this is a draft from 2023:
Well I guess anything that you practice regularly, a movement style or apparatus that you have a relationship. like if you do yoga everyday, you build skill and understanding in those poses over time. It’s a mindful and intentional way of moving, spending time with the body and opening dialogue with it.
My movement practice is a way for me to meet myself, to learn this body.
Spiritual access point – when my body is in motion I find it easier to soften my mind, and that’s when the divine can get through. It also demands of me a mindful awareness that is pretty hard to maintain in the modern world
To move at your challenge point requires embodiment – you to tune into what’s happening in your joints and muscles, where you’re sore, your energy levels. All the sensations and stimulus that effects how you move. I mean it would be an affront to live like that, in that hyperawareness. Its really important to me to have something like this to make sure I don’t get too disconnected from the earth, from spirit. And my body is that, I am part of the earth.
It also takes a lot of humility to then listen to the body – your ego wants to do whatever the thing is and it sucks to admit when you’re sick, or tired and you cant perform at a certain level. You lose strength , whatever. The practice is about coming back, meeting yourself with honesty, wherever you are today.
this is my answer now:
a movement practice could be many things. it could be a traditional form, or movement philosophy, that you follow, like yoga or t’ai chi. it could be a specific skill that you practice, like archery. it could be a means to achieve an end, like a martial art. it could be a creative medium, like dance or circus. it could be a personal or shared healing practice.
my question now, is about what is “practice”. we are moving, all the time. all the time we are alive, that is. breathing is moving, and without breath life ceases. standing still requires constant fine adjustments to keep us upright.
even in stillness you move. the unrelenting motion of life.
so is practice about intention? when you are moving with a goal, is that your practice? what if your practice is dance, and you swim. is that not part of your practice?
when i think about describing my own intentions for my movement practice, i think about creative expression. i think about refining movements, pathways and skills that allow me to move in ways that tell stories and express feelings. that’s what i want my movement based performances to be like. sharpen the knife before cutting vegetables type thoughts…
but if i am always moving, while i breath this life, what dictates “practice”? maybe all of life is that, for me. all the time a writer is not writing, they are gathering materials, they say…
i am confronting, these days, the anxiety that pervades everything that i desire. including movement. including all types of creative expression. when i was a kid, i had a recurrent and debilitating mental block doing back handsprings at gymnastics. i got through it, with the help of a compassionate coach who validated my experience and did not make me feel less than. competitions brought it back. so i knew that anxiety, fear of judgement, were big for me.
but i am realising that it is not just back handsprings that are blocked. its everything that i desire. texts i sent this morning to my dearly beloved:
“if i want to do something, immediately i feel anxious”.
“why is that… i don’t want to be like that… i dont want every chance i have to do something positive or pleasant turn into fear and stress and anger and regret, but right now it does…”
“its everywhere; wanna dance? block. wanna sing? block. wanna make love, write, eat, sleep, that block is on anything and everything i want to do”.
the practice then, for me, is about unstitching the fear stops me moving. the thing that right now, stops me from moving in the way that expresses my creative desires, is fear. if i want to move, i have to practice unfearing.
how to unfear?
i wrote about ovaries. i wrote about the drive to create something that lives on, outside of yourself, that overcomes the hesitation of self preservation.
so what do i want to live outside of myself? how can my movement be a story, a relationship, that is alive in its own right.
movement shared, i think. movement in, with, to, for others.
i was thinking about desire, and who i was (in 2023) when i played the vj harvey character. who was the sex clown? now, when i look at her, she was someone who had been so effectively corralled away from her own desires, that the most alive she felt was when she inhabited and manipulated the desires of others.
my movement practice then, was it mine? sometimes, yes. when no one was watching. when i danced, and i spoke about softening the mind and letting the divine in. what i didn’t mention in that post was that rarely could i bring myself to do that in a state of sobriety. what did the drugs do? they didn’t make me move. no, they just numbed me to the fear… and then i could move.
when i performed? no. it was not mine. i was opening myself to the desires of the audience and allowing them to move me. that took my fear away. why? because the audience could project their desires onto me without having to feel the fears that lived in their bodies. i could feel their desires without having to acknowledge the fear that lived in mine.
movement. desire. ovaries. life. new life. generative process is hugely risky, and completely different from self preservation.
so what if my movement practice is not about healing, addressing, removing the fears that bind me. what if i fear desire, because what i desire is risky.
i desire to make new life. literally, reproductively. i want to be a mother! (and that is a huge leap away from the girl in 2023 who had a neutered tattoo in her ear). but i also want to make new life creatively, socially, culturally. i want to dance new life into this culture, these people, who live on this continent (australia), now. i want to sing us into living inside of this landscape, not on top of it.
my practice now is about allowing myself to be moved by the desires of my ovaries to create new life in the world.
