Focus Jam / Score Jam, Leipzig

 Focus Jam: Skin, Fascia, Muscle, Bone

Starting exercises will begin with attending to the sensations and mechanics of different anatomical systems. We look at their mechanics, how they change our mental states and imagination as we attend to them, how they interconnect with each other, and how they can serve as part of a vacabulary of physical poetics.

After some exercies to introduce the foci, we jam.

 Focus Jam: Mutual listening and following

We’ll start with the classic, foundational “Ouija” exercise from CI in the 1970s, with both partners committing to following subtle shifts of pressure and tension at contact leading to an unpredictable flow of mutual following.

Then, we jam.

Score Jam: Slowness

Slowness offers many possibilities for a shift in awareness and a shift in mechanics.  As we slow down, we often become a bit more calm.  Tai Chi, Alexander technique, Feldenkrais techniue, and Klein release-technique all use slow movement as an opportunity to study how we use our bodies so we can become more functionally aware of our bodies in motion. Certain rituals or circus techniques use slow motion to invite a shift of consciousness or mental state in participants.
In the Slowness Jam, we will explore moving into and out of contact with each other slowly, with different flavors of slowness: the casual slowness of 0.3 m/s, the “self-study” slowness of 0.1 m/s, and the microscopic altered-state of 0.03 m/s.  We’ll explore the mechanical possibilties and problems as well as shifts in awareness and conscious state.

Focus Jam: Physical Listening, Manipulation, Yielding, Following, Resistance, Agency

As we give weight to someone or deliver force, we change the spectrum of possiblities for another’s movement: we manipulate them.  The experiment of contact improvisation is a play with mutually affecting each others’ movement.  We start with simple physical listening exercises, manipulating a passive partner and lighly following and feeling a moving partner.  We play with surrendering into forces, resistance, and redirection.  We explore maintaining a sense of agency, including as we actively allow another to move our body or change its trajectory.  We take up the agency of affecting someone else’s movement.  We stay proprioceptively present with what we together are doing.  Hands are available to be used, but we wake up our whole body to this sense of aware mutual manipulation.
For a reference, i’ll be leading some brief versions of exercises from the Passive Sequencing Work, a set of exercises and practices that i have been working since the mid-90s, to lead us into the jam.

Score Jam: Authentic Movement Circle with Active Listening

Authentic Movement  is an exploration from the late 70s and early 80s, one of a number of practices extrapolating the explorations of Jungian Psychotherapy to the experience of the body.  The central practice that emerged out of this body of work is a practice of moving with one’s eyes closed in a state of permission while being watched by a supportive witness and then speaking together about one’s experience moving and one’s experience witnessing. While the initial notion of “authentic” had a particular meaning coming from Jungian work, we will take this in the more open sense, as explored in the more buddhist-informed versions of Authentic Movement that emerged in the late 80s.
This Score Jam will be in two parts …

• Part 1 will be a short introduction to the most basic practice of the authentic movement eyes-closed/witnessing exercise, done in dyads, with solo exploration (no contact).
• Part 2 will be done together in a circle, with witnesses on the outside moving into the center with eyes closed to move as desired, with an invitation to explore solo or in contact as desired.  Witnesses can either watch from the outside or be “active witnesses”, entering the circle to offer physical interaction to the eyes closed movers and to observe through interaction.

Score Jam: The Camera Score

We start in stillness with our eyes closed.  We imagine that our eyes and ears are a video camera and that we record a film to be shown to someone.  We open our eyes and proceed to use our eyes as we might a camera, our ears as we would microphones for audio recording.  What kind of film do we create?  Is it a documentary? an art film? something else?  IS it one continuous film or a series of shorts? It is like being a film maker in a room of filmmakers all filming each other making films.
We expand our imagination to consider our skin as recording touch and our body as recording proprioceptive experience as part of an art project.  We allow experience to come to us.  We pursue experience and see what we find.

Sort of like a contact jam on psychedelic mushrooms or LSD.

Score Jam: Round Robin

The “round robin” is the oldest and maybe simplest of contact scores beyond the open jam.

We start in a circle.  As we are in the circle on the outside, we keep our attention focused on the action in the center, understanding that our supportive attention feeds the dancing in the center. We enter the circle to explore physically, to dance.  We might solo.  We might join a solo to form a duet. Maybe we cut into an ongoing duet to form a temporary trio. Maybe the trio lasts a while, maybe it is brief. At some point we might leave what we are doing to go out to the side to watch… a temporary trio becomes a duet, a duet disbands…

We go in as we like and leave the center as we like, but we try to keep at least one duet in the center at all times and we try to keep at least one person on the outside watching at all times.  We try to spend some time witnessing and some time in dancing.

We try to let dances “brew” for a bit and develop before cutting in, but at the same time, we understand that it is our obligation at some point to interrupt what is happening to cut in and steal a partner, both to facilitate change and to take over so that some people in the center can take a break to watch.

As we dance in the center, we do not try to “entertain”, but instead simply show the results of our experiments in exploration.

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We’ll start the Score jam with a bit of open dancing to warm up. Then we’ll move into the Round Robin.