Themes

Inner sensory experience

Connection to the larger world

Synergy of content and delivery

Content

Sabina first asked ripped in half sheets of paper and asked us if we were familiar with automatic writing. We all said yes. She stated we would be writing after we had a movement experience.

The following are the instructions that were given:

Invitation to feel our breath

To begin walking through the room

To notice the space

To silently find a place in the room where as a group we wanted to work

Asked us to stand with our feet wide

To relax our sternums

Open our hips

Soften our knees

Allow the belly to drop

Release the backs of our necks

Open through our chest using our hands and sense of touch, touching ourselves and touching out in to the space

To trace down our legs, feel the back of our thighs and sits bones, tracing on our bodies and out in to the space

Sabine relayed to us that she was listening to the news this morning and heard about violence in Syria, etc.

She invited us to allow our response to our personal challenges/problems to be an act of compassion toward ourselves and towards the world (this is a paraphrased interpretation of what she said). 

She asked us to allow even the releasing of our necks to be a small act of activism within a larger global context.

We stayed with this experience of standing and releasing/opening/softening/using touch to feel ourselves and extend ou tin to space for a bit longer with this concept in mind.

She then invited us to go onto all fours and feel our hands and feet on the ground, staying with attention to our breath. She then asked us to follow our curiosities as movers. We stayed with this for a minute or two then ended the movement portion of the exploration.

She then asked us to do automatic writing for a few minutes and then to share with each other something from our writing.

Experience

The most striking aspect of my experience was in noticing that tone of Sabine’s delivery and how it in and of itself facilitated my experience as much as the content of what she was saying.  Her soft, steady vocal tone became content in and of itself.

                                                                                        photo by Nilikuta Shani

When I had completed the movement portion of the exploration and was asked to write I found that I had no words forming in my mind.  I began to ‘write’ in a series of shapes and hieroglyphs that I sometimes was allowing to just form on their own and other times was listening to my inner sensations and documenting them, or remembering moments during the movement from sensory place and allowing this to form the ‘letters’ on the page.  It felt like an early discovery of language from the root of direct experience rather then a translation in to a pre-identified word of any sort. 

Later when I was reflecting on the process and her connection of our bodies to the larger global politics I began to think about the ‘body politic’ and how so many layers of society – thought forms, imprints of how we respond to our environment physically, stresses, memories are fascially intertwined with our structure and how releasing that which is no longer serving us – be it re-patterning a posture or allowing an emotion to be felt and witnessed versus letting it unconsciously run the show – that all these things really are political acts and affect how we experience the world - which affects our behavior, etc.

Sabina at the end stated that if this was a longer process she might have us take something from our writing and put it in space – speaking from behind one of the scaffolds, or lying on the floor.  She might have us shout it, or dance it, etc. This gave me insight into how her choreographic process might proceed. I left this exploratory process feeling much more present in my body, with my disposition greatly relaxed, inspired and softened.