On 28th April I was invited to deliver a TEDx talk at TEDx UoChester. The event focused on ‘Nurturing Health and Wellness for a Changing World’.
This blog is an extract from my talk – I’m asking what dance teaches me about being in the world? How might we value different forms of knowledge? How might it be to lead with the wisdom of the body…?
As always, I’m interested to hear what resonates for you…
Joanna Macy says in her book, “World as Lover, World as Self”, “Many of us are braced, psychically and physically, against the signals of distress that continually barrage us in the news, on our streets, and in the wider world. As if to reduce their impact on us, we withdraw, like a turtle into its shell. But we can choose to turn to the breath, the body, the senses, for they help us to open to wider currents of knowing and feeling.”
For me, dance is the practice where I turn to breath, body and senses. Dance improvisation opens these currents and is a place where I access different knowledge, bodily knowledge. Through my dance practice I find resilience, strength and connection to self, others and the world.
When I’m dancing I access a presence that most often illudes me in the everyday where I’m planning… doing… going… and never quite arriving, to myself.
This presence doesn’t arrive magically from somewhere but is cultivated, honoured and attended to. It comes in and out of focus.
In a dance I often begin by pausing, noticing…
breath rising and falling in shoulders, chest and, eventually, maybe belly.
I hear the sound of my own breath entering and exiting. I notice…
Sounds arriving to my ears, layers of information…
Curiosities begin to bloom.
I notice… patterns on floors, light falling, shadows creeping
I feel my body in the floor and the floor receiving me, and the ground below receiving me – earth and gravity rooting me.
I notice I’ve begun… to follow curiosities, questions…
how that line between light and shadow might be in me… how the warmth of the sun on the floor might bring comfort.
I notice through my arms, head, torso, pelvis, legs, feet how I meet the air… and it meets me back.
And I imagine, sparked by the sight of a tree outside, I imagine currents of air moving across and through me. I imagine the voices they carry, old as time telling me about the winds that have always blown and changed and our ability to sway and bend, to continue to change and grow with them…
And in this way the dance teaches me.
The live-ness and immediate-ness of a dance, has the ability to teach us what we need to know in the moment [this moment]. The idea of a truer reality where we might experience each other differently.
In a dance, an improvisation, I slow down and pause… from this pausing, new curiosities, questionnings, immaginings and noticings emerge – directions and ideas I might never have thought of.
I also LOVE moving fast… full bodied flying, falling, rolling… here I find sensations that teach me about strength, resilience, softness – how to give into the ground and use its strength and grace to rise again.
But, if I’m always moving, these sensations begin to blur, through a glorious state of follow… follow… follow… I come to a place where I know I can’t listen anymore, where my presence has morphed into something else and I’ve lost track, or sight, or sense of the choices.
And so, the time to slow down and to pause arrives again. In this way the qualities, phrasing, dynamics of a dance teach me that we can’t keep going and going in the world – losing track of noticing, missing possibilities, leaving no space for them to be presented to us. And yet we try – to keep going and going, and we’re exhausted.
Dancing also helps me to notice support… When I feel despondent, disconnected, can I notice the ground, the way it receives and supports me, stays steady and strong as I move with it… Allows me to push against it to find my strength, my softness and my structure.
I can notice my structure through my skeleton – these bones that offer their daily support from within, enabling me to articulate, create form and meaning.
And the air that I meet around me, offering lightness, space – to move into, to expand into… The air holds me gently, through it I sense space, time, and drink in it’s vital support through the breath.
This dance of ground, bones, air, reminds me what is available for me to return to.
And so, for me, the act of dancing is a way of processing the world – meeting it with curiosity, respect, kindness, strength and grace.
Dancing gives me the gift of time, of space – in a duet with Adam, in the Wanna Dance? programme, we can settle into a dance of hands, fingers, connecting, turning, sliding, pausing… returning – and emerge 40 minutes later, a sense of time standing still for the dance, or the dance suspending time – existing only here, right now. These dances are teaching me that we must slow down… find space to slow down and notice, because we’re missing so much in our constant rush towards more, and better, and bigger and more.
Dancing brings me into connection with the wonder of the everyday – drawing my attention to birds flying, seasons changing, eyes meeting and parting… heart beating…
A poem inspired by an experiential anatomy into movement session with Amy Voris
The heart has a moment of rest between beats
Even the heart in its job of keeping us alive
rests
knowing the power of resting
essential to the doing
The pause, the softening
From where true action can emerge
How often I choose doing
over resting
believing the power is in the action
and only there, in the doing
more, and again and more and better
Can I lean into the back of the heart
choose the moments of rest
knowing it’s the thing that keeps the heart going
and going
is pausing and pausing
waiting
for the true moment for action to arise again
And so dancing gifts me all of this, this way of knowing, learning, understanding – for others perhaps this comes through another creative practice? Walking… painting… making… drawing…writing. These practices bring the gifts, the wisdom of nature and the universe into the body and then out into the world. When we notice, and translate that noticing into a creative act, we are, as I remember K.J. Holmes proposing, ‘magicians making manifest potential in the world.‘
And it changes us, our perspective, our understanding… and it MATTERS. It brings us closer to ourselves, so that we might have more compassion and understanding for ourselves, each other and the world.
I wonder, can I trust myself, trust that this dance and movement practice, deep, full bodied listening over time, can be an alternate way to engage, to lead in this world… A way to cultivate strength, resilience and connection.
Could systems and structures really embrace the wisdom of dancers and make space to listen? Because if they could, then I see a world where care, compassion, choice, instinct and creativity are valued in and outside the studio – and the innovation, joy, sensitivity and perspective that would bring can only be a good thing.
Thank you for reading,
Jane x
The TEDx talk also contained additional extracts from a previous blog for Cheshire Dance: ‘Meeting? Offering? Valuing… in dances with people with PMLD’ which you can read here.
