7E. Performance Score: Seated Dialogues

• Two or three of you sit in chairs facing out toward the rest of the class, turned slightly toward each other. Have a dialogue, a conversation. Talk about anything. Be simple. Really listen to each other. Take what each other says seriously. Believe it. And listen to yourself and believe that. Be with each part of each word as you speak it. Play with pauses and hold tension in them. Hear the way your partners speak words, their timing, pitches, quality of energy. When you speak, follow through with the sound patterns as you hear them, or break patterns and create surprises.

The Sound Of Language

This exercise is the introduction to dialogue. We enter dialogue by lis­tening. To simplify the task, we de-emphasize content. We keep it sim­ple. Dialogue tends to trap us in mundane, ordinary, and dependent relationships. We bog down and get lost in our own and another's agenda. Listening prevents this from happening. By listening, we create music together with the spoken word. A simple example of a musical dialogue follows. Notice the patterns and rhythm. Imagine the rise and fall of inflection and pauses.

"Hello."

"Hello."

"I haven't seen you in a long time."

"Yes."

"You're looking well."

"Yes."

"Healthy."

"Yes. I've been away."

"Really"

"In Germany."

"Really."

"Yes, for a year."

"Really. I have family there."

"Really."

If we can let just sound inspire, we can free ourselves from the absorp­tion in content. The sound of speech furthers the sounds of speech. Whatever one partner says to another is perfect. Everything they say, or do, is accepted. Nothing is denied or countered. We adapt, flex, change, and shift perspective to further the music, to satisfy our listening.

Day Seven tuned the ear to hear the present, the music of spoken language. As our capability to listen increases, the students' need to speak particular ideas at particular times lessens. This in turn allows more room for a choice of utterance and silence.

Day Eight

Transformation

8A. One Sounder, All Move

8B. Facings and Placings

8C. Transform Content, Movement Only

8D. Transform Content, Sound and Movement

8E. Transform Content, Phrase and Gesture

8F. Performance Score: One-Upping

The dog chews its tail. What started as a nibble at a flea bite has become a dance, a ritual, tantalizing, familiar, repeated over and over again, yet each time, brand new. It's not a matter of outcome. Round and round, the dog stabs, gnashes and thrusts, and each stab inspires another and another gnash leads to another thrust. One move inspires the next and the next responds to the one before. The frenzy of the dog becomes more significant than the causes of his motion.

We are not the act. The act moves us. Our awareness keeps the act from overwhelming us. The next exercise invites students to be moved to their fullest capacity while maintaining awareness.

8A. One Sounder, All Move

• • Find a place for yourself in the room and stand still, eyes open. Bring your attention to your breath. Release any tension that you're aware of, in your body or mind. As you watch your breath come in and go out, find an inner stillness.

• I'm going to vocalize. I will make sounds for three to five minutes. My sounds will both inspire and reflect an inner journey. The sounds will create the journey and that journey will have an affect on the sounds.

• You're all movers. Respond to my sounds. Don't mirror them. Contrast what you hear to what you do, in timing, texture and feeling.

• After three to five minutes, I will pass on the position of sounder to someone else by going over to a mover (while I'm still sounding) and assuming their physical expression. That mover, then, takes on my sounds. We trade places. The new sounder goes off the floor, to the side of the room, and sounds on his/her own for three to five minutes, before passing her sounds onto a new sounder.

• While the third or fourth sounder vocalizes, begin to connect with one another, in duets and trios. Respond to what you hear, your inner impulses, what your partners are doing, and your experience of them. You must be still some of the time so that you can listen to all these things.

• We'll continue this until everyone has had a turn as sounder. The last sounder will bring her sounds to a close to end the exercise.

Against the Beat

Sound often dominates the actions of the mover. We're drawn to move to the beat of sound, maybe, because of the drumming of our hearts, the old familiar two-step, cheering on with our cheerleaders or rock and rolling. To not move to the beat requires a shift of attention to listening. One's inner music, carrying its own timing and rhythm, shares the fore­ground. The counterpoint tension between inner and outer timing leads the student into an alarming, alert and awakened field.

Eli is almost two months old. He likes wrap-around-sound. Music, the clothes dryer, the vacuum cleaner. He relaxes, lays hack and floats.

In order to float, we must relax. The sound will enter our body. It will touch an early place, an "Eli" place, and we, too, will float.

The exercises in this training may seem to lead to opposite direc­tions. On the one hand, we talk about floating, letting go of the ourselves and relaxing into direct experience. On the other, we practice techniques of control, awareness, composition, form. Yes and yes, to both. The latter develops craft and the former expands the possibilities of what we experience directly.