The studio will be closed from January 27 – April 30 while I am in Asia, teaching and studying. Please stay tuned to this blog for updates on my travels and studies. I can be reached by email and look forward to sharing my experience with you in person when I return in May!

Arrival

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WashingtonDC_UnionStation I am just over a week into my journey, and finally getting a chance to post some updates. I arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I’ll be studying for the next month, late on Friday night, but I thought I’d start at the beginning. So the photo above is the very first one of this trip, taken at Union Station in Washington DC on Friday, January 27 at the relative start of what was to be a very long train ride to California. The first leg of the trip, from NYC to Chicago, was relatively uneventful if albeit uncomfortable for lack of a sleeper car. But the quiet time to stare out the window and dream was so very welcome.

Before I get into the details of the near disaster that struck in the second leg of the train trip, from Chicago to California, let me say that the decision to take the train rather than fly had everything to do with what I have set out to do on this little journey of mine. For those of you whom have worked and played with me, you know that it is not for want of meaning that I set out on this trip. In fact, for all my years of financial struggles as an artist, I have been exponentially blessed with a wealth of meaningful connections, energy, curiosity and passion for my work for which the greatest riches in the world could not substitute.

My studio in Brooklyn is as beautiful a sanctuary as I could hope to find, so it is not for the fantastically ornate Wat’s that I have come to Thailand (although they can hardly be beat for visual stimulation)…

And my ongoing participation in the Steve Paxton/Lisa Nelson Figure Space workshop at Earthdance in Western Massachusetts is a reminder, if I needed one, that there is no need to travel half way around the world for the opportunity to work with inspiring master teachers. No, it is not for lack of anything that I packed my bags for Asia, except perhaps for lack of time.

Oh, it’s tempting to muse on the significance of time, and space, and time-space, but I’ll leave that to the physicists and philosophers. What expertise I have lies in the realm of embodied experience, and it will come as no surprise that what this body-mind of mine was increasingly experiencing in the past months was compression of time and space – after all, it is New York City I live in! But when I noticed that this compression was affecting me right down to the level of my dreams, so that I was living a life in which I hardly had time to dream and certainly not the space in which to bring those dreams to life, I decided to take a pause to meditate on the possibilities.

And so I set out on this moving meditation via train, a ceremonial shift of mind-state into a different experience of time and space. The tangible sense of traversing the immense body of land we call the United States was profound at certain moments, and it would have been incredibly restful too, especially once my traveling partner and I had our own sleeper compartment on the California Zephyr train from Chicago to Oakland, if only our sleeper car hadn’t caught fire at 2AM in the morning in the middle of Nebraska! Seven hours in Hastings, Nebraska, home of Kool Aid and the site of a similar Amtrak fire back in 1988, and I am suddenly (momentarily!) under the impression that time is actually a burden. No one was hurt, and eventually we were moving again, so all’s well that ends well.

I’ve arrived three times already since I started this trip: in California, in Bagkok, and then in Chiang Mai. In a few moments I’ll leave this shady cafe and arrive back in my room for a nap. But in my mind I have only just begun traveling, and for the moment, as long as I am moving, I am in no rush to arrive in any one place. Meanwhile, I’m sending love and smiles and good wishes to all! I’m looking forward to sharing more of the journey with you…

Treading the Line Between Effort and Release

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Yesterday’s post was almost as excruciatingly difficult to write as some of the exercises we are doing, and it occurred to me that it might be a good moment to reconsider my approach. While there may be a point at which I can articulate quickly and clearly in a few words some of the incredibly dense material we are encountering, that time is not now. Perhaps the most valuable thing that I can share with you are the few in’s that I have into my own learning process.

