Sumo

Session 3, Day 5
So we’re past the half-way mark in the workshop. And everyone is making leaps and bounds in their skill level. You may not think that the way you dance is drastically different, but it shows in your openness and your ability to take on new tasks with more and more courage. It really showed today in the Budo exercise where we did the connection exercise in a circle, and worked on finding each other’s center quickly. This is good practice in fully committing to the task and leaving no time for doubt – which is essential when dancing. When we dance we’re constantly calibrating and re-calibrating where our weight is. So we practice a deep awareness of our bodies in relationship to space and other people. When we did our center pliés exercise, I had you imagine yourself as a hug sumo wrestler to try to get you to take up more space and allow yourself to expand width-wise. This image helps to use the support of the space and stretch beyond your kinesphere. If our sense of ourselves is flimsy and narrow, then we in a sense limit the relationship we have with our surroundings…We also continued to drill the choreography we already know, and then we added a few more steps. I had you count out loud while running the routine, and that seemed to help connect the mind and the body a bit more. If, without speaking, your mind seems cluttered with other thoughts unrelated to the choreography, then counting in your head and tracking your body with your eyes, is a way to quiet and focus the mind. It’s amazing how much the mind and body conflict, and it’s as if, the heart of the dance practice, is more of a mental exercise in stilling the mind. It’s a really complex negotiation between the two. And in dance class, we should explore how much of our “thinking” and decision-making we can locate in our felt/physical bodies, instead of in our mind-body that we so often use in every-day interactions. More to come…