9A. Body Parts Lead

• I'll beat a drum in a regular rhythm. Everyone, step with every beat. Step, step, step, step, step ... Now, lead with your head. Follow it as it travels around the room. Up, down, side to side, twists and turns. Your head has a mind of its own .. . Lead with your right arm. Follow your right arm around the room . . . Lead with your left arm. Follow your left arm . . . Your sternum forward, backward, sideways, up, down and around, slow, fast, always changing as you step to the beat of the drum Big steps, wide steps, move into the open space of the room. Lead with your hips. Front, side, back. Step to the beat of the drum. Lead with your knees ... Forward, sideways. And, now, your feet ... your feet are in front of the rest of your body, no matter what direction you're going in. Step to the beat of the drum.

• For eight beats, lead with your head, the next eight, your right arm, eight with the left arm, eight with the sternum, eight with the hips, eight with the knees, eight with the feet... Now, on five counts. Five with the head, five with the right arm, left arm, etc. Four counts ... Three counts ... Two counts

One count. Head, right arm, left arm, sternum, hips, knees, feet. Dance it. Travel.

Occasionally, students mouth the counts as they move. "Head, 2,3,4, 5,6,7,8.... right shoulder, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8.... left shoulder, 2,3,4,5,6,7,8...," over and over. As the progressions get faster and shorter, these students get more and more behind time and more and more frustrated. If they were to let go of counting, resting in the physical experience, and trusting their bodies to feel the count, at the early stages of the event, their body would learn the organization.

In a modern dance class, a teacher demonstrates a 32-count sequence of movements. As she demonstrates, some of the students observe through their bodies. Almost imperceptibly, their bodies move along with hers. They are the ones who are going to be able to memorize the combination. They are not thinking. They are trusting their bodies to learn the sequence. They don't count. Nor do they analyze the movements. They receive the new informa­tion directly from the teachers body to their body. Body to body. Through years of practice, they've come to this kind of learning.

Spirit

We hunt for treasure. We hunt for it and find it at the same time as we notice every aspect of our experience. We observe clues and see that everything is "clue" to now and onward. The clues are unfamiliar, mysterious. Today's crooked finger is not the same as yesterday's crooked finger. The pattern of the breath is not the same as before. We cant predict anything. We don't know any­thing. Each clue is a state of mind. The clue and the state of mind are one thing. The crooked finger feels its way into the mind and the mind feels its way into the crooked finger. The body and the mind are crooked finger. Unfamiliar, complete, uncovered spirit.

As we discovered earlier in transformations, even small shifts of the body's alignment can affect the psyche. A thrust forward of the hips, or an inward turn of a foot. Because of doing this movement, one feels differently. The psyche responds to this different feeling. Not necessarily with image, story or inner dialogue. There's a quality, a condition, or a state of being that inhabits the entire organism. It's un-nameable, but we call it spirit. Some students come into these trainings more prepared to express themselves through movement, others more through language. Dancers and actors are the most obvious examples. But, individual nature, com­bined with cultural and family conditioning, usually predisposes one way or another, particularly when it comes to accessing and giving voice to the imagination.

The following exercises approach the imagination a variety of ways.

9B. Non-Stop Talk

• Stand on the floor. Move as little as possible. Begin talking. And don't stop. Listen to yourself. Pay attention to what you're saying, no matter what it is. Follow your train of thought, or let your mind jump around. Whatever works. Keep talking. Even if you repeat yourself, continue talking, non-stop. Not fast. Just constant.

We don't have to think about grammar, or syntax, as we speak. We know our language. We're free to play with content, to lie, exaggerate, fantasize, or atrociously act out. We can disassociate from our logical', and learned, patterns of thought and free the untamed mind.

With this exercise, each moment is filled with words. If words are listened to without judgment, from an innocent belief that the word is true, the next word will come and ideas will follow. If the narrator, for one moment, distracts (dis-tmcks) himself with self-criticism or judgment, or jumps ahead of where he is, the text will disappear, leaving a naked, awkward, self-conscious performer.

If one were learning lines in preparation for a role in a play, the task becomes easier if the actor stays in the scene and is alive to it. Even the task of learning lines becomes a body event.

We humans share mind quirkiness. Until we become skilled at qui­eting the mind, it will flicker and dart from object to object. It's our underbelly, the place we're soft and frail. We recognize each others' underbellies and resonate together in the domain of distraction. Most of what we think of as "funny," our comedy and jokes, pokes at these inner struggles and peculiarities.

Our texts will have more body, depth, humanity if we bring our whole selves forth. Layers of consciousness add depth and idiosyncrasies to experience. The trick is to be conscious and accept everything that comes: no matter what it is. Whether or not we choose to act on material as it surfaces is dependent on its relevancy to the moment, not fear of being exposed.