After four days of attempting and accomplishing a variety of exercises, games and body puzzles, I am become increasingly aware of my approach to working with my body, and beginning to catch glimpses of new possibilities. Continue reading →

Tuning the Instrument of the Body

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Shortly after I wrote yesterday, a conversation arose in our morning session about the importance of being “in shape” for a dancer. Steve, who is in to the eighth decade of his life, demonstrates the incredibly complex movements that make up Material for the Spine quite beautifully, yet feels that he is not as in shape as he used to be. He recognizes a change in his motivation to stay in shape, which he traces to a head injury that occurred ten years ago.

So what? Is it really necessary for a dancer to be in shape in order to convey something meaningful, asks Adalgisa? Isn’t it the case that plenty of strong dancers fall short of conveying meaning? And yet, Steve insists, there is information that a well tuned instrument can convey that an “un-tuned” body cannot – for those of us who have experienced moving dance performances, the sentiment resonates. So is this work we are doing a way of tuning our bodies, I ask? Yes, is Steve’s response. And what are we tuning our bodies to? Here the answer is simply that this is too advanced a question.

Questions of “so what” and “what is it for” have surely come up for many of us: I’ve encountered it in myself, in conversation with others, and also in the talk that Steve gave at Smith College last night. Nancy Stark Smith, an internationally known teacher of Contact Improvisation who performed with Steve Paxton in the first experiments with CI in 1972 and founded the periodical Contact Quarterly, got up to ask: after one has mastered the form, then what? Steve did not give her any more of an answer than he had given me earlier in the day, but at the end of the third day of intense and exhilarating work in the studio I began to understand why.

To explain this “why” in writing is tricky. Steve himself chose to focus on explaining what it was that he was looking for when he first developed the CI form and encountered the need to teach it to a group of people whom had never seen or experienced such a thing before. He recognized a certain lapse of consciousness that often occurred in the Aikido roll, a move that not only he but his own Aikido teacher found particularly tricky to teach to Western students. Steve saw that often we would begin the roll and somehow finish, but in between there was this gap where we did not know what happened – a moment in which we would drop out, perhaps out of fear or a sense of disorientation, and a different part of the mind would take over to bring us to safety. He was looking for a way to fill in this lapse in the sequence of the consciousness of the body, and in order to do so he had to turn to sense cognition, which is different than semantic cognition.

I have to stop here for the moment, but I think this is somehow key. There is information in this sense cognition which cannot be approached or arrived at through the semantic mode of the mind – you have to experience it in order to know, no one can tell you. And all of us brilliant thinking minds are frustrated because we want to “know”, but it is a different kind of knowing that is being proposed here, one that takes us to a frontier of our consciousness that we have hardly explored.

Material for the Spine as a Yogic Practice

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Two days into the Paxton workshop and I am undoubtedly making my way into new territory. The work we are doing is very technical and while it is too soon to make any generalization about it, I will venture to say it is very yogic in nature. In fact, there are a series of movements that we are studying that were given to Steve several decades ago by a yogi, and I sense that it is not only the ripe old age of 115 that this man lived to that has given Paxton such reverence for his work. There is much in what we are doing that comes from Aikido as well, and a huge amount that is informed by a very Western approach to anatomy. In my conversation with Steve on Monday night, he described his work as a distillation of various techniques and this is exciting and fascinating because as someone who also has sourced a variety of approaches from East and West it seems clear that some process of distillation is essential in order to discover and transmit information about the body.

Perhaps pioneers of movement like Paxton are looking for their own form of yoga, one that suits the time and place we are from. Perhaps Contact Improvisation itself is a nascent form of Western “yoga” – it is certainly a movement and awareness practice that has taught me so much about my relationship to my body, to gravity, to other people. For people who are familiar with the freedom of Contact Improvisation it may come as a surprise that we are spending so much time on such specific and detailed movements. And while there is no structured time set aside for dancing, we have the evenings to explore on our own, alone or through contact with others. But rest assured that there is much play involved in the work we are doing – we spent several hours on body games yesterday, and perhaps my favorite part of the workshop so far is the post-lunch group nap time.

