14F Performance Score: One Minute of All Possible Sounds

• Let's sit in a circle. One by one, we'll each take a turn and sound as many different qualities of sound possible in a minute of time. I've got a stopwatch here. I'll start you and stop you. Remember sounds carry feeling. Open your mouth. Step aside and let your body voice itself.

shift, transform or develop. Three choices. Simple. Continue doing what you're doing. Stop what you're doing and do something else. Or, change what you're doing until it becomes something else. What appears so simple, in fact, demands a miracle: a quiet mind, an expanded awareness, a willingness to leap into the unknown, and an integrated body and mind. A most possible miracle.

Day Fifteen

Freedom

15A. Episodes

15B. Face the Music

15C. Shift with Initiator

15D. Solo Shift

15E. Performance Score: Solo Shift

A raggedy man totters in the subway door, half in and half out. Enraged, he shouts and screams unintelligible words at the passengers. He's wild.

The little girl squeals, laughs and screams, at an exploding pitch. She kicks her small feet in the water and gasps as the water sprays her in the face. She's wild.

The lovers claw at each other, rip off clothes, pull, squeeze and jerk at each other's limbs and torsos. One mouth is in the other's. They're wild.

We could say that these people have lost their minds. Whether the content of their actions is playful, ecstatic or hostile, their experience draws from energy broken free from thought.

The man in the subway is untethered. He has no tie to safety. He's lost his awareness and his condition is dangerous.

The little girl is untethered, too. Let's assume there's a adult with her to keep her out of danger.

The lovers are tethered. Their safety is tied to the conventions of lovemaking. Of course, if one of them deviates from the conventions, they negotiate. If negotiations fail and disparity persists, there's danger.

In Episodes, students approach wildness. The constraints of the form keep them out of danger, safe.

15A. Episodes

• Everyone walk. Find a common pace.

• In a few moments, one of you will stop walking and throw a fit, have a tantrum, an outburst. The fit must be expressed as a travelling sound and movement form. As soon as a fit begins, everyone else stops walking and watches.

• "Mad person," let loose. Keep the sound and movement linked and travel with it, cover space. Remember every movement is sounded and every sound is moved. You may pause in stillness and silence, but let yourself go where you have never been before. You can't plan it. Don't even try. When you've completed your outburst, pause for a moment, let the experience resonate, then resume your walk.

• Watchers, notice the details of the fit. See how it moves, listen to how it sounds, feel how it feels. Remain still until the "fitter" finishes, then begin to walk when she does.

• After everybody has had a turn or two at this you can join the person who is doing the fit. Do what they're doing just as they do it. No tempering. Joinfits that are unfamiliar to you ...

• Eliminate the walking. The fits come one right after another. You're either still and silent, or you're doing what someone else is doing, or you're initiating a new fit. If you're still and silent, pause in the final shape of your last expression. Don't go to neutral. Expand your awareness to include the entire ensemble in your frame of perception. Look and listen. Relate to space, shape, and time. Only one fit can happen at a time. If a new fit is introduced, everyone pauses; only if someone joins you, may you continue. Let the fits be responses to the ones that came before.

The surest way a child can throw an adult into mental chaos is to throw a tantrum. Parents, siblings, teachers, doctors, therapists, experts in child development, all rack their brains figuring out the best approach. Should they ignore the child or should they put the child in a room and lock the door? Should they go away? Should they buckle under and give the child what he wants? Should they show affection? Show anger? Calm the child down? Mirror the wild behavior? Whatever the tactic, their aim is to turn the tantrum off and restore "peace."

Why? In the wild tantrum state, awareness is lost. The released energy floods a large part, if not all, of sensory perception. Somebody may get hurt. In Episodes, students are asked to specifically combine sound and movement while travelling through the room. That means they must pay attention to what they're doing, how they structure their expression and they must remain aware of the others in the room, too. Their wildness is contained. To that degree they're aware. Awareness dams the flood, contains it. There's no overflow into danger.

Every exercise in this training expands awareness. Awareness is seeing. We use the term "blind rage" meaning sightless, out-of- control rage. As soon as rage becomes insightful rage, it boils within an awareness context. The one who rages knows what's going on. She is safe to rage. No one will get hurt. The more awareness is expanded, the more capacity i.e., control, the student has to unleash, uncork, and liberate wildness.

Wildness has nothing to do with content, but is defined by freedom. Feeling free, we feel unencumbered. We're not advocating a "wildness" theater or even tantrums. But, until a student can uninhibitedly express her every feeling, she can't really know if her constraints are from aesthetic or practical choice, or from fear of reprisal.

John releases his line. The fish pulls away and for a few moments swims wildly toward freedom. Then, John starts winding the reel, tightening the line, wrestling the fish into shore. Then, he lets it out again, and again the fish takes off and again John reels it in. Back and forth, release and tighten, release and tighten. They fight with one another. All the time the fish is coming closer in to shore, until finally John lifts it from the water, frees it from the hook and sends it back to the sea.

John alternates between control and letting go. We do the same thing. From the release of Episodes, we'll reel our attention to the rigors of listening.