8B. Facings and Placings

• Everyone, stand somewhere on the floor. Change the direction that you're facing ... change your facing again ... again ... change your location ... change your location and facing ... just change your location ... change your shape ... change your shape and location ... change your shape, location, and facing ... just your shape ... just facing ... change your shape and level (for instance, lying on the floor for the low range, standing, or reaching, for the upper range and sitting, or kneeling, for the mid-range, etc.) ... change your shape, level, facing and location . . . change the tension only . . . change the tension again . . . change the shape, level and tension ...

• Put yourself into small groups, trios or quar­tets. Stand in "neutral" together. From this position, begin an improvisation together in which you only move from placement to placement, fairly percussively. Every time you move, change your facing, shape, level, location, tension, or any combination of those. Be in relationship with your partners.

Fill your forms with feeling, intention, meaning. Play off each others' tim­ing as well. You will be responding to your partners with every choice you make.

Space and Shape

On the first day of the training, students became aware of timing. On another, they became aware of shape. On a successive day, they studied pauses. On another day, they focused on intention. They're accumulating skills that affect everything they do. Nothing is forgotten nor left behind. For example, the previous exercise, Facings and Placings calls for alertness to timing, contrast, attentiveness to one's partner, gathering information, and filling form with feeling and intention. Students are learning to twine a braid of skills; the braid doesn't simply get longer, it gets fatter. As they practice a skill, again and again (timing, for instance), their awareness expands to include more detail, nuances and subtleties. As "timing" becomes more articu­lated, they experience more, which leads, again, to a broader landscape of experience.

To see how placement affects meaning, visualize the following different situations.

Two women facing front, in the middle of the room, standing side by side.

Two women at the back wall, standing side by side, and facing the back wall.

One woman standing in the center of the room facing front, the other standing in the right rear corner facing the right wall.

One woman kneeling facing front in the right rear corner, the other in the left corner, kneeling, facing front.

Two women, one kneeling in the center of the back wall facing front, the other standing facing front in the right front corner.

Two women, one standing in the center of the room, the other kneeling towards the back wall in the left rear corner.

Two women standing side by side in the center of the room, facingfront.

Two women standing in the center of the room facingfront, one half-way behind the other.

Where we place an action, how we locate it in space, affects its meaning. Location determines perspective and perspective affects power. The women in the images above, were described as only standing or kneeling. No expression, or other activity, was given. But if we were to visualize these scenes, our imagination would respond to the emptiness and fill it with story. A woman folded in the corner, back to audience, or a woman folded stage center, front to audience, are quite different images; they elicit very different feelings.

Dynamics

Dynamics refers to the force of an action: the combined phenomena of time and energy. When we say, "Change the tension," we're reconfiguring time and energy dynamics. Changing the dynamic of an action, is another way to tamper with its meaning.

Slowly, turn your head from side to side in a relaxed fashion. Add tension to that action. Now, add speed. Notice how the inner expe­rience of your head turning changes. How do your feelings respond to the variations?

Try this with language. Say a phrase and then vary the tim­ing and tension. What happens?

Here, we're purposefully manipulating the dynamics of our actions so that we can experience ranges we may not normally reach. After enough practice, we can stop bothering to make it so hard. A range of dynamics will become part of our expressive language, ready to respond to our inner experience.

Transformation

A leaf slowly turns brown. Drying out, it becomes dark and crisp. Nothing ivet anymore, nothing to hold it to the tree. It drops to the ground, shrinks, becomes darker and drier. Nothing to hold it to itself. It breaks into small pieces, becoming powder, becom­ing earth. Is it still a leaf? Is earth leaf and leaf earth?

The leaf changes, becoming different in consistency, but more of itself. We could say, "Fulfilling its destiny." We could say that the transformation exercises in this training are practices that teach us how to begin to fulfill destiny.

On Day Three, we introduced the reader to the process of shift, transform, and develop. So far, the exercises have concentrated on shift and the development that happens between each shift. Now, we com­plete the triad. We move into transformation, the process of incremental changes which are visually seen and bodily felt.