1.
As babies we are a mix of protective reflexes and chosen action. As we mature we rise, from belly on the floor to hands on furniture, to hands on the walls to taking space in standing. As children we grow our relations with carers and objects and environments through seeing and touching, smelling, tasting, listening, reaching out and drawing in the world to our mouth, our heart, our skin. We deepen our sense of ourselves by enacting those relations. Patterns of movement are shaped by inheritance and our culture(s) of origin. Before we are born, family and physicians look to our mother’s belly to sense our vitality, growth and impending arrival, attending to our movements, the motion. We have always been in process. Having landed in the womb as an embryo, we went head first into the new space of becoming – our axis announcing the direction our body intended to organize and grow. Our nourishment came from mothering and from the fetal yolk sac. Our story has always been one of becoming – changing and growing – as is our birthright.
2.
We walk, we crouch, we kneel, stop, lie down, run and climb, jump, sit, turn, kick. We have our doings. We fall in love with the possibilities that techniques give us for extending our moves – as with track and field – for shaping, telling, and amplifying – as in dance – with our bodies. We also develop techniques for more routine encounters with challenge and joy. The philosopher and artist Milford Graves has said that life is a lot like crossing a busy freeway. Little point then in learning how to march to a metronome unless, that is, ‘there is no traffic’. Suppleness, readiness, multidirectional movement suit our condition, support our longevity on earth. Suprapto said “I start from (these three) …a grasshopper, you dance I play music, looking for where is north and where is south … to develop the presence of my life that is more humane.” The confused grasshopper is a nimble image – or technique – for developing quickness. Playing in movement at any age. we are belonging to and participating in the world, a world fundamentally expressed by living beings in motion.
3.
When we say that speech sets humans apart from other organisms, we miss the fact that all life communicates. We detect the presence of living speech with our senses. But in the buzzing field of intercommunications, how to grow more conscious of how we ourselves are speaking through our bodies in the field of life? And among humans and other-than-humans, how to gather from the information-abundant environment? The perceiving and processing of our relation to our own actions calls to mind a bus ride. Knowing at which stop I want to get off the bus, I may feel myself actively looking out of the window, while seated. I need do little else on this ride, knowing our locations en route. Maybe earlier in the journey I am more passive, looking ahead as other riders get on and off. The driver drives, and we are still a distance from my destination. How to sense your relation to what you do in the movement of your daily-life? How to sense your relations to your doings among your people? In your landscape and in nature? In spiritual life? Awareness is won through our sensitive observation.
Recognizing ourselves as belonging to the field of speech, of human and other-than-human life, opens a way to myriad relations and conversations. Where shall we like to put ourselves in this shared field, what would we like to listen to, what shall we offer in the field of life, what do we instinctively create here on earth? Being involved like this, in that mixture of passive and active, it is the content of our compositions – our choices, our dialogue, our offerings – that is the material expression of consciousness. Put another way, our involvement in this space of perception is our cooking. Suprapto said that consciousness means being in life, that our nerve and muscle can themselves grow in consciousness. (How expansive a view this is from the input/output model of a sensory-motor system.) There are many techniques we could try together. Significantly the feeling of this vitality within the common field of communication and in our dialogue, marks the approach.
4.
I think of a guide written by a friend’s great great grandfather. He immigrated in the late 1800s, and shared with his countrymen soon to board the boat for the US that they could look forward to living in a ‘help yourself society’. This phrase, its various possible meanings, has sat with me a long time. Is it help yourself in the sense of take all that feeds your appetite? Like a buffet? Is the emphasis a kind of on-your-own-ness in making a life, independently? Is it help yourself in the sense of ‘please kindly’ as in an offering – which is underpinned of course by our colonial origins? These could be a few facets of conduct in a help yourself society.
Another pamphlet I think of is one published by the State Department in the 1950s that includes the following anecdote. In reply to the simple question ‘What’s your favorite color?’ an Englishman replies ‘Of what?’ while an American replies ‘Blue.’ What is meant in these differing replies, what is the attitude of each? How are these answers received? Should we understand one another from the place of culture? A capacity for recognizing cultural difference expressed in these replies was essential to preserving the peace between Cold War allies. How then, beyond tolerance of difference, to dialogue?
And so, we can ask in our moving together how am I and how are we dealing with space? With place? Am I dependent, am I growing more independent while connecting with others? What is right and not right for the culture? When we meet, how to understand one another? Given our distinct ways, how shall we tune, share among ourselves? How to be in peace? The concept of playing in the garden has at its heart the possibility of creative intercultural communication.
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Background: Recently I kept running into ‘free movement’. I got curious what is meant by the concept. I didn’t get far with that actually. But it followed an earlier (never ending?) question, ‘What are we doing when we practice Amerta movement, or joged Amerta?’ Yes, under Prapto’s guidance, which is now in the past, but perhaps also as we find our way in Amerta-influenced practices of today it can be helpful to explore distinction. My entry here is an interpretation of elements of a conversation on the concept of joged with Prapto in December 2016 and was also stimulated by receiving a copy of Prapto’s 2009 seminar talk.
References
- From Prapto’s “Dance Meditation?” talk translated by Diane Butler, 2009 “The [Javanese] term joged can be applied for children who are playing with a feeling of enjoyment. It can also be used for many [inexperienced] communities … it can also be used at a high expertise level … It can be called a kind of joged, in my interpretation, if it can develop obah, polah, olah and solah (changing or growing, motion, processing, and actions or manner of conduct).”
- Beverly Bajema’s family archive, To America? by Cornelius De Smit
- Milford Graves: Full Mantis (film)
- State Department pamphlet by Margaret Mead
- On the relationship of outdoor practice to inner development “…[S]ustained contemplation of outer landscapes led to a subtler understanding of the spirit. In the Cairngorms she came to feel ‘not out of myself, but in myself’ ….. a doubled motion, an exploratory movement out into wild landscape simultaneous with the confirming movement back into the self.” – Robert MacFarlane Landmarks, writing about Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain.