13F. Performance Score: Separate Sound, Movement and Language

• Everyone off the floor except one trio. Now, we'll watch each trio that has been practicing together. Start fresh. Don't try to use any material from your previous improvisations.

The book of signs opens. The content and the form are intentionally exposed. Students not only intend to communicate with each other, they intend to communicate with the audience. This resolve affects the improvisation; the volume and quality of the voices sharpen, shaping and spacing all change. The content lifts, too.

Day Fourteen

Beyond Self/Big Awareness

14A. Sensation to Action

14B. Circle Transformation

14C. Transformation, Two Lines

14D. Directed Shift/Transform/Develop

14E. Witnessed Shift/Transform/Develop

14F. Performance Score: One Minute of All Possible Sounds

We watch, don't we? Each other, trees, birds and wars. We watch ourselves going through the gestures of living, making the appropriate or inappropriate grunts, groans, grasps and growls. Even when we're unaware of watching, we watch. We wake in the morning and we know how our night was. "Slept like a log." Who did? The watcher? Or we could say the watching? Watching watched me sleep.

What is probably the most basic exercise in this whole training comes up today. Why on the fourteenth day and not the first? We've been laying groundwork, stilling minds, coming to inhabit our bodies, prodding memories, igniting imaginations and resurrecting feelings. Yes, even watching ourselves watching ourselves.

14A. Sensation to Action

• Everyone, lie down. Relax. With each breath, relax even more into the floor. Place as much space as possible between all of your bones. Begin ning at your feet and slowly moving upward, scan your body. If you notice any tension, let it go. With each exhalation, relax your mind as well. Relax any tension present in the form of thought. Quiet yourself. Quiet your brain. Melt it. Mush it. Relax it. Lie there. No noise ...

• Notice the sensation of your breath. Don't change it or do anything to it. Just notice it. Notice the details of the experience. As your attention moves over your limbs and trunk, notice the separate sensation in your body. Anything. Maybe a tight spot, or itch, or heaviness or lightness, of some body part. Or a hollowness. I'm using words now to talk to you but notice sensation without talking to yourself, without language. Just feel it.

• Notice another sensation, whatever comes into your attention. Again don't do anything about it. Just watch it. Do the same with another . . . and another . . .

• Again, notice a sensation. Allow that sensation to inspire feeling, affect your state of mind. Don't worry where the feeling comes from. It's either your imagination, or memory, or a combination of both. Do this again. And again ...

• Notice another sensation, whatever comes into your attention. And accompanying feeling. This time I would like you to move into that feeling/sensation. Explore whatever kind of movement that feeling/sensation calls up. Play with the movement. No reservations. Let it take you for a ride. Sensation, feeling, action. Sensation, feeling, action.

• Stop. Return to lying down in neutral.

• Again notice a sensation and allow that sensation to affect your state of mind and guide you into movement. Follow the feeling/action. Stop. Return to neutral.

• Notice a sensation again, and again, allow the sensation to lead you to feeling/action. Now, stay with feeling/action. As you play with the movement, continue to notice new sensations as they arise. Let these new sensations lead you into new movement.

• Now, bring someone who is near you into your awareness. Don't relate to them, just become aware of their existence nearby. Continue following your sensation/feeling/action loop ...

• Notice more detail of the behavior of your partner. Allow what you notice— the specifics of their actions, as well as, their inner condition—to affect what you do. Don't get pulled away from your inner awareness. Follow your own experience.

We begin with the intention of noticing sensations in the body and not acting on them. We just watch them: we practice control. Not scratching the itch. Not stretching the cramp. Not filling the hollowness. We allow what is, to be what is, without wanting or needing change. This ability is fundamental to our training. Everything else builds on top of it in layers.

We're not interpreting these sensory experiences. We're not creating images or story. We're not talking to ourselves at all. Our language mind remains quiet.

Language tends to take us away from moment-to-moment body experience. It doesn't have to. With practice, a student can be in the moment-to-moment body experience of languaging. For now, we practice the direct, unmediated, experiencing of the body.

Impulsive reactions cloud awareness. Don't react, remain aware continually, without interruption. By not reacting, by just noticing, we come to know the "noticer" as separate from the experience being noticed. This builds internal muscle. We're not whipped around in the wind anymore; the phenomenological world becomes something to watch. From calm strength, we're able to choose responses.

Towards the end of this exercise, our intention changes: we respond to the sensations we notice; we move into, with, from, or around them. Our actions are conscious, chosen. We can, just as well, choose not to.

Picture this scenario. Laura sits in a very small room. The room has two doors. The two doors face each other. Laura is sitting silently with her friend Emily. Emily gets up and leaves through one of the doors. Laura sees Emily leave (sensation). She interprets Emily's action as rejection and immediately feels abandoned (feeling). She reflexively acts on the feeling. Laura runs to the door, but it's locked. She bangs and bangs on the door. She screams, kicks and yells (action). Laura doesn't notice that Emily has returned through the other door.

How would you direct this scene? What other choices does Laura have?

Braiding

When you make a braid you take three, or more, clumps of hair and intertwine them until they become interconnected and inseparable. They loose their individual identity and become one braid. Similarly, we sep­arate objects of awareness and explore them with immaculate attention. Later, these objects of awareness, sensation, feeling, intention and action (whether movement, vocalization or speech) integrate and become one thing—one unified action, full of sensation and feeling, motivated by intention.

If the performer's attention is on her experience, if her mind and body are in the same place, her inner and outer experience will match, and she will enter the field of universal expression. She will be relating, to the experience, not her experience.

Within universal expression, we hold conscious action lightly and fiercely at the same time. Lightly enough, so we can continually notice the details of form, shape, quality of feeling and meaning. Fiercely enough, so we are 100% committed to each moment of action.

What's the difference between "self-indulgent" expression (action that is too personal) and universal expression? Intention? Not necessarily. Awareness? Yes, absolutely.

Thift, transform and develop. These are the three ways we proceed through improvisational experience. In Day Eight, we began to investigate the transformation process. We transformed the content of an action while keeping the form consistent. Now, we're going to transform both the content and the form of an action. This transformation process requires an encompassing awareness. There's a lot to notice. Sensation, feeling, and action integrate, simultaneously and with exquisite detail.