* Establishing the connection/trust that allows for risk taking *
I opened up the evening by separating the focus into two parts – establishing connection and trust with yourself, and establishing it with a partner. I welcomed people to dance with the focus, to ignore it, or come up with their own focus.
At “Soaring off the Mountain,” a contact improvisation workshop I taught at Earthdance a few weeks ago we worked with the spontaneous acrobatics of the form. Out of that investigation we learned that before we could welcome the more spirited moments, first we needed to develop a sense of connection and trust.
One of the work groups in that workshop developed a structure of dancing and when they felt the connection firmly established they would simply say aloud: “OK.” From that work the focus for this Tuesday jam was formed.
The notes below come from people’s comments at the end of the jam and some of my own discoveries. Because the Boston CI listserve is read as far away as South Africa, I also receive emails with observations from people who geographically can’t attend the jam but who ponder or dance with the theme we are working on. Please keep your notes coming, I will try to include as many as I can in these follow-up. This particular focus generated a lot of comments.
The notes:
* Sometimes you have to stick with a partner for a long while before the sense of connection appears. It’s not always comfortable.
* There is a threshold in the dance that I pass through when I am no longer warming up—I am now “dancing.” And there is a similar threshold, though it is more liminal, where I feel connected and trusting with my partner. If I attempt to rush either one, they take longer to arrive. I have to “trust” the time it takes.
* Does the trust of a partner come from finding what is familiar, the common movement vocabulary? Or does the trust come by venturing into the unfamiliar together? Yea, yea, I know: both!
* Overheard during a dance: I want to trust to be able to fuck up -- and that my partner won’t judge me for it. (partner: Is fucking up when you fall hard?) No, fucking up is when I don’t do the things l learned about the form in classes.
* Sometimes I can’t find the connection to myself and it’s through the dance with another, their weight, the connection, the aerobic heart rate and breath, that I find a place to connect to myself in the dance.
* I feel there is a gender difference in establishing trust. I look for different sign posts if I’m dancing with a woman or a man. I’m still articulating what they are.
* There is a social risk in the form. I was in a trio and wondered why the other man was dancing more with the woman than myself. And then I felt like she was dancing more with him. I realized that this is my default feeling in a trio, and probably has little to do with reality. If I could get through this, maybe I would dance in more trios.
* There are many levels of risk.
* Yes, and there are many levels of trust.
* I was working with the times I deflect the intimacy and the times I stay with it.
* I did an authentic movement style warm-up, to trust and risk really going with something. That went into my duets, to really go with something -- beyond “nice” contact.
* Do I trust myself to say “no” – then I can trust myself to say “yes.”
* If I have the trust in myself, it doesn’t matter if I feel a connection with my partner.
* I have a state of being that feels connected regardless of the partner or the qualities of the dance.
* People sometimes bring their level of trust from their previous dance into their next dance. When someone comes and brings the connection to a previous partner I want to ask, “Are you mistaking me for someone else?”
* Because of the focus of making trust, I didn’t have my normal hesitancy about approaching partners.
* Because of the focus I felt more external than internal tonight.
* When I came in the room, I only saw the word, “trust” on the sign, not the rest of the focus. It allowed me to play with my partner’s trust. Can I let them fall? Do you trust me to not take you beyond your zone of comfort? Or that I WILL take you beyond?
* Tonight it was quite chatty around the edges of this “focus” jam. How do we ask for people’s attention that is not in a librarian, “Shhhhh!” kind of way? How do we not make the space too precious but still honor the intention of having a focus of investigation for the evening?
* The risk taking that came into the room led to a lot of off-balance dancing and a lot of the unexpected.
* I’ve flown more tonight than in the past six months put together.
* I really like watching tonight. Seeing the risk taking was exhilarating.
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