{"id":1463,"date":"2011-12-31T13:52:24","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T13:52:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/?p=1463"},"modified":"2012-01-19T12:16:21","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T12:16:21","slug":"scott-thurston-dancing-the-five-rhythms-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/1463\/scott-thurston-dancing-the-five-rhythms-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"SCOTT THURSTON: Dancing the Five Rhythms, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

WARM-UP AND BODY PARTS<\/h4>\n

I step onto the floor. The cool textured plastic of the mat meets my bare soles and I delight in the sensation, my feet still hot from walking up the hill. Adrian comes by and raises his palm to receive a high-five \u2013 our traditional greeting.<\/p>\n

The dojo is still fairly quiet \u2013 seven of us are scattered around, warming-up in various states and stages. Some lie motionless whilst others rehearse the vocabulary of yoga or pilates to get themselves stretched-out and limbered-up, whilst a gentle pulsing beat oozes from the speakers. I\u2019m trying to get used to the simple contact between my feet and the floor so I set off on a few experimental steps to test how my balance and weight feels. Even this is enough to threaten to totter me over today, so I bend my knees slightly and try to concentrate on visualising my weight\u2019s connection through my legs to the ground. I\u2019m thinking of a dance workshop I did three years ago when I spent a whole weekend just trying to get a sense of connection with the earth, to get grounded, to shift the way in which I carry my weight more firmly down into my knees and feet. I long for that \u2013 I wish I could spend the whole session today just trying to stand and walk.<\/p>\n

From my position with my knees bent I start to set up a simple swaying motion from side to side, feeling the shift of my weight and starting to get the rest of me involved. I\u2019m distracted by a dancer I don\u2019t recognise talking to Carrie the teacher by the decks. I find myself measuring this new person up immediately \u2013 trying to gauge her experience, her background, her mood. The self-conscious pride of my own commitment and standing in this group surges up for a while, but I know this particular tendency in me and I try to let it go into movement. I lift my head and move it from side to side, feeling a few clicks in the vertebrae in my neck. As I start to find a connection between my head and my feet my arms suddenly come into play, helping to extend my swaying motion and inviting the centre of my body into awareness.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m opening my attention to the rest of the group as more people arrive. Again I get distracted and a bit irritated by two dancers chatting loudly at the edge of the dance floor. I inwardly entreat Carrie to intervene, but she is rapt in conversation with the new dancer. Again I try to address my disquiet through movement \u2013 I start to fling my arms out further and allow them to draw my hips and knees out into the space and to move my feet across the floor. I\u2019m spiralling around myself now and edge over towards the offending couple, not knowing what I\u2019m going to say or do, but as I come within range they resolve their conversation and drift apart. I feel a pang of guilt and reproach for myself for being so touchy today, but there\u2019s a lightness that immediately follows and I put this energy into my dance and shift up a gear.<\/p>\n

Something starts happening at this point which takes me deeper into the process I\u2019ve set in motion. I start going back over the day\u2019s events and thinking about a message I received at work that unsettled me; about an unfocused morning trying to settle to revising a document; about the steadily rising feeling of tension that became almost overwhelming. But I notice that the feelings that attach to these recollections \u2013 particularly the message \u2013 seem to have diminished somewhat. They are at a distance already and holding less sway. A space opens up, new energy rushes in, and I\u2019m moving in expansive curves right across the floor, weaving in and out of the other dancers, as the tempo of the music picks up. My thoughts turn to the writing session I had before the class \u2013 the rough draft of the poem which feels broken now \u2013 if real \u2013 whilst there is a stronger sense of satisfaction from the reading that I undertook. A line of a poem by Gil Ott returns with great clarity and urgency: \u2018we \/ take the form \/ of our uncertainty\u2019. It seems to speak directly to my dance, trying as I am to tentatively stake out the field of my concerns in movement, patterns for my energy to stir and trace. This thrills me and I dance with the line for a while, a glow of pleasure surging in my belly.<\/p>\n

Turning across the room I notice the new dancer spring onto the floor: lithe, confident and adventurous. There\u2019s a precision and control in her movement that reveals her training. She moves beautifully. Before I know it I\u2019ve compared myself to her and found my own movement utterly wanting. This gets complex and thick. I slow down and draw my expansive circles into me, focusing on a spot on the floor in front of my feet. Coming almost to a standstill, I lower my knees to the floor and lie down on my side, finally coming to rest on my back. I am rocked by the oddly bitter and contradictory sense that the earlier pleasure I took in the dance is somehow down to an ego-state I determine as pride, lording it over everyone else. This tendency exposed I\u2019m left wondering what I\u2019ve actually got to contribute here. Do I have to sacrifice that pleasure to really participate, or is it precisely a pleasure of self-expression that I needn\u2019t be ashamed of? What a lot of judgement and self-criticism. But there\u2019s not too much time to dwell on this as Carrie calls the group together to begin the taught part of the class. The first phase of the dance is over.<\/p>\n

