend language but that are shared by our humanity, and the power of being seen in this act of communication is arts greatest and most potent force.
A member of the group recently articulated her experience of working with Cain:
“We learn such important stuff, a kind of understanding of ourselves and each other beyond words, an understanding which can be quiet and tender or strong and powerful, and in which we dance a connection to whatever it is which binds us together. Whatever age we are!”
The group’s choreography embodied something larger in it’s thematic content. Perhaps something of it alluded to the collective blinkers that we all have around ‘seeing ageing’ or ‘not seeing it as members of the group reflected through their personal stories.
Communicating through language can bring us to a certain depth of experience, but movement reveals another layer further, for these are felt stories of the living body, when witnessed in the ritual of performance, new meanings, both personal, and collective can emerge.
The very life of this group is about making space. To bring to consciousness this ‘forgotten secret knowledge’ of the senses.
Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, their dreams.
(lame Deer & Erdoes,1972 p.157)
Working in this way, seems to be so much about remembering something we can often forget.
Buddug a participant in the group began dancing 4 years ago. In a recent creative process she said:
“ I have been thinking, this dance in about shadows and light, when I began losing my sight, I began to notice the shadow, not only in my vision, but in my life.
When I asked why Buddug danced, she stated for ‘freedom’
The desire for freedom is not only her story, but also all of ours in many ways big and small.Movement and being in our bodies can magnify our relationship, or lack of it, to the notion of freedom.
My experience so far working with somatic awareness and expression is that our bodies own ‘original grace’ can often be lost amongst habits and the challenges that life presents. Spending time with my 2-year-old nephew recently made me reflect on this idea of original grace. Seeing the freedom he had in his bones, his softness, his clarity of expression in a wave, a cry, or a gesture reaffirmed something about the importance to find this softness, openness and curiosity about our immediate experience of being in our bodies and to journey with a beginners minds again.
Understanding the conditions that supports the emergence of presence and this ‘original grace’ is of great interest to me. What is this presence that allows our ‘beingness’ to appear through our bones and tissues.
How we listen to ourselves in the dance is of great importance it seems.
What do we listen to when we dance?
How do we attend to this listening?
How are we changed through the act of listening and embodying what we are listening to?
Anne, a member of the group speaks about why she dances:
“Why do I dance? I dance because it is my birthright and I hope never to be denied the practice of my art. When I dance I move to come close to the ‘still point’ and remain for a blessed while in a place which the world turns about. When it is no longer possible I will visit the stillness and remember all the dances I have made. They are indeed the dance of heart and breath and life”
Anne Mart
Anne speaks of remaining for a blessed while in a place where the world turns about.
This place where we experience a kind of ‘active stillness’, and perhaps a freedom of sorts is important for Anne, and also for me.
‘In the place of stillness, rises potential.
From the place of potential, emerges possibility
Where there is possibility, there is choice.
And where there is choice, there is freedom.
Gabriella Goddard
When we attend to this rumbling stillness within us, we notice that it is like mercury, liquid, moving, ungraspable, changeable. It needs our time. We need to abide with its slippery quality for a while so that we can get to know it. To be there with it, as its settles, as we settle.
T.S Eliot so perfectly captures what I would describe in dancing as ‘active stillness’ as the still point.
Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. (Eliot 1952, 119)
As we enter our dances it can feel like this ‘deep listening’ becomes a compass of sorts for us to follow. As we follow the directions that emerge from attending to this stillness. We begin shedding something and gaining something simultaneously.
Deeper layers of communication and communion with aspects of ourselves that go unnoticed in our everyday business begin to become revealed. As we listen, we extend ourselves into the possibility of total receptivity; our listening extends so much so that everything is included in our dance.
‘The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest’
Bruce lee
Sometimes we can experience a sense of timelessness as Eliot beautifully captures in his poetry. As we drop the layers of our discursive mind we begin to sail closer to a kernel of embodied truth that is housed in our flesh. Coming together to move as a collective we have the opportunity to develop our capacity to orientate ourselves to this kernel through the dance and with each other, for our shared intention allows our listening to grow stronger like sails of a ship. Our collective listening can support us and guide us in the sea of our life. Perhaps those moments of connection, in the dance with each other, move us that little bit closer to feeling ourselves into the answer of why were here.
I would like to read a quote from Starhawk.
We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been – a place half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free. – Starhawk
There is something paradoxically ordinary and extraordinary about working and dancing together in this group, everyone dances for different reasons, and all of us have a variety of different experiences inside the dance, but there is a common thread that unifies us perhaps, as Starhawk states it is ‘this place where we can be free’.
