15D. Solo Shifts

• Separate from your partner and practice shifts on your own. You have no director. The timing of your shifts is up to you. Don't say "shift" to yourself. Just shift whenever the impulse strikes. Remember, the shifts must be very different in form from each other.

• Now, work with this perspective. Begin with a primary shift. At some point respond with a secondary shift. As that becomes primary to the next response, make the next shift. Remember the boundless frame.

Partners with Me

We're always in partnership with ourselves. It's evident when we see people on the street talking to themselves. We consider that aberrant behavior. But we talk to ourselves too, don't we? If we have any sense, we just don't do it noticeably. So who's talking and to whom? Isn't the talker talking to the listener? Then the listener responds as talker, talking to the listener, who before was the talker. So the talker and the listener are one and two at the same time. Primary, secondary, primary, secondary...

In all improvisations, every moment responds to the one before, whether they're micro-moments inside a developing shift, or the shifts, themselves. One moment talks to the next.

15E. Performance Score: Solo Shifts

• Everyone please leave the floor and sit in a line as audience. You'll each do a performance of shifts, one, two or three minutes, your choice. We'll begin at one end of the line and continue in order.

• We'll pass a watch. You'll each time the person who proceeds you. When you get up for your turn, tell your timer how many minutes you want. Timer, call out, "Stop," loud and clear when the minute, or minutes, run out.

It's not uncommon that one's sense of time changes when in front of an audience. One minute can feel like a day and three minutes, a few blinks. It depends on the accompanying qualities of pain or pleasure. And that depends on whether the student is directly experiencing or not. In direct experience, pain and pleasure, like freedom and control, normal and abnormal, become irrelevant.

A student's choice of one, two, or three minutes generally reflects her anticipated pain or pleasure. It's not always that logical. These time choices in themselves are subject to exploration. Some go for three minutes just so they can then have the opportunity to explore that experience of uncom-fortableness. Others may go for one minute because they don't want to have too much pleasure.

Instead of reporting on what you're doing, be what you're doing.You shift prematurely. Don't rush. Immerse yourself. Have your shifts come from your body energy, not your head. You're thinking up your next shift while you're still doing your last. Relax and let the shifts take care of themselves. If it's fear you're feeling, deal with it. Investigate it. Move into it. The sensations. Build a story around it. You're complicating things. Let each shift stay where it began.

Don't add to it by making it more of anything. Accept it. 'Fess up. If some feeling is blocking your energy and fun, use it as material for shifts. I see your outside, what you're doing. I want to see your inside,what you're being. Relax, relax, relax.

We're exploding the boundaries between infancy and adulthood, lucidity and lunacy, humanity and bestiality, banal and sacred states. The experience of entering and surviving these states grants permission to explore even further, continually expanding the limits of the conceivable and the expressible. Our frame expands to include all universal experience as equal and the same, within awareness.

Day Sixteen

Relationship

16A. Space Between

16B. Chords

16C. Ensemble: Walk/Run/"Ah"

16D. Shift By Interruption

16E. 1/3-1/3-1/3

16F. Angels

16G. Performance Score: Disparate Dialogue

We shape our experience?

Isn't that how we see the world?

As shapes of things?

We fill in space,

with shape.

We see space within shape.

We name shape

as tree, cookie, smile,

sadness, house or mathematics.

Often we don't name, we just sense. We sense the space/shape of our body, through motion, kinetically. We sense the space/shape outside of our body, through sight and hearing. We may sense the space /shape inside and outside our body as inseparable. One isn't without the other, since the shape of the body affects the space around it, and vice-versa.