The question that remains for me is how this work pertains to a performance practice. I was very privileged to recently participate in a workshop with Thomas Richards of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards, and while the work with Richards was as detailed, focused and demanding, it was different in nature in a very fundamental way. I hope to elaborate on some of these differences for myself in the coming days, as a way of understanding and clarifying my own approach.

Steve Paxton Workshop at Earthdance

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As some of you know, I have the incredible privilege of spending two weeks at Earthdance, an amazing community and retreat center in Plainfield, MA, at a workshop with Steve Paxton. For those of you who have not heard of Paxton, he is the man credited with inventing Contact Improvisation and is renowned as a major contributor to the experimental dance and performance scene of NYC in the 60′s and 70′s. His current body of work which we are exploring in the workshop is called Material for the Spine, and in the one day of the workshop so far I have indeed accessed my spine and used my entire body in ways that are fantastically new and yet somehow essentially true.

Paxton is a true master, and at 72 it is inspiring to see him move and hear him speak. But just as exciting for me as it is to have contact with this incredible man, is the contact with the 24 other incredible peers from around the world who have come to partake in this workshop, men and women who like myself have dedicated their life to the exploration of human movement. Among us is an amazing man in his 60′s by the name of Eugene, who is paralyzed from the solar plexus down and has limited mobility through his arms. Last night, under the inspiration of Alison who proposed that we have evening talks in which we share our work with one another, I had the opportunity to hear and see Eugene move and speak about his movements, physical and political. As a long-time disability rights activist, Eugene had some amazing stories to tell and brought up some essential questions about what it means to insist on movement, to work so hard for it for the sake of being more alive.

This two week encounter with Paxton is in fact one of three encounters over the course of twelve months which make up this workshop, titled Figure Space. Lisa Nelson, another pioneer in the experimental dance scene whose work explores the role of the senses in the performance and observation of movement, will be teaching the two week segment next April, but her presence here right now has already added fire and dialogue to the mix. The questions that have come up just in the first day – like the relationship between the movement of the eyes and the movement of the skeleton – are so meaty that by the end of these two weeks we will surely have enough to chew on for at least five months.

I’ll be doing my best to write a little every day, so follow along if you like and feel free to send questions and comments along.

October Tip of the Month: Transitions

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The theme of the October newsletter is transitions – a theme that I am exploring and experiencing on many different levels these days – and since we are all making the transition into winter these days, I thought I would offer a few tips for supporting your entire organism (body, mind, spirit) as we approach the shorter, colder days ahead.

In fact, the most relevant tip I can offer is simply to notice the way that your body (mind & spirit) are experiencing this transition. A good place to start is by observing your energy throughout the day. The simplest assessment might happen on the level of quantity, and the more specific we get, the more informed our choices for applying our energy will be. So whether you are noticing that the changing season is bringing about a general drop or rise in energy for you, try to hone in on your energy levels at different times of the day.

You can begin by noticing the extremes – when do you tend to feel most energized, both in body and mind? When is your physical energy at its lowest? Your mental energy? You can get a bit more specific by observing when in the day your body begins to wear out? And when does your mind begin to tire? Tune in especially to what you feel at the start and end of your day. For example, if you find that your body needs more time to reach its full energy in the morning, or that you begin to lose your peak energy earlier in the day, you can begin to make adjustments accordingly.

A mistake we often make is to assume that the pattern of moving through our day that worked for us over the summer (or yesterday, for that matter), will work for us today. But especially for those of us living in New York, where functioning at our peak efficiency seems to be the unspoken requirement, it is important to notice that just because you try to fit as much as possible into a given day doesn’t mean that you will get a whole lot done. Being in tune with the rhythm of your body and noticing how that rhythm is changing from day to day and from season to season will probably make you not only more efficient, but more relaxed, more capable of making the best choices for when and what to feed your body, mind and spirit, and therefore, a more vibrant and likely healthier person.

