Spoken language and body language.

Through language and movement we come into relationship with ourselves and with our environment. Coming from a background of law and humane sciences, language has always been an important means of expression and communication for me. A means, also, to explain oneself and to understand others. To precise individuality and to create community. That is mainly why I speak/understand six languages.

But how do I communicate when language has not (yet) been differentiated?
Where there is no common language? With children, speakers of foreign languages, thinkers of foreign thoughts?
How can I find ways, to connect my experiences in dance with my language? Speak before and while I dance. Speak afterwards.

Some of the following projects show my work around philosophical themes through language, body and art. I crystallized moments of body talk into pictures, and then 
let myself get inspired to words by these pictures days, weeks, months later. In this process thoughts took form that had flown through me equally or similarly in the instance of movement. And sometimes totally new connections came forth. Ideas fledged and evoked new movements: They became the inspiration for my dance. They became the foundation for my course descriptions and course contents (e.g. Body and Time; The Body Unveiled) and thus have moved others, who then again have worded their experiences. A potentially indefinite chain of movement and language.

Below you will find my dance and my thoughts on diverse topics.

I would love to experience Contact.Links,  what you have to “say” to this – in whatever language you choose: through dance, art, being concise and sharp, philosophical…

These could be the themes of our dialogue:

Body & Time
Body & Space
Oak & I
Concepts
The Body Unveiled
Balance
Holding & Letting Go
Embodied Evolution

Body and time

The following pictures and thoughts are taken from my final project “Oak and I” for the BMC practitioner program. The theme was “Distal initiation of movement”, i.e. how to start movement in the periphery of our body (fingers, toes, head, tail) and where does that take us?

The project consisted of a book with photos and poems and a 20 minutes showing.

Location and partner:   big oak tree on Hampshire College campus, Amherst, MA., near soccer field.

How it evolved:           

my father had just died and there I was, no family,

means (to me?) less support, less boundaries,

and then this lust for life emerging from inside,

this knowing of “enough supporting postures”.

Let me reach out and find support externally.

And here I read:

“…we don’t live on the ground enough, and thus we lose … distal initiations”

(Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in an interview in CQ5:2, Winter 1980 with Lisa Nelson and Nancy Stark Smith = Sensing Feeling and Action, Body-Mind Centering^® - Books, page 58).

 

My explorations took me to questions

• of support and where do we expect support to come from. There was a moment when I happily thought that this generous tree is offering me branches wherever I need them. But then I realized that it is more that I just adapt to reality and content myself with whatever is offered. There were definitely places where there were no branches. Yet I was all content. Why would it be so much more difficult to be content with whatever branches people offer and not ask them to grow new ones?
• of balance. What is distal and what is proximal after all? What is outer and what is inner? What is up and what is down? It all became indifferent at times – but then gravity helped to find grounds (and once I fell). Gravity is a partner we can always count on.
• of who I was and who my relatives were. After days and days in the tree, we became so familiar. Birds landed right next to me, woodpeckers dove for food deeply into the oaks branches, squirrels filled their bellies for the near winter and looked at me in unconcerned surprise. I felt connected to everyone and everything.

• And many more.

touch

 

tasting input

 

 

starfish on tree

 

extremities

 

changing roots

 

 

eyes

 

Concepts

How strong are our patterns in movement, thought, behaviour? How to find new possibilities: From the movement patterns of the (first) cell all the way to our movement patterns in relation to gravity?

How tight or free or fluid is our approach to dance, movement, sensual experience, to age, to the essence that distinguishes the self from the other?

Chögyam Trungpa (Shambhala):
„Slowing down any impulse is said to be the best way to begin.”

We will explore entrance ways for slowing down in our nervous system. We will examine different structures in the immune system, the permeability of membranes, our preconceptions for the sense organs, our reflexes and Basic Neurological Patterns. With silence and voice.

 

Behind the veils

there is more

to be discovered:

Magic.

Structure.

Life.

 

But: what is this actually, that expresses itself? Which parts of our body are actually familiar to us? And: which ones do rarely come into expression, which ones do mostly stay hidden behind veils of dim attention?

BMC will help us raise some of these veils off our body, show us pathways to the unfamiliar, open our senses for all that is still waiting in the hidden unknown. This will happen mostly in guided or free movement studies, besides also through anatomical and physiological demonstrations, facilitation of voice and breath. We will visit: Organs. Fluids. Senses and Perception. And many more. An explorative journey without end…

Balance

In dance, in daily life: sometimes we are moving without any connection to the earth, the space around us, to others, to our own body. This is one version to stay in balance. But there are others:
Which structures, which circumstances of our environment can we use for our movement, our behavior? And: how do we use them in the cycle of possibilities of yield – push – reach – pull?

Which inner, which outer spaces are available for us in order to reach out or move towards the center? Which directions and spatial planes? Which body?

Seemingly familiar, and yet…

Body-Mind Centering provides a method for us to recognize our anatomical and kinaesthetic patterns. We will explore our own preferences and find new options. We will research the most different aspects of balance:

Holding and letting go

holding
holding on
holding on
letting go
flow
flow on
holding
and so
on

Holding on and letting go – two unbridgeable opposites?

We will explore the transitions from one state to the other: emotionally as well as qualitatively in expression and movement. On our own and in improvised contact with others we will playfully find their rich shades from fluent to abrupt, just as we choose. The necessary physical experience of being held (by the earth’s gravity) will serve as a prerequisite for our letting go of the habitual. We might then perceive the letting go of control not so much as a loss, but rather as a simple moving on into the next situation.

On this basis we will work on and make use of the Release technique in dance and movement, nourished by our inner letting go of concepts, ideas and expectations.

The main topics on this journey are the body’s innate reflexes and fluids, the vestibular/equilibrium system in the inner ear and the nerve receptors in the joints, the interplay of muscle fibres and facial layers, the flow within our connective tissue.

Embodied Evolution