Sacred Movement, Sacred Sound

Sacred Movement, Sacred Sound                  Debrief of Weeks 1 & 2                                         Esposito                  10/12/14

But the man who combines within his mortal frame knowledge, love, and selfless service is holy and becomes a place of pilgrimage, like the confluence of the rivers Ganges, Saraswarti, and Jamuna.               – Iyengar (1966, 1968, 1976), p. 22.

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Welcome to Week 3! With two beats (Week 1, Week 2) we establish rhythm. With three we can sense direction.

1. Introductions, syllabus, covenant, method

Week One: Who are you? (RIMI, Alice, Past-Present-Future, we are processes; not static, beings in time…)

Workshop activity: “Mirror-Curtain-Light (blackout)” – Soma (lived body), Hanna

Week Two: Who are we? – body, breath (life), mind,  – asana, pranayama, dharana – sangha

Workshop activity: “Shiva” – group shape (soma-to-sangha), Progressive Relaxation, Autogenic Conditioning, trance, SENSATION, creative visualization, proprioception (creating sensation in the body using mental imaging)

Week Three (proposed): What do we do? Action, the act. The inverse symmetry of ritual trance, shamanic techniques, healing, magic, ritual; know what’s wrong before attempting to heal; Somatics, the inverse logic of embodiment

 

Basic Concepts and Vocabulary

AWARENESS: sensation, feeling, thought, movement (Feldenkrais)

CONTENT: Power-powerlessness, Freedom-bondage, Belonging-alienation, Fun-grief (Glasser)

FORM: Shape, Space, Time, Motion (Nikolais)

SPACE: point, line, plane, volume (architectural)

Vertical, Horizontal, Depth (Deep-high-and-wide)

2-D Planes:                   Vertical + Depth = Wheel plane (Laban)

Vertical + Width = Door plane     (“)

Depth + Width = Table plane     (“)

SHAPE: symmetry, asymmetry; solo soma and group shape, the individual and the group

 

METHOD: Gestalt (holism) – Alternate polarities, Overlap polarities, Integrate polarities, such as doing and observing, moving and talking, etc.

Workshop 1: “Mirror, Curtain, Black-out”

• Movement, from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’ in three steps (beg., mid., end)
• Metaphor, sign, icon, symbol

Concepts: Inverse Symmetry – your reflection’s left arm is your right arm. There is an inverse symmetry of Time, Space, Shape, and Motion… we can create an effect by understanding its opposite. Mind-body, body-mind; “work on one is work on the other”.

Workshop 2: “Shiva”: Line up single-file facing mirror, create random designs with limbs; design vertical by changing level: low, middle, high; design horizontal in symmetry, balancing left and right; move along line without destroying illusion of “one body with many limbs/heads”.

• Three worlds, Week 1 recap—“mirror-curtain-light/dark”conceptually related to “3 Jewels”.

1. With mirror open – sangha – all of us plus our “shadows”
2. With curtain closed – dharma – our real selves, flesh and blood relationship, reality working out our paths—karma is how we work out our dharma
3. Light (blackout) – Buddha nature (self) – enlightenment, awakening to Self, I, Buddha nature, going within to find moksa, liberation, FUN, sweetness, seduction, subversion, laughing liminality! Like leaping lizards? Ha!

• The Theatrical ACT

o   Seminar: eventually we got to the subversive act—to “subvert the subversion”, a trope used by Herbert Marcuse, in One Dimensional Man (1964)

• Art, performing arts, live voice, live embodiment; “the art”, magic, shamanistic techniques

1. SENSATION
   1. Part of somatic awareness (sensation-feeling-thought-movement)

i.     Concentric muscle contraction

ii.     Eccentric                “

iii.     Isometric                   “

1. Awareness of Sensation

i.     Hanna’s SMA (sensory-motor amnesia) synesthesia—lack of sensation

ii.     Focus awareness (dharana)

1. Body part
2. Tense muscle on in-breath; relax on out-breath

iii.     Awareness and Control, Stability and Mobility—inverse symmetry

1. As in “mirror-curtain-light”
2. “Pattern” is discerned consciousness, one-pointed attention (dyhana), prolonged (discipline)
   1. Develop mental focus—on sensation (contract/release; ‘rolling weight’, ‘inner wave’…
   2. Associate image and Sensation
   3. Focus consciousness with INTENT
3. Intent

                                               i.     Goal

                                             ii.     Pilgrimage

                                            iii.     Transformation

1. Group Shape (“Shiva”)

                                               i.     Like “pair walk”, creating heightened sensitivity to Self and Others

                                             ii.     Common intent

1. Seminar 10/8/14 – emerging themes
   1. Unity in Diversity (of religions)
   2. What are the ‘universals’?
   3. What are you going to do (about it)?
   4. Art as medium of sacred, non-ordinary or extra-ordinary or heightened awareness of holiness inside of everything
2. Creativity
   1. Creating modern rituals tapping ancient ‘wisdom’
   2. Shamanistic techniques, (or any indigenous cosmology rooted in Nature, consistently and actively engaged through balanced sensitivity to needs and desires of self-other-world expressed as a dialectic of power/freedom/belonging/fun, in collective, communal “acts”.
3. Lecture, Workshop, seminar Points
   1. The architecture of the BODY (Bartenieff hand-out), upper & lower unit, left and right side, is homologous to the architecture of space.
   2. The architecture of buildings is homologous to motion and functionality
   3. Trance and Creative Visualization

i.     Relaxation—quiet body and mind

ii.     Visualize – sensation to image (proprioception)

iii.     Association – metaphor linking part of one realm of experience to another, as in sensation to emotion, emotion to thought, thought to movement, etc.

iv.     Limitations of metaphoric ‘frame’

1. Focus
2. Intent
3. AUM – Sound– open (A), focus (U), close (M) – bringing it all ‘home’
4. Method – Alternate, define polarities (Curtain-Mirror-Light/Dark); Overlap, play, fun, (“Shiva”), mirror, inverse symmetry; Integrate conscious ‘manipulation’ of sensorimotor intelligence (our next step in Week 3)