November Asides

Thoughts on Ensemble Dancing

Ensemble dancing, both choreographed and improvised, set and scored, while different in their essential natures, nevertheless hold some significant things in common. Success requires holding space, being touched and moved by a larger sense of the self. This self extends beyond the flesh and incorporates both space and bodies alike. This self may even include the audience, but not always. Having a flexible sense of the self is a skill. Giving language to the action is to speak of embodiment as something we do, not as something that is given. Presence in this sense, is an action since how we embody influence our presence. And, there is an endless palette of possible embodiments because there are an endless forms that bodies arise as and endless ways the mind that is that body can enfold the body as a spatial being within any moment. The embodiment that embraces many beings, holds important skills within its practice: 

+      It feels space as a kind of concentration of substance that touches and is touched alike.

+      It attends to spatial presence in flexile modes – so that the eyes that can see a diffuse field of vision can concentrate that field as deftly as eyes that narrow a field of vision to a single object of attention, say 2X2=4. 

+      It moves inwardly and outwardly with the speed and regularity of a heartbeat, often faster.

+      It holds the “self” in kind with others, not above, not below, balancing attention generously. 

+      It understands that the action of the many is toward the one and the action of the one is toward the many that it also always is. 

+      It recognized that everything touches everything and that all is entangled, nothing is truly Independent. 

+     Strength and power, grace and beauty is an action of the many on every scale of being.