So if, for example, you notice that you are slower to rise in the mornings than you were a few weeks ago, there are a number of choices you can make based on that observation that do not necessarily involve stronger coffee. One approach is to leave yourself more time in the morning to move slowly through your routine before you get going, another is to do exercises that will help to gently energize and wake up the body. Different exercises will be right for different people, and if you want to work on creating a routine that’s right for you, you can mention this tip for a 20% discount on a private session.

Once you have a sense of the typical rises and falls of your energy level throughout the day, you can turn your attention from quantity to quality. For example, the quality of the sleepy energy you might have in the morning might be exactly the right kind for dreaming up new and unexpected possibilities for a creative project or a bigger transition you might be engaged in in your life, whereas the sharpness of mind and body you experience at another moment in the day might be better suited for doing the practical work it takes to keep your life going and growing.

A change in seasons is a great time to notice these changes in yourself, not because they aren’t happening at other times – we are constantly changing whether we notice it or not – but because they are often more pronounced during the transitions. If we have somehow fallen out of sync with our internal rhythms, now is a great time to tune in and experience the full potential of these changes with our entire being.

July Tip of the Month: Getting the Most Out of Your Stretching (Part 2 of 2)

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A question that I am frequently asked is, how do I know the difference between “good pain” and “bad pain” when stretching? There are so many answers to this question! As many as there are people who ask it : ) But there are a few guidelines that I’ve found very useful over the years…

1. MOMENT TO MOMENT

First of all, the question itself is an answer of sorts. Stretching is about opening up the body (and therefore the mind), and at it’s core, every stretch is an exercise in awareness. When we stretch, we are tuning into our bodies, our nervous system, our breath, and asking ourselves: what’s going on? what do I feel now? And now? And now?

Sometimes there is discomfort associated with stretching, but if we ignore it and assume we should power through the sensations, we are missing the point altogher and most likely moving in the direction of “bad pain”. Pay attention, what does the discomfort make you feel? And is it changing? If it’s not changing or diminishing from moment to moment, then you are most likely better off shifting into a more comfortable positon.

2. BREATH

As usual, the key is breath. Whatever stretch you are in, when discomfort arises, breathe into it. If the discomfort is so great that it is inhibiting your breath – causing you to take short, shallow breaths or to stop breathing altogether – you are most likely in a position to hurt yourself. If you see that you can take a deep breath, then go back to the first tip and observe the change in sensation. Any change is significant, even if it is minor or if it is a matter of the nexus of the discomfort shifting from one place to another rather than diminishing. Take another breath, see if it moves or changes again. When it stops changing or becomes too intense for you to breath deeply, come out of the stretch slowly and gently.

3. GENTLE RETREAT

On that note, I’ve seen people hurt themselves just as often jumping out of a deep stretch too quickly as they do by overstretching while in a position. A general rule of thumb is to always save enough strength, focus and energy to come out of a stretch with as much awareness (or more!) as you went into it. Don’t wait until you can’t take it any more and rush out. Think of a rubber band – if you stretch it taught and then release suddenly, it will snap. If you’ve stretched deeply, come out slowly and move on a deep exhale (or two or three…). You don’t have to come all the way out right away, either – you can stop along the way for a moment to sense how things have changed.

4. COUNTER STRETCH

Often, doing a gentle counter stretch is especially good if you’ve stayed a long time in an intense stretch. That’s why in Yoga, for example, Fish pose often follows Plow pose. In Plow pose, the spine is in very deep flexion with the legs over the head, so Fish pose brings the spine in to a gentle extension, to counter and release any tension built up during the Plow pose.

5. SPARE YOUR LIGAMENTS

And finally (for now!) beware of any sharp pain around the joints, especially the back of your knees, in your wrists and ankles. As opposed to much of the current cultural lore, stretching is NOT indiscriminately “good”. There is a big difference between stretching muscles and stretching ligaments. Your ligaments are responsible for maintaining your joint integrity and unless you are pregnant or studying to be a contortionist, you really don’t want them to stretch very much, if at all. Ligaments are not elastic in the same way muscle is, and when they are overstretched they often remain that way – that’s why someone who has sprained their ankle is more likely to resprain it in the future, because the ligament had been overstretched and is not supporting the joint in place as well.

