5B. Jog Patterns

• Walk. Accelerate. Walk even faster. Keep changing your direction. Avoid circling the room. Change your direction spontaneously, don't think about it Accelerate. Accelerate more. Accelerate until you're jogging. An easy jog. As you're jogging, bring everyone else into your awareness. Where are they? Where are you in relation to them?

• Begin to build patterns, spatial designs or games together. You all see the same pattern developing and you all contribute and collaborate on its exe­cution. You are only playing with space, jogging, either in place, or traveling Nothing else. There is only one spatial pattern in the room at any one time and everyone is involved in it. No duets. Keep your eye on the group.

• Patterns are going to change: one person, introduce a new spatial ele­ment. The group, either incorporate that new element into the existing pat­tern, or begin a new pattern with it.

Jog patterns focuses on action. It's athletic and easy. There's no story or language. It's about ensemble. It's about herding—moving as a pack in the same time and space and with the same intention. Events happen too fast for anything else.

Patterns require agreement. The mind must let go of itself to accom­modate and alter the group energy and design. Everyone must follow by leading and lead by following. What if everyone threw their orange peels on the highway? In Jog Patterns, private agendas don't work:

• I have a great idea. I'll do it this way.

• Pheww!! I'll get lost in the crowd.

If everyone had great ideas and executed them there could be a splen­diferous show of chaos but there'd be no patterns. And, if everyone hid in the crowd, one pattern would repeat itself ad infinitum.

The move from Eyes Closed directly to Jog Patterns is a radical change from inner to outer focus. Students respond to this in various ways. Some are particularly attached to their inner world and want to stay there. They resist being yanked away from home. Others feel impris­oned inside of themselves and can't wait to escape. Their home is social.

In Eyes Closed, the student follows and responds to the ever-chang­ing landscape of her mind. In Jog Patterns, the student follows and responds to the ever-changing landscape of the group activity. Similari­ties exist. As students practice shifting focus from inner to outer, and outer to inner, they experience awareness, no matter what the object of awareness may be. The content, whether it comes from an inner or outer orientation, turns less and less precious, less and less separate. It's all material of equal value.

5C. Only Verbs

• With partners. If possible, work with someone you haven't worked with before. One of you is speaker, and the other is mover.

• Speaker, you say only action verbs, such as walk, sit, stand, smile, clap, bend, etc. And as you say each verb, the mover will perform that action. If you say, "Sit," the mover will sit. If you say, "Stand," she will stand. If you say, "Lie down," she will lie down.

• Speaker, play with the way you say the verbs. Let your body/mind speak the verbs. Approach the saying of these verbs as a dance of changeability, a reflection of your shifty interior. Go for range. Allow for vast variety in the way you say the verbs. Change your mind, irrationally, radically. Even inside of one verb, change your mind several times. Your language responds to feeling. Feeling is in the body. The body is dynamic.

• Mover, you will reflect the speaker's quality of speech with how you perform the action. Every nuance in the speaker's voice, every chatter of teeth, push of breath, every pause, shows up in your movement. You are the physical embodiment of the speaker's sound. Because the speaker plays with the sounds of the words, you might not be able to hear what the verb is, what action you are supposed to be doing. That's fine. Go with the sounds/energies you hear/feel at the time. You move only when you hear sound. However long it takes the speaker to complete the word, you take the same amount of time to complete your action. It may be two minutes before the speaker reaches "k" in the word "walk." In that time period, you are to carry the same dynamic as the speaker's voice. Don't look at the speaker. Create your own world.

• Speaker, your primary function through the speaking of these verbs is to explore your interior world, not to order the mover around. You may watch the mover, however, and allow her spirit and action to influence your interior path.

Dancing the Mouth

Speech is movement. Like any movement, speech has the potential for strength, agility, and grace. All these parts move: tongue, teeth, upper jaw, lower jaw, gums, hard palate, soft palate, cheeks and lips. We sense this movement, moment by moment. The interaction of these moving parts, combined with breath and voice, articulates vocal sound. We hear that sound moment to moment. The movement and the sound com­bined affect our psyche and change our reality. We respond to that change with the next movement, the next feeling, the next sound. We're tuning into the loop of action/awareness /action.

• the instrument sparks the psyche

• the psyche sparks the instrument

Just as Eyes Closed has the potential to focus attention on one aspect of the self, so does the voice. The mind must quiet down so that atten­tion can rest on each moment of sound, so that one can discover the sen­suality that waits.

Take the word "sit." There are infinite possibilities. Worlds. Say, "Sit." Now, say, "Sit," as if you mean: Hello; or, I love you; or, Get out of here; or, Come hack; or, I'm fed up; or, Stop that; or, I'm dizzy, I'm terrified, I'm dissolving; or, I'm speechless, confused, constricted, choking.

As in the Mirroring exercise, Only Verbs offers students opportu­nity to look at belief relative to function and role. Here, the functions are simply to speak verbs, or respond with movement. Carrying out these functions may produce uncomfortable feelings associated with the roles of "being in command" and "being commanded." Feelings accompany­ing certain actions may lead to positions of power and oppression, and to roles of victor and victim. Through this exercise, students may see that such feelings are reflexive conditions, not necessarily relevant to their current experience, but generated from past occasions.

Once freed from habitual feelings about the roles being played, stu­dents can hear language as cues for choreography and maps for inner exploration. The mover and the speaker will then have infinite choice. They focus on their immediate experience and expression and bypass role identification.