I have literally been staring at that question on my screen for 30 minutes. That ‘rest’ that I “really needed” has come, and gone. There are so many loose ends sitting in my inbox that it feels like I’m facing a pile of spaghetti as a to do list. My body has turned to mush thanks to successive colds and too much food and, helpfully, the entire world has shifted into hyper New Years Resolutions selling mode. Great. Welcome to January.

Still, pauses are useful, beginnings are hopeful and there is something to be said for taking stock and thinking before you leap back into the same old thing. Here’s my bit of New Year’s wisdom:

1. It is always useful to make use of the ‘space’ that a holiday brings to create some perspective. When you’re outside of your regular doing mode, you realise that perhaps the things that you are doing are not making you happy. Or maybe you realise that something just has to change. I think it’s always good to notice how you feel about going back into working mode and think about how you can adjust things to make your working experience a little better. Or if you realise you are deeply unhappy about yourself or life in general, find a professional to talk to.
2. I always find that the best time to get rid of a bad habit is after a holiday, because the change of routine has created an interruption in your habitual behaviours. This is another reason why holidays are not only nice, but also extremely important. They lift us out of the rut of bad habits that we accumulate just to get by. The key is to be aware of the tendency to slip back into them once you return to working mode. There’s no need to be cynical about a New Year’s Resolutions. Now is the time to make the shift. Is the habit just covering up a deeper rooted fear, unhappiness or boredom? If so, refer to no.1.
3. If you really want to get back into exercise then the best option is to join a class. If possible try to pay upfront for a course of classes. That way you’ll show up every week. Doing it alone takes a lot more discipline and ultimately other work commitments will take over and seem more important. Busting your guts in the gym for one week is the best way to secure an injury that will just hinder you for the next 6 months. The little and often approach is more sustainable and ultimately more effective.
4. Try something new. Everyone needs an outlet for creative play. This is something I’ve really struggled with, mainly because the activities that many people associate with recreation, (dancing, music, yoga, etc) are all kind of work related for me. So last term I decided to join a choir. I went along to the first session and paid my subs for the term. I felt completely lost. I almost didn’t return to the second session. But by the third and fourth session I was totally hooked. It’s been quite a challenge for me to just do something for fun. I had to let go of a lot and just get on with it. I still cannot read music to save my life, but who cares. There are so many things to do in London and they don’t need to cost an arm and a leg. I love initiatives like Write&Shine, which is a pre-work creative writing class plus breakfast. Book clubs are quite fun too, but then try to do something that involves meeting new people if you can. The social aspect is part of the benefit.

Finally, and I say this more to myself then to anyone else, the key is to just start somewhere. Don’t be a perfectionist about it, it doesn’t have to be your best yet. It’s just a start.

Happy New Year!

Founded by Anna Halprin and her daughter, Daria Halprin, in 1978, the work of the Tamalpa Institute uses expressive arts practices to tap into the creative resources of individuals and communities. Through what they call a life / art dialogue, this work is really an extension of Anna’s ideas from professional dance/performance making into individual and community development. As described in my previous blogs ‘Arriving’ and ‘Score’s and Resources’, Anna’s work, whilst significant in the lineage of contemporary dance, spilled into real life. Her approach addressed the politics of intra and inter-personal relationships as well as our connection with our environment. The Tamalpa Institute solidifies this relationship through a 3 year training program. During my week’s stay we explored this work in the afternoons, no doubt to take the strain off Anna who is now 96 years old. I had no idea what to expect from this work and what I relate now is just my sense and experience of it during that week, rather than a fully researched presentation.

On the first afternoon Rosario takes us through a ‘self portrait’ process. The question Rosario poses is: “How am I experiencing myself physically, emotionally, mentally in my life right now? I think we dance a little and then paper and oil crayons are provided and we draw an image in response to this question. We’re given time to write something in our journal, inspired by what we’ve drawn. Earlier in the day we were divided into ‘support groups’ of 6 people. In our groups we are now asked to dance in response to our image and writing, whilst the rest of the group bares witness to our dance. After each performance, the performer has a chance to talk about their experience in the dance, about what they were thinking or where they’re at.

I guess that the purpose of this transfer of thoughts from image to words and then to movement aimed to create more texture or room for new ideas / revelations. I feel totally disorientated. Working outdoors is overwhelming and my main concern was staying in the shade and navigating the complex personalities in my support group. The idea is that the sharing is just a one way presentation, but unfortunately members of the group take it on themselves to provide a kind of feedback. I feel a little frustrated by this, but not wanting to be bossy I just let people talk and keep my input to a minimum. Why do we always jump in to provide feedback? Why is it so necessary to give our perspective? It’s a good reminder that sometimes just baring witness to somebody’s thoughts, work, actions is enough, especially when we have no other context, or when our feedback is not invited.