In these moments of freedom in the dance there is the possibility of experiencing this aliveness, of being awake, of re-collecting, or re-remembering that which is lost, it’s about homecoming back to this original grace.
Anna Halprin and the ‘life art process’ has influenced and shaped the way I work since my first introduction to her in 2011. It is this fluid exchange between art making and life that is so central to the tamalpa process and also to my practice as an artist. The life/art process is based on the principle that
“As life experience deepens, personal art expression expands, and as art expression expands, life experience deepens (Halprin 2000)
The simple joy of Seeing the group members inherent wisdom or ‘original grace’ in motion is the keystone of my work. In preparing this presentation I have been thinking so much about playfulness and freedom and how important it is, but also how a little piece of freedom within our lives can grow and expand.
Cain’s Experiences in the dance studio, and with each other have begun to branch out into their daily lives and also into mine, which re-affirms to me the importance of this process. The group’s commitment to jump from their own personal staircase and to embrace this unknown territory with courage is a great inspiration. Id like to end with some words from one of the members.
Dancing with Cain
We who dance with Cain
are in the second
half of life, not young,
not old,
certainly not aged nor ancient,
nor ready to be relegated
to the residential home
and forgotten – dry relics
of ordinary lives, best
ignored;
not young any longer, no,
not finally
old either, but ripe
and grown to a fullness dance
gives us a chance
we are willing to take:
to explore the way we move
in the space outside us,
and to breathe
into the furthest extent of our reach
and beyond,
as we explore
the space within
and find how our movement heals
and realigns us, and honours our oldness.
To be given this gift by Cain,
to do all this, before our bodies
must be boxed and burnt or buried,
is such a joy
we sometimes fizz
with exuberance
as we work together,
to make moments of stillness
that are almost prayer.
On The Arrival Of Soul
A woman in her late 70s arrived for a dance and movement session that was taking place in the afternoon. It was the first of such sessions in the local area. As she walked in, she seemed a little confused and a little irritated. Her understanding was that she would be watching dance, not participating and dancing herself. After the initial confusion subsided, she gradually joined in the activities. As the session drew to a close I asked each member of the group to share a word and a movement that described something about their experience at the end of the session. We went round the circle each person speaking and moving his or her truth. Each with their own gesture and tone. It came round to the lady in question.
She looked somehow different now, softer perhaps. With tears in her eyes, she said “belonging,’ her fingers and hands meandered down like roots from a thirsty tree to clasp the two hands of the participants either side of her, she squeezed these hands with a punctuated silence that left a resonance which filled the space with an indescribable richness.
In that moment something happened that once again confirmed to me the communicative power of the arts. We were both transformed for that moment; there was a quality of something suspended. Gravity had changed its mind for that briefest of moments.
What she spoke awakened the meaning of “belonging” beyond the letters and the word itself. She had burrowed deep and excavated herself, and with the speaking of that word… her soul arrived.
When soul enters the room the air thickens. It is as if the air becomes rich with meaning. Not a meaning that we can grasp by our intellect or our rationality. But a full-bodied meaning that temporarily suspends us in time. The speaking of someone’s truth has a resonance like a church bell, which shakes us into a spell of noticing what we often miss about each other. Its like you have spent years whispering wishes into the well of yourself and finally, without warning, you hear the echo of the answer that, you have quietly been yearning for.
You have been thirsty for years and years without really knowing, your ears drink in that answer that quenches something of that thirst that you had grown accustomed to.
The soul is similar to the 100 trillion cells in our bodies – it is opportunistic to space- and thrives on space. It can break its way through the smallest of cracks and grow in circumstances where growth and life would seem impossible. Those pavements that we tread every day to work, in between those heavy slabs of stone, the tiniest most delicate fragile flower can still somehow grow. Into itself.
Our eyes are so used to orientating towards “something” in front that we often miss the aerial view. There is so much we can miss on the way by the astounding magnetic strength and pull of our imagined futures.
The soul does not run to a timetable, neither does it glance at the clock in order to find the “right time” to make an appearance.
The soul arrives, when it arrives.
We can’t make it appear, we can’t summon it. We can’t hold on to it tightly, because its very nature defies every attempt to grasp it.
But what we can do is create conditions for its growth we can encourage a space for it.
We can generously water in between the cracks.
The soul is shy but also boisterous. It’s a cunning magician and a lonely wonderer. Like a fox, it appears and disappears leaving a trace of something in the empty space; you can’t see it in with your eyes. But something in you knows it’s visited and carved a trace of itself in the air. You recognize this trace by listening to the absence of something that once was.
