January Asides

Just back from the wonderful festival that hosted my birthday event, I am dwelling in the resonance of much of its political orientation, thanks, in large part to Keith Hennessy. I knew this would happen when we put together the collection of wonderful teachers who contributed. While I won’t get into what everyone taught, I will suggest that everyone grew in their understanding of how political the dance landscape is, if only one pays attention to one’s relationships to people, places and things with an orientation that reveals actions of power, authority, the properties of physicality and how that shows up in objects and beings, and in the play and choice making that shapes the creative landscape of being together. While those who know me, know how political I am in my care for CI, Keith Hennessy brought to them a level of awareness of the dynamics of social politics, what is present but normalized into invisibility. His gift is to unveil people’s eyes to what is before them and yet unseen, to reveal within their agreements what goes unchecked and where freedoms live that offer grounds of consideration. He believes in the healing power of dance when informed by a “feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial ethic.” *

I support Keith’s work whole heartedly and love what happened for people as they encountered an understanding of how the emphasis on the individual is not a necessary “truth” (rather it is the ground for all neo-liberal economic authority, an idea that must be insisted upon otherwise the whole kit-n-kaboodle collapses – note, Margaret Thatcher, one of the key proponents of neoliberalism said that there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families**). I spoke to this issue as key note speaker at a Somatics Conference*** at Bath Spa University in 2019. The damage this perspective has wrecked upon peoples and the societies within capitalist domains remains ongoing. We all are profoundly entangled by its corporate tentacles, which act via strategies that empower a tiny percentage of the people and vastly disempowers most of the remainder while offering the former a complete sense of ethical impunity. That these perspectives came with an economic agenda is no surprise, yet it is worth exploring if you want to understand how ideas become lived. We are all currently subject to the results of this agenda. But what’s dance got to do with it? Especially Contact Improvisation! Well that’s why this was an important issue to give voice to at my B-day party. 

Dance heals, Dance informs, Dance awakens, and Dance asks for more dancing. I kinda think of Keith’s work, and my work as sharing a purpose, only going about it with very different orientations. I believe that when people are told what a body is, what a mind is, what they do and can do, they limit the possibilities for the imagination to offer organizational capacities that drive new “truths”, new ideas about what is possible, what a human being might and can be. Ok, lots of words that mean if you start with how the mind moves as a body and vice versa, you can change the very ground of experience. An embodied state that is shaped by a culturally normative understanding of being is stuck believing the myth of individualized being. Other embodied states produce vastly different experiences on this important ground level… How the mind is embodied, what attention can know and do, and what the imagination has to do with it. 

So, it is on this embodied level that I chose to work with what “readiness” can be from an orientation that allows one to be easily moved, ready to be moved, to meld, to join, to resonate, to act, to bridge, to support, to hold and be held. How do you hold yourself lightly? That is a political “stance” of stillness in motion. It is a belief that power is in communication, communion, co-creation and a shared space of being. Power is in a relational readiness to act, which is the opposite of being jacked up, tough, hard, tense, anxious, and all alone. Touching before even being touched is a creative act of the imagination acting on how the mind understands the capacities of the body to be present in the world. It is a thrilling state of being always more than merely one, and never merely human. My belief is that until the bodymind is free to experience differently, it will reproduce the same old reality. One in which power is at the top of a hierarchy.

*Keith Hennessy, unpublished writing, “Dancing as Political Healing”

**1987 Women’s Own interview

*** Rewilding Presence: Ecology, Cultural Politics and Dance Research” Keynote, Bath Spa University. Bodily Undoing Symposium: Somatic Activism and Performance Cultures as Practices of Critique. Bath Spa, UK.

——

Whomever owns the means to your experience, owns you. Experience as I understand it, as I live it, is formed by my attention. Attention is not just one thing, right? Attention requires both a body and a mind and better yet a body that is living mind. Indeed, when I separate the body from the mind, I become disembodied, or dis-enmnded (no mindfulness of the environmental self which includes the body and the space of the body as a living presence). The myth is that attention is only an act of the mind at work, except that it is only visual (body), and that the mind is involved in keeping what is important front and center, like a black board, or now, a computer screen. This is a recipe for the easiest takeover of human experience that could possibly exist. And, it is underway now, by forces that don’t have our best interests in mind. Yikes!!!

Scramble quick!

In my world, the bodymind is not given to a predetermined condition. It is not preconceived such that all you do is drive the vehicle. The act of organizing your attention is creative, a function of your imagination, the means that will let you know what is real and what is not real, what is worth your attention, and what isn’t worth it. What is dead and manipulable, and what is alive and requires respect. How it is possible for you to respond, and how not. 

Culture acts to take control of this situation by telling you what you are and how to drive. Keep it simple and there will be no issue. One thing about the imagination is that it easily gets dialed to “repeat”, so that you can reproduce the same, predictable results. Any algorithm is trying to do just that, give you results you will believe because it repeats for you! The world shows up as you expect it. Danger!!! 

Repetition limits mindfulness. The whole job of the mindfulness journey is to awaken to the vastly brilliant, vibrant, circumstances in which mere nuance becomes a world never experienced before. From nuance the whole world comes alive and seemingly shifts on its axis. In mindfulness this (whatever) is never lost to that. You gain an ability to recognize your experiential choice, whether in joy or in suffering. While I will always be a part of you, as you me, I am not you, I am not even me. 

The dance we dance, with ever more skill, is one in which we learn to be the keepers, the gardeners, the art makers of our experience, one that grows beyond anything we can be taught by anyone, or anything other than by the whole of living itself. Living life, we are infused by worlds that are inexpressibly interwoven, moved and moving. Still, no one can know these levels of experience for us. We are one, and we are many.