On the second day the sun is so strong that we have to start the afternoon session in the indoor studio. Thankfully, I think. It’s hot and stuffy but there’s something reassuring about sweating again and rolling around on floor without worrying about splinters. The improvisation score takes us through each area of the body to sense what movements are available and then to track back to one area that feels most familiar and another that feels most unfamiliar. Having identified two areas, we’re asked to bring these two movement scores into dialogue. I start working with the hips as a familiar area and the feet as an unfamiliar area. Of course the rest of my body was moving too but the initiation came from these two places. At the end of the process I realised that the areas I had chosen during the exercise were a reversal of my habitually difficult area (the hips) and familiar area (the feet). Ask anyone who goes to my classes and they’ll tell you how much I love working on feet. My hips on the other hand have caused me all sorts of problems. If there is one area I have to work very hard on it would be my hips, as Anna would put it: I have Kangaroo rather than Turtle hips. So it’s quite interesting that in that space and time, this relationship was reversed.

Having devised a movement quality, we’re asked to draw an image somehow portraying a quality / idea / feeling of  what we had just danced. We then get into groups of three. We each take a turn to hold up our own image whilst one person moves in response to it and a second person, the ‘poet’, offers a verbal response. At the end of each 5 minute performance the ‘artist’ has a chance to talk about the experience after which the performer and then the poet offer their perspective. The exercise didn’t seem to give me any new perspective, at least not in the short term. I was mostly struck by the fact that the structure of artist, performer and poet gave each member of the trio an active role, so everyone’s presence felt more invested in the process. We each had something to lose, and I think this made the quality of the ensuing discussion a little richer.

Wednesday afternoon. I spent the two hour lunch break trying to recover from my fit of crying triggered by Meredith Monk’s music in the morning session. I’m telling myself it was the music. We’re asked to consider the following life/art questions:

What in your life is opening? What in your life is closing? What do I want / need to open / close in my life?

Deep stuff. So I turn to my journal and write in all seriousness: “My feet are so dirty and I wish I could clean them. I don’t really know what to write.” Clearly. I think I’d decided to take it all with a pinch of salt. Earlier that morning I had announced to my car pool pals how I really didn’t get the connection with emotions etc. I found it a bit of a stretch. But only a few hours later I was bawling my eyes out. These questions just seemed to press the issue a little. It took some time for me to get something out. Then we transferred the words into a drawing and then again into a dance. This time we performed in large groups of 10 people. We had two witnesses each who sat out and watched. At the end of the performance the performer spoke about their experience, then the witnesses could offer their perspective. “You have colour in your picture!” someone exclaimed later. True. So far everything I’d drawn was monochrome.

I had an interesting realisation at the end of the performance. During the improvisation performers were given the option of talking. Someone in the group had taken on this option in a somewhat more determined way. The whole performance was taken over by her monologue. I mostly spent my time trying to withdraw from the noise and pull of the group. I just wanted to do my own dancing! Then at some point I crossed paths with Dena who had taken to asking everyone questions. “Who are you?” she said to me. Instead of responding, I kept moving in my own little dance. I remember considering a response but then deciding that to say anything just wouldn’t have felt authentic to where I was at that moment. So I ignored her, making her question an abstraction. Sitting with my two witnesses afterwards I thought to myself: “what a typical bloody Londoner I am. Someone talks to me out of the blue and I assume they’re mad and ignore them.”

Thursday afternoon. We cover ourselves in tick and mosquito repellant and are led into the woods. This is meant to be a dance with nature. We arrive at a spot for this enlightening process and there’s the very distracting sound of a digger in the background. I first stand by a tree stump that looks a little interesting. The score is to make contact and then have some kind of a movement dialogue with nature. OK then. Suspending judgement. I stand there for a good minute before realising that this particular bit of nature is swarming with mosquitos and that I probably haven’t covered my legs with enough of that tick spray. So eventually I give up on my efforts to ignore it all and find a less mosquito ridden tree. It’s ok to move away from something that feels hostile, I tell myself. The second tree is a large redwood. My dance doesn’t feel hugely overwhelming. I lean into its bark, sit back and look up at it, try to see right to the top. The dialogue feels very one sided… trees don’t take any notice of you.

I walk back to the deck where Rosario asks us to grab our journals and consider: “What am I bringing with me from the natural world?” But unlike yesterday’s conundrum today I have a clear answer. I realise that I spend most of my life trying to meet others. I travel to my clients and classes. I feel that I’m always trying to meet someone else’s standards and needs. Trying to be the teacher they need, trying to be the flatmate they need, trying to be a useful sister, trying to meet funding aims and objectives. And here I am at the home of a woman who is known the whole world over and who has built her work around her life. Anna has been developing work in her home studio since she was 22. People travel to her, some from considerable distances. With all the emphasis on getting yourself ‘out there’ I think we undervalue the need to create roots, to stand squarely in our own space and say “this is me”. There’s a popular saying that goes: “If you don’t like your life, change it. You’re not a tree.” Yes change precipitates growth, but you can’t grow a tree if you keep digging up its roots. Sometimes relating to people needs you to shift your perspective. But what if I stand still? Might that not allow other people to adjust and relate to me? Who says we need to spend our lives hopping around everyone else?

