FRAMING THE BOUNDLESS
© Nita Little Nelson

Human beings are of two natures, boundless mind and bound body. In each moment, we are both.  Art is manifest in this most potent union and it serves us well to examine it closely.  As dancers, the range of our physical language and creative expression is in direct relationship to the very character of this union.  This character is not fixed, it is ever and always changing. 

To appreciate fully the potential of dance, indeed the potential of being human, we, as dancers, must train our minds as well as our bodies.  The two, mind and body are too intimately tied and affect each other too potently.  Explorations into the infusion of the boundless nature of mind upon the structured conditions of physical reality in the making of the art of Contact to continue behaving as if the mind simply needs to get out of the way and let the body and its sensations take over.  Although the nature of pure mind is formless, boundless, as mind becomes embodied it takes on structure.  That which is boundless becomes framed as it changes from formlessness into this wonderful, incredible, weave of possible awarenesses, possible awakenings, and possible knowings.  These possibilities are not a set sum.  There are worlds upon worlds of possibilities and they change everything. To behave as if choice were not involved in the very nature of experience is to miss the gift of being embodied. 

People have choice in the framing of that which they experience. The new dance potential is dance that crafts that experience, the mind within the body.  As dancers, we live at the cutting edge of that craft.  For me, this is our greatest gift to the world.
 
The mind is range and possibility itself, with many different forms of mental action.  Unfortunately, when we think of mind, we think of “thinking”.  Typically, we mean linear thinking when we use this word and I more than agree that linear thinking is problematic to the body because it’s point by point processing limits perception, diminishes awareness, and is basically too slow a process for the huge amounts of information that can be lived in other actions of mind.  I train what I call “multi- dimensional” thinking, or thinking that works in whole forms of experience, fields of awareness, more similar to shapes or “being states” than to the point by point processing of what we generally consider thinking.

I call the multi-dimensional action of mind a form of thinking since its boundaries define a shape that flows down pathways of change. Logic and illogic is a potential ingredient in both linear and multi-dimensional thought.  However, in multi-dimensional thinking the amount of information involved in the flow far exceeds the ability of verbal language to convey.  It can only be conveyed in a form of expression that includes not only the physical body, but the extended body. The extended body is the subtle body that experiences the size, shape, and character of experience of the space (including objects/beings in the space) as well as time and qualities of the time experienced. The boundaries of the flow of experience stretch and extend with the infusion of mindful awareness and conscious choice.  Getting “out of one’s way” in the making of art is an attempt to step into flow, let go of linear thinking and experience freedom; but it forces a release of the very tools that might enhance the experience and propel the art and the artist to a whole new level.  “The way” is that which is in motion in the body of the mind… the whole form that is boundless mind as it becomes embodied.