20th Anniversary of Melbourne Jam – Live Music Jam

The finding of a dance
The exquisite waiting for the coalescence.
And the will it, won’t it; is there enough here?

Push it, ride it, fly it
Waiting in every moment of action. Acting in every moment of waiting.
Can’t force the wave, can only ride and respond to the force.

Okay. It’s time now.
Lose your centre.
Don’t worry, I’ll give it back.

Getting tired.
Feeling the skipping of the smoothness. Feeling the waning awareness.
Restful. Reflectful. Ready to move again.

Slow. and ready to Flow.
Take the time to find the slips and eddies. Swirling in the stream.

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lightness of experience

I had an interesting experience at the jam tonight that got me thinking about lightness. Often dancing with a beginner, I experience a lightness of their contact. Often dancing with a very experienced dancer, I experience a lightness of their contact. And then there is a set of dancers, with some experience, whom I experience as heavy in their contact.

Now, I am speaking about my ‘experience’ of their contact. Irrespective of the degree of the weight in our dance, does my partner feel heavy or light to me?

The lightness of the beginner and the lightness of the very experienced dancer differ considerably. The beginner’s lightness communicates uncertainty, sometimes confusion, and a lack of knowing about using weight. The very experienced dancer’s lightness communicates versatility, consideration and a high responsiveness of weight.

The dancer with some experience has learnt to share their weight, but not yet learnt how to take it back, or further, how much of their weight to share in the first place and how much to keep a hold of. As we keep dancing CI, we add greater detail to our weight-sharing spectrum, and can traverse it with ever more ease. Being able to better modulate the integration and tone in our bodies, allows us this greater versatility and responsiveness in weight sharing. An experienced dancer can deeply connect to their partner by giving their weight, but allow their partner utmost freedom in dancing by also holding it back.

Perhaps, the journey of CI could be categorised as one from lightness to lightness anew.

breath through your pores

Dancing in a trio at the jam tonight, whist one partner smothered the other, the phrase “breath through your pores” got said. As we continued dancing, the phrase started to be said repeatedly within the trio. Which allowed us to realise some interesting homophones:

“breath through your pores”

“breath through your pause”

“breath through your pours”

“breath through your paws”

all seem apt, in their own way. I especially love the third, with it’s sense of movement (and the fact that utilising the breath to facilitate pouring can be so effective)

a good dance

Q: What makes a good dance?

A: Tonight I danced with my friend Cameron at the jam. We had a great dance, and it got me thinking about an answer to the above question (recently posed as the focus for an upcoming CI retreat). Here’s what i came up with:

A great dance is one lingers.

I guess that could be taken to mean the dance lingers with you after it is done, and that is certainly true of a good dance, but I was more referring to the dance having moments of lingering within it.

First, lingering moments are listening moments. Knowing that my partner and I are listening to each other, waiting for each other, is a great basis for a dance. But more so, the reason that I feel so enriched when a dance has the ability to linger is because it tells me that we are  closely following and playing with the flow of the natural forces, gravity and counterthrust, as well as letting our natural rhythms, breath and pulse, steer us.

Gravity is an acceleration, it has an upswing and a downswing. And a moment of pause; before the deceleration of the ascent becomes the acceleration of the decent. In the dance, we have the ability – through our body’s connectedness – to shape these moments of pause into lingering suspensions. And we wait, with our breath and our pulse, for the moment of fall.

But our great dance, lingered not just in its moments of suspension. Lying draped over one another on the floor, we listen to the ebb and flow of our breathing, and the steady lub-dub of our hearts, for the next set of waves to be bodysurfed.

And as we take these lingering moments, these resting moments,  we find a rhythm between exertion and recuperation that is supportive. The dance is not strenuous because we follow the ebb and flow of our efforts, in the embrace of the natural forces around us.

deep mind

this phrase occurred to me whilst dancing today:

deep mind in fast flow

I was reflecting on the challenge of staying embodied – and responsive in weight-time – whilst the flow of the dancing gets speedier; avoiding the preempting that can happen as we rush to keep up; using our core-distal connectivity to embrace 3-Dimensional spatial disorientation and receptivity.

Textile experiences of gravity

I remember talking with another CI dancer recently, who was saying that they like to dance wearing woolen fabric because it helps wick away the sweat. I like to dance in cotton and I probably would have said that was mainly down to the fact that – prone to sensitivities of skin and itching – wool is usually too scratchy for me.
But the other day whilst walking, I had a subtler realisation. It began to lightly rain as I was out and I noticed that as my cotton t-shirt was becoming increasingly heavier with the dampness – a tangible sensation of gravity’s pull.
After I’ve been dancing CI for a while, my perception of gravity naturally becomes a little sharper. Maybe this is why I have never before differentiated this subtler experience of gravity – the weight of the sweat in my t-shirt – from the rest. But now realising it, I would have to certainly rate it amongst the reasons I like to wear cotton – even my clothing is helping me tune into gravity.