Today we finish the first phase. No sadness! Things need to keep changing. It is enough. Shift, before it becomes too much of a habit. I have exhausted this place. It becomes harder and harder to drift, disorient and be surprised. The practice has emptied itself and we need to move on to another phase of development. And I am tired of this computer blogging work!
What this research has brought me: a desire to study and practice the dérive as well as read up on the Situationists. To develop techniques of disorientation and elasticity. To develop a practice of performing place, in many different ways. To test Rupture in Space with many people at once. To start practicing movements of work that produce a sound score.
My plans for the next step: we both collect a list of our own material, the different qualities, and name it. We both make a DVD with the recorded material for each other. We hand over the material in Barcelona on December22. We view each other’s material and register what seems interesting and engaging of the other’s movement. We let the practice of the past 20 days resonate, revisit the tasks and think about how what we have done could emerge into a performance score.
At our first meeting in Amsterdam we will do a long coexistence without any rules but a time frame, which will be recorded and later viewed. I trust that a structure will appear.
Goodbye!

Ideal quality for Sunday’s hangover! Actually my state of mind and body today is the best for this rubberbody. I actually understood further the disorganized body (or the emptying). But this quality brings continuity to the emptying, spiraling, energy feedbacks forth and back.
I am sad. It’s the last one. It’s Sunday. It’s the sunset. I am leaving Amsterdam. But I enjoyed so much doing this first part of the process!
I’ll see you in Barcelona for 20 minutes!

RUBBERBODY. This one is about a lose, relaxed mind as well as body. Imagine yourself with extremely long floppy limbs and a long rubber spine. All ends of those limbs, including the head and tail, are extended and pointing/projecting into space. You fling them around in a very released way, gently directing into space. Guiding them with anatomical awareness. Remember again all the connections and relate things in different ways, but let it happen on it’s own. It shouldn’t be muscular at all but very soft, gentle and rubbery. Imagine yourself walking on a fluffy ground (a room filled with the material that’s inside a teddy bear, an uneven ground like my construction site of yesterday). Another shifting ground technique. Initiate falls in all possible ways but don’t fall. Suspend. Find elasticity. Find the curve. Disorient in space. Keep extending through the two last fingers. Find the shoulder support: feel yourself hanging from between the shoulder blades, lifted from that point. An upward lightness and a downward fall. Maybe a bit drunk. Give up all control but don’t collapse. Get as silly as you want, but register sensations.

That was great! Actually I start to think that I can relate much easier with Paxton’s words than Alexander. There is something in the vocabulary he uses that clicks immediately with my way of understanding. I read it and it’s immediately physical.
Why people respect so much such an action like today’s (as you see in the picture), just because there’s a camera behind? I hate this. I go out with the ball and no camera, and I get into troubles. But suddenly there’s a camera there and there’s respect and curiosity! mmmmm, makes me wonder!

SMALL DANCE. This text is coming directly from Steve Paxton’s words. I tried to write it down as precisely as I could remember. I would like to think about the almost, the edge of movement, pre-acceleration, pre-initiation. The edge between the virtual potential of a movement/thought and an actualization of a movement/thought. How actual is the pre-initiation of a thought movement? What happens if you think it but don’t do it, or did you do it by thinking it? Does it need to be ‘done’? What means ‘to do’?

(Stand.)
Find your balance. Find your concentration. Easy breathing. Watch the small dance, the little movements around the skeleton that help you balance. Relax your coxyx. Relax your sacrum. Long inhalations. Long exhalations. Diaphragm moving down with inhalation, up with exhalation. Feel your weight on the floor. Agreeing with gravity. Organs relaxing down into the bowl of the pelvis. Bowl of the pelvis receiving the organs. Easy sternum. Easy means. Observe the small dance. Feel the dome of your skull suspending upwards. Feel the length of your spine extending through your head towards the ceiling.

Imagine but don’t do it: imagine you are taking a step with your right foot. Imagine but don’t do it: imagine you are taking a step with your right foot. With your left foot. Right, left right left, right, left…
Stand. Balance. Feel the small dance.

SLOW WALK. With the small dance in mind, go for a slow motion walk in a place that runs at speed. A busy noise place that you can rupture by being slow.
Then try another slow walk. You have to carry a big object, maybe a chair or table. You have to stay with the small dance awareness while carrying something big.

That was fun!

ISCHIAS REACHING BACK. Try this blindfolded. It might be good to have something, or many things, to sit down on. Blindfolded, you walk backwards, reaching with your ischias, trying to find the place to sit down on. Maybe try to find a slightly different way of doing it from the usual Alexander exercises. Just to find another approach. Reach from your right ischia only, from your left ischia only. Sit down on the floor. Get up again. Orient into a backwards space from your ischias pointing. They are your new eyes.

Shifting ground by blocking senses, disorienting situation. Put some cotton into your ears (blocking noise). Close your eyes (blocking image). Hold your breath as long as you can. Walk in circles, moving your head. Imagining there is no thing such as flat. Hallucinate! You can do this practice many times, each time it will be more intense. Every time you need to breath again, open your eyes and orient yourself, but don’t wait too much to hold your breath again, so it’s just a physical experience of disorientation. Enjoy!

SHIFTING GROUND. Create your own technique and report back to me. I will then try it out myself.

COLD DÉRIVE. While waiting for your instructions on shifting ground, I have not gone to the dance studio, as planned, but ended up on a long drift through the cold and extremely foggy night. I tended towards the football stadium. The bright flood lights dispersed in the mist looked very attractive. On the football field people were running, training, screaming and playing. I watched and got into my peripheral vision. I then started to feel the ground touching my feet and the cold creeping up. I tried to be non-judgemental about the cold: not disliking it but taking it as a sober fact. As much fact as my bones are fact to my structure. I started to relate the sober cold to the empty bone. Finding a silent sensation. Trying to endure the place of cold while observing sober sensations. I started a very slow bone walk with peripheral vision, sensing the texture of ground change under my feet. From concrete to sand. A very slow cold silent bone walk into the football field where everything happened at a noisy speed. Rupturing place with a disjunctive activity.
Returning to the town center I was informed by a digital thermometer that the temperature had dropped several degrees since my departure. I recovered my blue fingers in warm water at home.