Re-search, Re-source
Beginning again and again is a natural thing
A continuous present is one thing
And beginning again and again is another thing.
These are both things
And then there is using everything
A continuous present and using everything and beginning again.
Gertrude Stein. . .
What is the relationship between your body and your movement? Image-based movement research (IBMR) explores the interplay of substance and action. Although we are bound to rules of physics, our movement habits can incline us to a narrow range of responses even as we improvise with movement play. Exploring, re-searching the source of movement can expand our movement options and hence our experience of self.
“In the act of practicing dance, whether learning specific techniques or improvising and inventing, a person is engaged in a process of tapping, mobilizing, and exercising the wisdom of the bodily self that keeps us upright and rested, energized and fit. The process of learning to make and recreate patterns of bodily movement requires us to use the kinetic creative that we are: to rise as we fall; to settle ourselves amidst chaotic lives, and to channel our actions potential in desirable directions.
Dancing, in other words, has value not just because it enables a person to accomplish impressive feats—though that benefit is highly pleasurable—but also because it nourishes the matrix of small movements—the push and pull in relation to earth that we are... earth-born creatures who dream of space. (LaMothe, Mar. 2019)”
The body isn’t a thing we have but an experience we are. When we dance we transform our experience of self. In ecstatic dance, in technical dance, in social dance, in performance we transcend our quotidian experience loosening and even losing the boundary between self and non-self—we become energy, flow, flight, root, oscillation, balance, weight, weightless.
The use of imagery to facilitate that transformation—that transcendence—can enable us to experience our internal body sense differently and can contribute to novel shaping of our external form in imitation of an aspect of the world. In the first case, inviting a sense of bones floating in muscle, or the heart floating in the ribcage, or “densifying” the muscles in the legs can invite a novel sense of the experience of self. Likewise, inviting the image of a shaft of wheat responding to a breeze, or a jelly fish responding to a swell, or a bird riding a thermal can deliver us out of our own sense of gravity into a gravity enjoyed by another living thing.
Kinesthetic delight can take the shape of movement habits we reembody to enjoy their familiarity. It can also be found in surprises when we somehow discover new resources on one side of our skin or the other—new sensations in organs, bones, muscles, and new experiences in shaping our movement in relationships with physics.
IBMR is a one-hour practice in re-searching. In the words of Barbara Dilley, “Being creative is rigorous in unexpected ways. There are moments of risk and uncertainty but we have everything we need to begin; our experience of being human, the goodness and sadness of our hearts, and our longings. The practice is about beginning, and beginning, and beginning. (Dilley, 2015, p. 15.)”
IMBR is about play, about looking and feeling and sensing and playing with experience for the pleasure this play can bring. “The play mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action. (Huizinga, 1992, p. 38)”
If you are interested in exploring the phenomenon of attending to experience in movement please come play Sundays in July, 11 am-noon. 90 N. Lexington Ave.
Dilley, B. (2015). This Very Moment. Denver: Naropa University Press
Huizinga, J. (1992). Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press.