1A. On/Off Clothes

• Everyone, put your street clothes back on. Change the speed of your movements as you handle your clothing. Sometimes move very quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes pause altogether, stop moving, staccato movements, tremble, wave. Focus on each moment as it comes into your awareness. Even within a five second time frame, change your speed three or four times. Pretend that someone else is directing your movements, so that you are not thinking about it. Don't get serious. We're playing!!!

• Be aware of your eye focus. Choose what to look at. Do you always want to be looking down at the floor? You may want to look ahead of you, or behind you, or off to the side.

• Now, repeat this with half of the group watching, the other half doing.

Dressing and undressing are conventions. They're movement pat­terns designed early in our lives, then repeated forever after. (Slip the shirt over the head first, then put the arms through. Put the right shoe on first. Button the jacket from the top down. Wet the toothbrush first, then apply the paste.)

These students had just come in off the street. The first thing they did was change their clothes. They were all experiencing some degree of excitement, since this was a new and unknown territory. They probably weren't paying too much attention to what they were doing and how they were doing it.

In On /Off Clothes, students look at a common experience in an uncommon way. They play with what they've always assumed was not play by focusing on the sensations of each moment of experience. How are they doing what they're doing, exactly? Are they moving in a heavy way, slowly or frantically fast? Do the clothes thud to the floor or grace­fully cascade down? Students feel their way, feel the textures of their clothing, as they pull, slap, or slide them on or off. They unglue from the "getting dressed" idea, relate to the form of the action and the details inside of it. The forgotten comes to the surface; the conventional method of getting dressed/undressed is a living experience.

An activity can be experienced as a partnership between form and content. The form is the physical structuring, how the action shapes and moves. The content is the function of the action, in this case getting the clothes on the body.

Form and content are useful concepts. Separating out why we do something from how we do it, sharpens senses and clarifies intentions.

It will serve us throughout the training to look at form and content as if they were separate components of action. But, in reality, they're not. One informs the other and cannot exist in isolation.

Here's an example: Curl your fingers. The time, space, shape of the action of curling your fingers is the form; the intention of the action of curling your fingers is the content. How did you do it? Fast? Hard? Slow? Gently? Did you grab for something? Did you crush something? Say you slowly crushed a piece of paper by winding your fingers down into each other. The slow winding of your fingers is the form, the intention to crush the paper is the content. In action, one can't exist without the other. Together, they produce meaning.