Sunday 10 March 2019

Respect...Trust and Flow...

I've been thinking a lot this past week about respect, about trust and about flow.
 I've  been thinking about how these words are meaningful in my life, through my practice, in all that I do. I'm not sure I can see these three things separately from one another, so I am going to explore a little of what I see as their relationship with each other.

Respect and trust for me, are earned through our encounters with others and through the flow was are a part of in our environment. When we meet others in contact improvisation for example (as I've been leading a lot of CI sessions this past week, I have been thinking through this practice particularly), we greet each encounter as a possibility. We offer and we respond, we give and receive information through a non-verbal dialogue with a shared understanding of their being respect for each others offering-gesture through movement. We trust in the environment we are in, co-creating it in the moment of our movement together. We trust in our own bodies, our relationship with gravity, with the earth and with each other. We do not know what is going to happen in an improvisation; that is the very beauty of it!! The word improvise from the Latin 'improvisre' means quite literally not being able to see ahead of time. We enter the space and in doing so we enter into the flow of possibilities; of change, encounter, interruption. We are in a continous flow of communication. Flow becomes an energy which supports us. It is not a thing as such, it is not related directly to time(space), but aware of the presence of flow within each of us and so within the environment we are able to be responsive to it, responsive to its energies, and responsive to change. With a respect for each person and our environment having something meaningful to offer, we can trust ourselves to enter the flow of the moment, to be open to the possibilities of the now. 

These processes are not exclusive at all to improvisation, to dance, but this is how I have been thinking about them this week. Respect, trust and flow are a part of who we are as people, communities, societies, the environment, how was approach and are a part of the world around us. It is important to to respect the encounters we have in life, through study maybe this is with other artist-scholars work through literature, or direct engagement through practice. We should respect that this is their lifetime's work, something they are passionate about, have invested time, energy, effort, life into to explore how it is meaningful and are generous enough to share that with you through their writing and/or through their practice. While we don't have to agree with everyone's ideas (in contact improvisation, we don't have to respond to every offering), we should be open to explore why we don't agree (why our response did not meet the offering of another). We do this through researching further, finding out more, considering our practice further in relationship to others, asking questions (verbally and through our practice) and trusting ourselves to be ok with being challenged by the possibility of something other than us, an idea outside of our immediate or current frame of reference. If we allow ourselves to be in the flow of our own lives, of our learning, to be in conversation with each other, with our environment, we are able to at least notice and acknowledge change as possibility and make choices in our responses in relation to that trust in ourselves.

This short TEDTalk by Itay Yatuv offers some thoughts around flow, trust, respect, challenges and learning to respond, through contact improvisation.   




What are your thought in relation to your own learning?


7 comments:

  1. Helen. This is mesmerising and thank you for your thoughts on respect, trust and flow. My thoughts are on https:/dsmgdance.blogspot.com

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  3. What an amazing film. I am not very good at contact improvisation but I was mesmerised but the trust and flow of movement shown here. I teach a lot of double work and classical pas de deux and we spend a lot of time talking about mutual respect and I always start my double work class with trust exercises. I think I might try using some of the same exercises with my younger students in their ballet classes to encourage trust and mutual respect.

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  4. Hi Helen,

    I enjoyed your post about contact improvisation. I have little knowledge on this so it was great to learn about a different genre of dance to what I am used to. I have a slightly conflicting view on the video. Please see my thoughts on this at

    https://jadenunn1986.blogspot.com/2019/03/respect-trust-and-flow.html

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  5. Respect and flow...improvisation. These past two years I have learnt a great deal about allowing the process to occur naturally. Our lives are full of improvisation and much joy results from when we allow ourselves to just dance through it. Motherhood brought the greatest challenge in my life. I have struggled to allow our lives to flow in respect to what we need and believe instead of how we think we ought to be. The dance video struck my heart and I remembered these words:

    Let us first teach little children to breathe, to vibrate, to feel, and to become one with the general harmony and movement of nature. Let us first produce a beautiful human being, a dancing child.”
    -Isadora Duncan, 1909

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    1. It took me a bit thinking about this, these are a bit of my ongoing thoughts: https://marianelladesanti.blogspot.com/2019/03/dancing-with-children-embodied-parenting.html

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