Sometimes when the soul appears you could hear a pin drop.
We are living in a world that at times can make it difficult to find places and spaces where the soul can roam freely. Our relationship to our perception of time is framed in such a way that we can be sucked into the vortex of busyness. Our egoic minds enjoys the task of building countless paths of thought and desire that are lined with gold. They sparkle, and like magpies we can’t help but be bedazzled and seduced by what the thought paths offers us. There are so so many paths to follow.
These glimmering paths are littered with signs pointing in every direction away from where we find ourselves standing.
Looking at the signs we see that:
Hope is over there twenty miles down and to the left.
Security is over there, three blocks down past the big Iron Gate.
Joy is at the end of that rainbow, hiding behind the shadow of the pot of gold.
So we stand, before these paths, breathless with an old rusty compass in our hand… it only works if we shake it. We look down towards it and every arrow is…pointing towards us.
Our breathlessness steams up the Glass on the front of the compass and we rub it to reveal that… once again. It is pointing towards us.
Were terrified and mad.
We feel a breeze on our nose and we look up… then as if from nowhere a gust of wind blows all those signs that we have been following, they spin with abandon, whirling and squealing and spinning, and shaking. Until, after some time hypnotized by the chaos. The wind dies down, and the signs, gradually slow down, painfully, they slow down. Like roulette wheel they stop, delicately and beautifully poised, pointing straight at us.
Our breathlessness disappears….
And we are left there spinning inside with nothing but ourselves as a compass.
It takes us time to remember where our feet are…. to feel them again in our dusty worn out shoes, we wiggle our toes in shoes with a worn out sole.
So the world values this currency of busyness. The busier we are, the more we can be seduced to feeling a part of something. We feel that we belong to that family of busyness, its carries us like a sail in the wind.
But when the wind dies down we find ourselves standing still with ourselves.
If we can bear it, we might find a richness that nourishes and feeds us. We can stay with the stillness, listening to the paradox of how it keeps melting back and fourth from emptiness to fullness.
Maybe, it takes courage not always be carried by the wind.
Maybe it takes courage to walk into it in the opposite direction.
Hair blowing everywhere with eyes streaming and tears dissolving into the air.
So In those wide-open gaps of stillness we can be reminded of our human predicament. This gap can be like a gold compass pointing toward preciousness. Our predicament might be how we lose sight of preciousness. Our own, others, and all that surrounds us.
In this golden gap we can gain perspective. We can see for a thousand miles, like were at sea. We can enjoy seeing the expansiveness and possibility of the sea of our life. But we can also feel completely lost in it, with nothing in the horizon that our eyes can rest on.Similar to our thinking. Sometimes there is nowhere for the mind to rest to seek security, nowhere for it to seek refuge and we simply surrender and let go of our imagined control. We throw the keys to the soul and it opens the door and lets itself in.
We sit back in our chair and listen to what it says.
We let it speak to us in its very own language that is unique;
Its language is individual to each of us and needs no translator.It speaks directly and in doing so, it pierces the bubble of assumption and certainty and plants us firmly back in the mystery of life.We can summon the courage to be brave enough to put our feet upAnd rest in the mystery…Knowing that we belong safe, nestled, somewhere deep inside it.
Cai Tomos
Sep 2012
James, H. (1998) The Eden Project: In search of the magical other, Toronto: Inner City Books.
James, H. (2001) creating a life: Finding your individual path, Toronto: Inner City Books.
Chodron, P. (1994) Start where you are: how to accept yourself and others, London: Element.
Chodron, P (2009) Taking The Leap: freeing ourselves from old habits and fears, Boston: Shambala.
Hilllman J. (1996) The Souls Code: in search of character and calling, New York: Grand Central Publishing.
Yalom I, D. (2008) Staring at the Sun: overcoming the dread of death, London: Piatkus
Body Thinking words
Recently I have been noticing the battle between two forces that are increasingly becoming more separate in our world. That is the mind and the body. In essence it is one force, but the perceived separation through our ever-increasing capacity to reason has grown. I have noticed a valuing of cognition, analysing and quick thinking. I’m amazed by people’s ability to weave cohesive tapestries of long words and sentences that arrive at something that can be perceived as stable and concrete, of course it depends on their delivery…
I’m impressed by the neural gymnastics.
Words falling out of some peoples lips like molten gold, and similar to Midas, words have the capacity to increase the value of not only what’s spoken but perhaps the speaker, adorned in dazzling wordy jewels of his or her own making…that temporarily blind us all.
