4D. Mirroring

• Again, standing face to face, look directly in each other's eyes. Balance your attention evenly between you—some on your partner, some on your self. Begin a mirroring exercise with a leader and a follower. One of you will become the leader by being the first to initiate movement.

• Leader, using movement and facial expression, project internal material feelings, attitudes, and states of mind—onto your partner. Make your partner into different people who provoke you. Allow yourself to respond to your projection, to get totally involved, in who or what you've made your partner into.

• When you move, leader, move slow enough to allow your follower to mirror you exactly, synchronously; an outsider wouldn't be able to see who was leader and who was follower. So you have a projection going and your follower is totally falling into it—but doing you movements, not the ones your projection might have dictated.

• Follower, you don't know anything about what the leader is working with, but you do know what she does. You are the mirror image of the person in front of you. Allow the leader to enter your mind and body. Notice the detail of her body, the expression on her face, how your leader holds her face, its shape and tension. Take on her spirit. Experience what your leader seems to be experiencing and mirror that back.

• The two of you stay in eye-to-eye contact. If the leader looks away, the follower must look away, and lose the ability to followexactly.

• When I say "Switch," without stopping, and continuing from right where you are, switch roles. I'm going to say switch several times, so you'll switch roles a couple times each.

• Now, I'm not going to say, "Switch." You decide when to take the leadership away from each other. Do this by shifting—stopping what you're doing and doing something else that is completely different from what you and your partner were just doing. At this time, don't worry about eye contact. Let your eyes focus appropriately onto whatever it is you are experiencing. Move at any speed and travel through the room if necessary. Have the shifts, the interruptions, or lead-taking, come faster and faster. Follower, do the best you can to keep up.

• Add the voice and make all action into sound and movement action.

• Add language. Each time either of you shifts, and assumes the role of leader, begin a monologue very different from the one you interrupted. Keep up with one another as best you can. Simplify your movement. Have your physical action be appropriate to your language. If necessary, don't move at all, and, by all means, if your talking, don't walk. Find another physical form to accompany your language.

Leading and following affect people's emotions. Can we enter the mirroring game and set aside our judgments about the actions we carry out? Can we separate our predetermined emotions from the actual experience of action?

Following has a reputation for being passive, demeaning, or lacking creativity and initiative. Therefore, some people are more comfortable lead­ing. Others are more comfortable following. Leading has connotations of being aggressive, demanding and egotistical. If we're focused on the moment-to-moment transaction between ourselves and our partners, it doesn't really matter which activity we do. What matters is that we can sense when we should follow someone or take leadership away. We become com­fortable with switching off from leader to follower, depending on the task to be accomplished, while not being attached to either position.

The task is to truly lead when leading, without self-consciousness inhibiting your actions, and to truly follow when following, graciously and generously.

Information (thoughts, images, memories, physical sensations, sounds, etc.) comes into our awareness. We identify or interpret this informa­tion. We name it. We make judgments about what we have named based on our historical relationship to the material. Emotions arise as reactions to these judgments. Most of the time, we're not aware of this process.

We believe our emotions are as real as the thoughts and opinions that inspired them. We say, "This is how I really feel," or "This is how I really think," or even "This is who I really am." And, in fact, as long as we believe that such and such is real, it is. What we don't real-ize is that outside of the raw experience that came into our awareness, everything has been made up. For example:

A woman hears a sound in the distance. She identifies the sound and calls it, "Train." She judges the train to be dangerous because of a childhood event, in which she witnessed a rail accident. As a result, she is overwhelmed with anxiety every time she hears a train.

Alternatively, this woman could hear a sound and not identify it. Sim­ply listen to the sound—a long drawn out whistle or three sharp blasts of air—whatever. If she stays in the experience of listening without any interpretation, she could work with the sound as she desires. She could allow the sound to lead her toward a fresh perception, rather than hav­ing her own interpretation repeatedly limit her experience.

If we stick to exactly what comes into our awareness, and not embell­ish it with meaning, we're more likely to experience a fresh perception of constantly changing events.

In this theater training, students become familiar with the process of manufacturing reality. Over and over, they live out situations that they makeup on the spot. They makeup beliefs, emotions and feelings that are as "real" as day-to-day ones.

By making-up experience, whether it be beliefs, emotions, feelings or images, students recognize that they are not that material. The fic­tions are simply configurations of mind/body energies passing through the performer, accompanied by personal history or devoid of it. This necessary distance helps us to experience any and all realities.

The Mirroring exercise invited experience without interpretation. Partners simultaneously perceived, accepted and responded no matter whether they were leader or follower. If the leader's attention is wholly upon the follower and vice-a-versa, then their consciousnesses merge both are lost to the giving and receiving. Leaders are watching the followers so much they're picking up clues to follow. Followers mirror with such attention and tenacity, that they begin to lead themselves into experience.

Automatic Pilot

Why are students asked not to walk and talk at the same time? Because we usually walk and talk simultaneously and unconsciously. Our atten­tion is on the content of the talking and we leave our legs to fend for themselves. We trust that they will figure out right, left, right, left, in the proper order toward the desired destination. To get out of this "auto­matic pilot" state, we can become aware of all our activities. We play with the physical relationship between walking and talking, knowing that their relationship makes meaning. For example:

John is pacing back and forth along the edge of the carpet. He is describing the demise of a relationship. His pacing and his lan­guage consciously intersperse. His tone is reflected in the jerky, angry energy of his walk. When his voice pauses, you can hear his narration continue in his walk. As he reaches different emo­tional states in his story, we see change in each stride and word, the dropping or lifting of energy, direction, expressions on his face, breathing. Sadness, anger, despair, rage at not being under­stood make his timing irregular. He speaks through his movement as well as his speech. There's tension between the words and the steps. His audience experiences the full onslaught of both actions combined.