*** Telescoping Awareness ***
This is a phrase that Nancy Stark Smith uses to bring attention to where we place our focus at any given time. Is it telescoped in on the cell by cell rolling of the contact point? Is it telescoped out on what is happening throughout the room?
Here are some of the observations made at the closing circle:
*** For me I started by telescoping way inside, and I stayed there a long time…
*** I realized that I have a room filled with telescopes. I have different telescopes for different people and for when I’m dancing with men and dancing with women. My perceptual apparatus changes depending on whom I’m dancing with.
*** I wasn’t particularly aware of the focus. And then suddenly I became aware of how I was noticing regularly how the dancers in the room constellate. Then my awareness came to the spirals in my body and how they extended past my body. I was telescoping without knowing it.
*** I was aware of the partner I was dancing with and kept an awareness of someone across the room. Then I let go of the visual connection and kept an auditory connection with this second partner.
*** “Focus” for me applies to vision. But I tried applying it to energy: small and big energy.
*** With this focus, things that normally would be distracting for me, like my hangnail, or this stitch in my back, helped bring me into the dance rather than into a place of judgment.
*** The jam was very quiet tonight—very ‘focused.’
*** When I’m with someone who is dancing willfully, who is manipulating a lot, whose touch has a lot of obligation in it – then I use a narrow range of my telescope. When I dance with someone whose touch is filled with curiosity and possibility, then I trust myself to extend to the outer ranges of my telescoping ability.
*** The end of the jam was like a kaleidoscope with the entire room of dancers moving together and through each other.
Return to Focus Jam page