I’m wondering about the seductive nature of words, and human’s ability to intellectually hypnotize themselves, by thinking themselves into knowingness. Perhaps feeling once they have arrived at the destination of knowingness there’s a restful smile from behind the wall of fleeting certainty.
I keep bashing into walls and walls of certainty. Some built by myself, some built by others. Walls made of beliefs, walls to keep the not knowing outside and the knowing within. Sometimes in words I hear such certainty, such sharpness and solidity in their delivery almost that they are made of stone and what is spoken about becomes just as solid and knowable. Stones have weight, so do words. People who speak with words made of stone hurt others whose words are made of feathers.
It feels that words at times merely describe the outer surface of something; it makes a cage to contain the unknowable from escaping. Keeping it known, warding off uncertainty.
I want to speak of the value of the thinking that happens beneath my outer surface. You can’t see it as it happens in my blood and in my tissues and in my cells and in my skin. If the brain and the skin are made from the same substance then surely I can think from here. But I can’t show you. I just want you to trust me.
The Cartesian hangover of the perceived separation the mind from the body means that our bodies are often porters. Carrying around the luggage that is our thinking. Years of carrying around beliefs and fears, joys and hopes all somehow programmed into and out of our flesh and environment.
Our thinking, our certainties, and the way in which we each formulate our view of the world stay with us gathering dust. We like our formulations. Because we know them…. and what we know, we grasp on to tightly for security in an ever changing world. We walk through our lives with a backpack of formulations about how we see life that shapes our choices second by second, we walk for thousands of miles not realizing what were carrying and what is carrying us.
Sometimes we build amazing walls of assumption and conclusions not only one wall but also several. We build walls within walls within walls. On the inside of us and on the outside of us, beautifully adorned with our histories that paved the way to our conclusions and assumptions about the world its people.
WE SPEND YEARS WALKING AROUND OUR OWN THOUGHT LABYRINTH…. TRYING TO FIND A WAY OUT…
Recently I feel increasingly seduced by the speed of the world to valuing words, a quick delivery and an easy answer…more convenient than diving down into my senses and searching for my words like pearls at the bottom of the sea… knowing that they come from a deeper place, and that I might have to be patient for the sea to be still in order for me to find them.
Will anyone be patient with me? That’s the worry … will they wait… for the words to come? And if they don’t and I come up to the surface of the sea breathless and with an empty shell in my hand and I say “ I don’t know”… what then…?
But the world’s addiction to the persistence of speed, the valuing of speed, means that our ancient way of relating to the world has become less important. But I feel this is what we were good at; we need to be guided by some other force than that of our thinking.
The ego loves explanation, It becomes thirsty for explanation in order to quench the anxiety of the reality that in truth…. we don’t really know what’s going on.
From one day to the next…
We can imagine, hope, and sometimes successfully kid ourselves that we know.
But really, we don’t know.
If we can manage to remember that we don’t really know. We might be able to be open to be guided again by the seasons, the winds, and the call of the wild.
For the elements know something, an accumulated wisdom of millions of years that we can learn from. But we need to make time to listen again…. with curiosity, to the mystery.
Our current relationship to how we perceive time is that it’s running out, we think were so short of it.
We believe there’s a time drought, and the devastating part is, that we have stolen it from ourselves, right under our noses. The very noses we used to smell the air with.
I went for a walk the other day and I put my hand into the earth, so I could remember the smell of the mud. Such a familiar smell in my youth, such a comfort. There was not much difference between us then. The mud and me. Putting it to my nose, threw a cascade of memory through my body, melting the separateness of my body and that which I was standing on. Melting my thinking that keeps me from being able to experience things as they are.
In that moment of smelling the mud. There was that pause.
That pause that I remembered Id forgot about. That pause that whispers life back into my ears, that pause re-fills the dry reservoir of time, letting me feel its fullness again.
Nature has potential to work like a mirror. It can reflect its wholeness and its fragility back to us, and through us. If we can bear to surrender our senses to hear it calling us.
Can we be brave enough to step out of the content of our cages of thinking and certainty that we all make for each other and ourselves? Can we be brave to open our eyes and dare to see without knowing?
Can we be brave enough to stand there naked? Bare arse in the wind, freezing cold in the rain listening to nature shouting wholeness into our skin.
Can we stand there long enough to bend our ears and skin to the shape of a sail and catch everything it has to say?
We shout into the wind, hoping our words will blow back in our faces showing us something about ourselves we can only see by screaming.
Cai March 2012