June Tip of the Month: Getting the Most Out of Your Stretching (Part 1 of 2)

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This tip is the first of two parts and presents some principles that can be applied to any stretch, as well as offers ideas for a few basic stretches…

I went back to dancing in my early twenties, when most professional dancers were approaching their peak, and of the many challenges I faced, increasing my flexibility was perhaps the most urgent. I remember one day in particular, when I felt like I had hit a wall and could go no further, a teacher of mine said something that struck me deeply. She said, Ophra, flexibility isn’t only in the body, it’s in the mind first and foremost.

So when talking about stretching, the first tip I can give you is to be flexible in your mind about what you can and cannot do, and be very careful of assuming that there is an absolute right way to do any particular stretch. This means approaching any and every stretch with curiosity and attention, and never assume you are doing it the “right” way any more than insisting that there’s no way you’ll ever “get it”. There’s also no such thing as how far you “should” be able to stretch, and nor how much pain you “should” feel if you’re “really” stretching. In general, avoid pain, especially in the joints and ligaments.

Really, if you’re going into any kind of stretching, Yoga or otherwise, with an inflexible mind, you’re missing out on the greater part of the exercise, whereas if you can be flexible about your approach, from day to day and from moment to moment, you’ll be getting the double deal (for all you bargain lovers) of opening your mind and your body simultaneously.

Here are a few more things to pay attention to:

1. BREATH

You can stretch your body just by breathing into parts of it that are constricted internally. On the other hand, you can do a wonderful job of straining and constricting your body by trying to stretch without breathing. Breath is the key to stretching (and life), please don’t try to do without it. Do this: pick a familiar stretch – for example, sit on the floor with your legs straight and drape your upper body over your legs, reaching the hands towards the feet (they don’t have to touch). Now, rather than think how far you “should” be able to reach, find the placement that allows you to breathe deeply, filling your entire three-dimensional volume up with air. In fact, don’t focus on the size of the stretch at all, just focus on the breath for five to ten deep, slow breaths, and then notice where you are. Chances are you’ve relaxed the torso a little farther down towards the legs and/or extended a little farther towards the feet.

2. GRAVITY

Even though I’m constantly looking for ways to defy gravity in my dancing, gravity is my absolute best friend when it comes to stretching. Take for example another similar and familiar stretch – standing on your feet with your torso and arms draping over the hips. Just the pull of gravity on the substantial weight of your head and arms makes for a wonderful stretch for your spine, the head acting like an heavy anchor that pulls and tractions the vertebrae down and apart from one another. As always, the key is to breathe, and simply give in to gravity’s pull with every exhale. If you’re straining to reach down, you’re not letting gravity do it’s thing. In this particular stretch, make sure that your sitting bones are directly over your heels and not behind them in order to avoid straining the knees – you’re better off with knees slightly bent than with over-stretched ligaments in the backs of the knees. And don’t stop here – this is an invitation to go into any familiar stretch and look for how you can use gravity to your advantage.

3. EQUAL AND OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS OF PULL

Stretching, like every other movement in the body, is always happening in at least two directions simultaneously. So if you are reaching certain parts of your skeleton down (like your head, torso and arms in the stretch above), look to see which parts are stretching up (your sitting bones, in this case). Here’s another good stretch to play with this idea: sit with your legs open and reach your right arm up and over your head towards your left foot (no need to touch the foot or come anywhere near, it’s just a direction). Now tune into your right sits bone and stretch it down into the floor against the pull of the arm up and over. Notice how much more stretch you get on the entire right side of the body if you simultaneously focus on stretching the right hip down and the right arm up and over.

So these are a few excellent principles you can apply to any stretch you do, and we’ll expand on this in next month’s Tip.