Standing in a circle we do a round of names and Carrie introduces the theme of this evening\u2019s class with characteristic humour and clarity. We\u2019ll be working on \u2018heavy and light\u2019 tonight, which awakens my curiosity. Carrie then invites us to prepare for the \u2018body parts\u2019 warm-up, a coinage which always makes me feel faintly uneasy. My sense of the phrase is as something akin to human remains \u2013 that body parts are what you find on a battlefield or at the scene of a disaster, and that what we are dealing with here is rather the parts of the body<\/em> \u2013 body as an integrated, living whole. The first task is to walk around the room \u2013 a task far from straightforward with today\u2019s unsteady gait, even after half an hour of dancing. I concentrate on breathing into my belly, imagining I\u2019m drawing up the breath from the ground through my feet, legs like hollow straws. I think of a tantric image of the dark reddish brown of earth energy taken up into the body from the ground, whilst drawing down a brilliant bluish-white light from the sky. As we\u2019re walking around Carrie asks us to become aware of the empty spaces in the room and to move into them, whilst being prepared to yield the space to another\u2019s claim. The group\u2019s movement adapts and shifts and gently speeds up. I find keeping my balance easier at a faster pace and start to bob and weave through the group. We are moving quite quickly now, whirling in and out of each other\u2019s paths, sweats breaking, a few gentle collisions, the energy threads starting to bind us together. A few of us start going even faster, taking ridiculous risks as we aim at tiny moving gaps between people, moving backwards, changing direction abruptly. Already the mood and energy of the room has lightened, has lifted. People are smiling, breathless, laughing, our boundaries and defences relaxing as we become a group, a provisional community.<\/p>\n

After Carrie calls the time on the crazy whirling phase, she invites us to find a spot in the room and settle our attention in our heads. I close my eyes and bring my concentration to bear on my forehead, temples and the crown of my skull. My movement is simple \u2013 letting the weight of my head fall forward slightly, I then roll it round to the left, back and round to the right. I hear a gentle grinding of the bones in my neck and feel the tension there start to ease and release. I tune-in to the relationship between my head and the rest of my body \u2013 how its movement creates consequences through the shoulders, spine and torso. Carrie invites us to explore moving the rest of the body starting from the head and tentatively I start to do so, still cautious about my balance, especially with my eyes closed. I recall a proprioceptive exercise I tried once \u2013 trying to raise one foot at a time with eyes closed \u2013 and how difficult I found it. But it\u2019s a challenge, relearning movement from this more inward perspective.<\/p>\n

In her 1998 book Sweat Your Prayers<\/em>, Gabrielle Roth, the originator of the Five Rhythms practice, asks: \u2018do you have the discipline to be a free spirit?\u2019 I love this question and have adopted into my own personal poetics credo of \u2018practice \u2013 attention \u2013 intention \u2013 discipline\u2019. The shadow side of this of course is my occasional lack of tolerance for those approaching the practice in a more relaxed way than myself \u2013 not difficult!<\/p>\n

At Carrie\u2019s direction, I shift my attention into my shoulders and enjoy the movement I find there. It reminds me of having a plaster-cast taken of my back for a sculpture I made at college: the weight of the plaster, laced with threads of hessian scrim, as it went off and the heat \u2013 my skin lathered with cooking oil to prevent it from being lifted off. The attention shifts into the elbows, then wrists and fingers. I love the angular shapes my elbows make, and I start to feel the beginnings of an energetic awareness around my hands, unusual for me this early in the dance. It was a workshop on Tantra three years ago that gave me my first conscious experience of my energetic body \u2013 electromagnetic field, subtle body, aura, call it what you will \u2013 and it has added a whole new dimension to my practice. It\u2019s something I want to explore further through studying T\u2019ai chi or Qigong. Carrie invites us to enter into a movement dialogue with another dancer, starting with a focus on our spine. I look up and meet Patrick\u2019s gaze just a few feet away. Stepping towards each other we begin a kind of mirroring, gently swaying from side to side, exploring the range of the back and front of the torso. After a while we let this go and develop our own expressions, whilst still moving in relation to each other.<\/p>\n

Pairwork takes the dance to the next level for me. It acts as a respite from the loneliness of a journey through one\u2019s embodied self but also crucially brings one\u2019s various psychological complexes into play and available for work. Sometimes it\u2019s also a mode of intervening in a passage of emotional stasis and repetition. As I\u2019m moving with Patrick I suddenly notice that I\u2019ve wandered off in my thoughts, and that our dance has lost its focus and urgency. As we regain eye contact, there is a corresponding increase in energy and attention to our conversation. We take more risks in mirroring and repeating our gestures to each other, and in exploring the space between us: coming really close and then separating so that at times we\u2019re on opposite sides of the room. It gets funnier too as it gets more intimate, revealing a kind of trust in disclosing the secrets of our presence to each other. It feels like the dance has really begun.<\/p>\n

At Carrie\u2019s behest, we finally let go of each other, making namaste<\/em> as we do so, and I follow the percolating energy into my hips. I visualise my pelvis as a bowl full of water and I move as if I\u2019m trying not to spill its contents, making gentle circles to the left and right. Closing my eyes I get deeper into the movement and can almost start to see my skeleton in my mind\u2019s eye. The attention shifts again, now into the knees. My knees are a sore point of curiosity and tentativeness. I\u2019ve had problems with my right knee for years \u2013 something about the way the joint is formed creates adverse wear and tear, a creakiness, a lack of flexibility. I don\u2019t entirely trust it, and I think this effects my overall balance and stability, implicating the left knee as well. Today however as I settle into their shapes my knees feel pretty good \u2013 comfortable and responsive. I move off the spot and feel confident in committing my weight to the floor, starting to appreciate the subtlety of Carrie\u2019s theme. I start to whirl about more confidently, but, as I ground my feet for a moment, my knee hits a particular angle and reflects back a sharp bark of pain. It\u2019s a familiar signal, but chastening, shaming even, and my body contracts as I slow and respond to this communication. I turn about more softly and try to relax my knees. Finally, as I\u2019m still recovering, Carrie directs her attention into our feet. This is useful as a way of getting more settled again, but I\u2019m surprised at the energy available to me here. It\u2019s an opportunity to reorient in the space a bit, so, straightening up, I take in the array of bodies passing me as I pass: different forms and colours, speeds and shapes, patterns of movement full of rich information ripe for reading as we thread through each other, weaving and knitting the space together.<\/p>\n