geTting on my nerVEs

Last night, in my new home of NYC, I returned to CI after a 6 month hiatus! I attended the Tuesday night lab at Bill Young Studio, and entered orienting within physical--inner ear--disorientation. I realized that for me, the most delicious dancing is the triggering, responding, new triggering, new responding neurophysical chain of action within a framework that forces disorientation and new orientation.

What we did:
Head study
1. Solo warm-up in which the one rule was that we had to maintain contact between head surface and the floor at all times- 15 minutes

2. Repeat with the potential for partnering adding that the partners body and the dancer's own body parts could also serve as interchangeable floor replacements with which to maintain head contact.

3. Exploring the free weight of the head and it's relationship with eye gaze and spinal/whole body follow through. We started standing together as a group holding hands in a circle. Taking care not to crash heads, to greater and lesser degrees, sometimes initiated by the trajectory of eye gaze, sometimes not, we tossed our heads. Each toss followed through to body of the tosser and caused a weight shift in the entire circle, a series of simultaneous ripples affecting one another. Eventually the circle broke apart into an open dance.

Observations and sensations:
3. It is challenging to use the gaze of the eyes as an initiating limb and maintain a visual awareness of what is happening in the space around you. Finding the orientation within this disorientation, the heightening of wind and temperature senses, allowing softening and sharpening the gaze to happen as a response to the needs of the moment. This adaptation response allows for a degree of scintillating risk to exist within and drive the dancing without the danger to could result from insensitivity.

2. Folks tended not to take full advantage of the sudden huge openness that the new possible surfaces for head contact provided--particularly maintaining contact between the head and various interchangeable surfaces of the dancer's own body. This blows the realm of possibility wide open. I'd like to explore further.

1. Warming up with the head in perpetual contact with the floor was an incredible warmup for the spine and the perceiving organism coming up with various ways to move and locamote within this unusual confine.