Notes on Practice: March 23, 2014

March 23, 2014 - Meghan LeBorious

I decided not to publish my post last week.  My car broke down (in the middle of a busy intersection) on the way to class and I never made it there.  I took the inconvenience pretty well in the moment, but had a tough week.  I wonder if it wasn’t, in part, due to the fact that I did not get to a class.  The post that I wrote and held back was honest and valid, but riddled with pain.  I decided to let that one stay in my private files, considering the potential optimism of the first week of spring.

My injuries have improved and I was grateful to be able to move.  My dance shifted in the parenthesis of injury, and part of me is nostalgic for whatever has moved on.  Of course, the dance is always shifting.  Sometimes it shifts by a larger magnitude, however; and I am comforted to know that something new will always come up to challenge and fascinate me.

In the second half of class, Tammy taught the Body Parts meditation—a classic 5Rhythms exercise.  In this case, dancers are instructed to focus on a particular part of the body, and then on another, and another.  In the Body Parts meditation I am totally engaged, finding a universe in the tiny muscles and various orbits of movement.  People seem to grow roots around the room, and many move slowly, with closed eyes.  The thing about the Body Parts meditation, for me, is that often I don’t have much fun after.  I find it hard to connect with people and seem to lose energy.

On Friday, Tammy taught the Body Parts a little bit differently.  As we focused in on a particular body part, then experimented with how it guided our bodies into motion, Tammy instructed us to open our eyes and move around the room with the awareness we had generated. This was an interesting variation; and didn’t have the same isolating side-effect for me.  Shortly after, I fell into a dissolved dance of contact with another dancer, curving around each other and moving briefly on the floor, swaying with our backs together; then I moved gently on to a new partnership.