Showing up on time, maintain focus, energy leakage, sitting out
Keywords: discipline, focus
For most folks attending, I think the following is obvious, particularly those who have already had some training in contemporary dance, theater, or martial arts. Others haven’t had a context yet to learn about maintaining collective focus in groups of physical practice. I wanted to write a post hitting on issues of arriving on time, keeping non-class conversations to a minimum, pushing oneself vs sitting out, etiquette around sitting out, and generally the idea of “energy leakage”.
I understand that many who find their way to CI do so from a kind of “find your own flow” festival perspective. Also we live in a time where in some circles there is a heavy emphasis on “being gentle with oneself”, not pushing oneself too hard, and taking one’s own time with things. There are seeds of usefulness there, but they can all be taken too far and nowadays often are. This not only hurts oneself, but also hurts the group.
I sometimes don’t make a stink about this in beginners or open level workshops with people who are new, but it is always an issue. I ask that people show up on time and maintain focus on the work while we are training, minimizing distractions of the social.
Of course, sometimes shit happens and we have to be late. If that happens, please let me know of this will be the case. Similarly, if you know ahead of time you have to miss some of the class, we can usually work something out. Letting me know helps me to minimize the disruptions. This takes some work. It’s more work if I have to do it unexpectedly.
In a focused workshop, it’s not appropriate to just “arrive in your own timing”. This is not just about the individual and what they can get for themselves, but about respecting the others with whom we work. If you miss something, that means material that you did not get. In many cases, we are building up work, and missing parts is like building a house, but missing the foundations. A little of this is tolerable as we “trust osmosis of learning”, but too much becomes a problem. Physically, this can be dangerous. If you do not have certain building blocks and try to rush ahead without having the foundational coordinations in the body, injury can happen to yourself or your partner. We want to create a safe space for physical risk taking. People get injured in CI more often than many people think (Here’s a blog on the subject).
Similarly, conceptual material builds, and missing foundations can make confusion later or can limit how far we can go. I want to emphasize the “we” there, as we are working together in CI and one person missing pieces can hold the whole group back.
If you are arriving after we have started working, please sit at the side and warm yourself up. I will work you in when it is appropriate. I also reserve the right to say that you have to sit out for a few hours if I feel that you have missed some essential work for the exercises we are doing.
Maintaining focus
There is a similar issue around “maintaining focus”: keeping work, investigations, and active curiosity engaged on the practice at hand. We let go of distracting casual socializing during exercises. This is not to create an artificial impersonal environment, but to keep the material moving forward and making sure that steps are not skipped. Side conversations slow things down. When they are during demonstrations, it means that material is missed. It is sometimes tempting to just start the exercise when you think you know what it is. I find that most of the time when people are doing this, they actually don’t understand the details. Sometimes, this actually creates physical danger and I have seen people get injured after rushing ahead with exercises, not paying attention to the details. Even if you do sometimes know the specific exercise, there are always deeper details and you never know if it actually is the thing you know until after the exercise is explained.
Commenting on or laughing about something that happens during exercises while in the process of the exercise often has the function of distancing oneself from the exercise, disrupting the exploration. It’s like we see something interesting and rather than continue it, explore it, deepen it, we instead stop it to talk about it, have a social interaction about it. In these moments, I encourage you to dive in deeper and if you laugh, have it be the laughter of abandoned madness rather than the social laughter of distancing from the thing.
It is also a thing that if you are talking, you put yourself into a mental space that makes certain kinds of physical understandings impossible, where the animal mind needs to do the thinking. Worse, other people hearing you talking have this mental state invoked and will often find it more difficult to focus. For you, your partner, and for those around you, please do not talk during exercises, except as necessary, and in quieter explorations, make sure to whisper when you do talk, rather than impose your words on everyone else in the space.
Also, when the instructor (me) calls for transitions (start something, stop something, come back together), please do some promptly, rather than casually in your own time. These small delays accumulate and take away precious exploration time. Moreover, they take away the best time, which is the last little bit of class, where we can take everything further or have more time for integration.
There is also the issue of “doing your own thing” during exercises and particularly during explanations, rather than doing the exercise. Of course, we do want to find our own way into things, and we do need at times to just “find our dance” first to see how the principles being explored integrate in it, but there is a balance there. Attachment to “doing our own thing” and resistance to promptly following instructions creates a kind of friction that slows down explorations, and tires everyone out, including those who are waiting for those who take longer. It certainly tires instructors out who have to repeat themselves to people who are “taking their time”. As we get “snappier” with transitions, we find that the energy stays up, we move faster through and deeper into exercises, get to more material, don’t piss off people by making them wait, and ironically all end with more energy rather than being exhausted.
This is common knowledge to those who have gone farther in physical practices like contemporary dance, theater, martial arts. In some of these contexts, we talk about these different unconscious resistances as “energy leakage”. Lots of little leaks accumulate into large limits on what we can do. If we keep a tighter container of focus, we maintain a vitality of shared investigation and don’t leak as much energy.
Sitting out
Sometimes, we need to sit out for a moment, for physical, mental, or emotional reasons. I mostly encourage people to keep going, particularly when it is just because you are tired, but it is your call, and if you do really feel you need it, do so, and I trust your call. If you do sit out for a bit, please go to the edge of the space and try to be un-distracting as you do what you need, and do not engage in side conversations with anyone else. That is just rude to the people still working. Check back in with me before jumping back in and be careful about sitting out too long. Again, I do reserve the right to ask you to sit out longer if I feel that you have sat out for some of the foundations we have been building on. This is not about being punitive, but about keeping a safe and constructive container.
If you feel tired, sometimes we do authentically need to sit out. More often I feel that this “tiredness” is just our habits defending themselves against change. My capoeira instructor, Bira Almeida, used to reply to anyone who told him that they were tired that this was obviously not true because they still had the energy to speak the words “I am tired”. If you can still speak, you are not really physically tired. As long as it is in the “little risk” and not “big risk” category, I encourage the experiment of pushing yourself through the feeling you call “tired”, and perhaps even put more energy in. Your habits eventually can’t keep going and change happens.
If your partner decides to sit out and you want to keep going, get my attention at a good moment, and I’ll work you in.
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Different people in CI have different etiquettes and shared understandings during classes. Some do have a “find your own flow” etiquette. I have a different understanding from my history in contemporary dance, theater, and martial arts, and I believe that while the “find your flow” norm has its plusses, I am interested in getting to places you can’t get to that way.
Hopefully this all is constructive and you understand. If we all work with these understandings during class, we can all go a lot farther in the work.