Articulation
**** Whenever I focused on articulation it seemed to take me away from my partner and the dance at hand. And then suddenly without pushing, there was articulation in my body and it was part of the conversation with my partner. And because the body was more articulate, it felt like I was relating to the entire room, the ceiling beams, the tables, the curtains.
**** I hated this focus. I couldn’t relate to it at all.
**** I spent the day not liking that this was going to be the focus. But before coming I looked “focus” up in the dictionary and found some ways to relate to it. Here are some of the dictionary phrases: “state of being jointed or systematically interrelated into a whole.” “”action or manner of jointing or interrelating.” “the clarification of an architectural design by emphasizing certain parts of the structure.” “A moveable joint between rigid parts of an animal.” “A connection between two parts capable of spontaneous separation.” “The manner of sounding or uttering the separate notes or phrases that make up a melodic line in music.” “Express oneself readily.” “Not reticent.” These I could relate to.
**** Would have been nice to hear those definitions at the beginning of the jam.
**** I wore toe socks tonight, and it helped me to articulate my feet.
**** Tonight I wanted x-ray vision. The spinal articulation was so pronounced that I wanted to see just the bones in movement.
**** Remember, we started the warm-up being still with our hands on our partners shoulders feeling in to picture their entire skeleton.
**** I arrived late because I got lost trying to find the studio. I was ungrounded. There was a point where people began to spontaneously speak in their dances and use sounding and breath. I remembered how much it helps me to use voice to ground. It got me here.
**** In the middle of the jam, when you said to the entire room, “Remember” I went from being on top, right down into the topsoil.
**** “Remember”? Remember what? The phrase that came to mind was, “remember back to the root of existence.”
**** I was working with ease and comfort tonight. But I fell off the horse several times. Luckily in CI we don’t lose points for falling off the horse.
**** At one point there were a lot of duets. I was soloing between everybody and felt like I was the thread weaving everyone together.
**** There was a moment where my mass was spread out over my partner’s mass on the floor. Suddenly that evolved into pivoting on a specific, articulate point right at the hip bone.
**** I was wondering what is the difference between the kind of speaking that deepens the dance, and the kind that pulls us out of the dance. There was a lot of chatter around the edges tonight that were distracting.
**** When I went to my first “focus jam” in Buenos Aires, there was not one extraneous word spoken for the entire four hours.
**** This is the Boston hybrid focus jam.
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