Remember
Last night we had our inaugural jam in the warm, spacious studio at St Mary’s Church in Central Square. Everyone agreed that this space will be a good home for our community of dancers.
We danced with the theme of “remember.”
There are many ways to approach this focus. Here are a few:
*** You might have a score that you are focusing on in your dancing or life. This is what you might remember.
*** You might see what memories the dancing invokes.
*** You might go to the opposite of the focus and see what it is you want to forget.
*** Or you might want to remember ‘Now’.
During the warm-up we each took something we wanted to remember during the jam and distilled it down to one word. We then took our finger and wrote that word somewhere on our body.
At anytime during the jam anyone could hit the meditation bell so the word we wrote on our body would light up. This way we did not have to think about remembering, our body would remember for us.
Here are some of the comments from the closing circle from people’s experience:
*** When I came through the door, I was happy to see “Remember” as the focus because I have not danced in months so I simply needed to remember the body.
*** When the bell went off, even though the theme was ‘remember’, it brought me into the present.
*** I ended up remembering to be spontaneous in a disorienting way – to get out of my normal frame of reference.
*** There was a moment when I was suddenly falling backwards where I got to remember it all – as my life flashed in front of me.
*** I can sum up what I kept remembering in one word: “Down.”
*** I was connecting to childhood memories. I got hitched up on someone’s back and I had a body memory of my father. I was wrestling with another person and remembered my brother.
*** I worked with forgetting. I imagined that I didn’t know any of you -- that I had arrived from another country. With this imagination that we had no history, I attempted to enter dances without preconceptions.
*** I was remembering earlier today when I was dressed in my power suit, with a lavaliere microphone on my lapel, talking to a large group of stuffy engineers. And here I was hooked upside down on someone’s back. Realizing that all these parts are me.
*** When I heard the baby gurgling on the side I remembered what it was like to nurse my children.
*** I was remembering ‘self’. Especially since I’m giving so much to my baby right now. It was heavenly.
*** As people move with the baby, Zaia gets self-knowledge. As we move with each other, we get self-knowledge.
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