Experiment: Starting Point

Sculpture by Richard Recchia  

Musing…

“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.”

― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

And there are countless ways to fly.

You can fly with your inspiration, fly with your courage to overcome adversity, fly with your idea...of flying.

Charise’s Turn:

All it takes is a word or concept or theme to begin building a movement phrase. I’ve participated in several improvisational movement classes with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and what is fascinating is how movement impulse takes over from any starting point. You are given a prompt, such as: imagine your legs are so heavy, how would you move through space with such heavy legs? At first this may sound like an exercise for a child, so you suspend that thought from your reasonable adult mind and go with it. You begin with a sense of weightedness and some stuckness until you start to experiment with mobilizing in different ways – maybe rolling, pushing, pulling, falling, struggling, lifting, sinking – and you’re in a dance of your own design, basically an experience that grew from a concept but is now in the larger territory of making. This “making” is what happens when you put all your conviction into your idea; you make it believable, you make it real. And then it is real! Like a plant that develops from a seed, the dance is no longer the prompt, or the theme, it’s what it is becoming. To me, this is alchemy, or magic. After all, what does magic require? Complete belief and trust.   

Get Fired Up:
What do you believe? What can you put your trust in?  Whatever that is, it contains a seed of making, of creating, of becoming.

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