By this stage we had all become a little more tuned in to the process. So we closed the session with a group sharing. Each of us had about a minute to reflect our thoughts back to the group. Some people performed a small movement or gesture. One person sang. But none of it felt silly. It all felt quite authentic and insightful. What I hadn’t accounted for that I now realised, was that over the course of the week we were all getting better at selecting and dealing with the materials we were working on. I wrote down a few of the other insights that people shared because I thought they were quite resonant:

• One participant had been working with a large asymmetrical stick. Her dance involved trying to balance it in one hand. She found a technique to allow her to do this. She concluded: “there is balance in asymmetry. You just have to figure out the technique. Don’t blame the stick. Engage with it. It’s a personal responsibility.”
• Another participant shared the following observation: “When you really want something and you hold on to it, it doesn’t really work out.”

It’s the final day. By this point I’ve learnt to just keep my shoes on so my feet don’t get all mucky. Rosario takes us through an improvisation sitting on the benches. To be honest my mind is not on my movement, because last night the UK voted to leave the EU and I cannot think straight, I’m so frustrated. Borders! They want more borders! Rosario asks us to take paper and colours and draw out something that carries the feel of the movement. I wasn’t paying attention enough really, but I trust another saying that Rosario has: “the experience is in your body in some way so don’t worry too much about ‘knowing’.” After drawing, we return to our journals and write a letter to ourselves “from the voice of the drawing”. Suspend judgement. Trust the body. Just write. And I do. When we get back into our support groups to share our pictures and thoughts someone asks if we’re reading out our letters too. Rosario says that this is just an option as letters can be hugely personal. Phew! I think. I’m not reading mine. No way! But as the first member of the group reads through her letter, and then the second and then the third, fourth, fifth, I slowly start to realise that there is sheer wisdom coming out of these insights. Not only this, but by being authentic to themselves they have written things that I empathise with and that resonate with me. So I read my letter too.

My trip to Anna Halprin’s Summer Workshop 2016 has been made possible thanks to the support of the Lisa Ullman Travelling Scholarship Fund.

Anna Halprin’s experimental workshops that began in the 50’s became the seed bed for postmodern dance, influencing the artists who later went on to form the Judson Church group in 1960’s New York. I am not a dance historian. I travelled to California not to understand Anna’s work intellectually but to experience it, to embody the space, her approach and her ideas. Anna’s work has underpinned much of the postmodern dance practice that has been filtered down to me through my teachers and their teachers. I came here to get to the source and what I’m relating now is the slightly haphazard collection of thoughts that spilled out from this frail but determined 96 year old.

Choreography is a strong word… I’ve spent my life rebelling against it. When you choreograph, you create. When you use scores, others create. That’s how I don’t burn out. I make space for others to be creative, I tap into their potential and I learn something from what they do with my scores. So I never burn out. – Anna Halprin

If Anna’s creative approach could be summed up in one word, that word would be “scores”. We walk into the space through a score. We relate to each other through a score. We create individually through a score, we dance together through a score and finally we eat together through a score. A score is a set of rules that loosely hold together an event, allowing an individual to devise freely but still remain engaged in a specific dialogue.

But the score needs support. Anna draws strongly on the RSPV cycle defined by her husband Larry Halprin. The R stands for resources. What are we working with? A resource could be the environment, our bodies or any object, idea, stimulus that informs or moulds our dance. Resources are the raw materials of the creative process. If we define them and become aware of them they can enrich our practice. S stands for score. These are the rules of engagement. P stands for Performance, the enactment of the score using the resources. V stands for Valuaction. Like an evaluation of the performance, this is an opportunity to look at what happened in the performance to generate further resources that will then inform the next execution of the score and so on in an endless cycle.Even the working process can be a resource. “Don’t worry if you feel stuck” Anna says, “Just think to yourself, ‘OK I’ve been collecting resources, now what can I do with them.'” With each repetition we become more attuned to the practice, opening up the creative options.

Anna approaches the body as a resource. She identifies two ways in which this resource can be used. Firstly it is a point of sensation, what do I feel through my physical body? Anna talks about being an artist. She says that as an artist working with the body, her aim is to try and access the most authentic movement possible. If movement is authentic then anyone can empathise with it. Inauthentic movement, like ballet, she says, is like decoration. “It’s not bad, but it’s not authentic. It’s a style.”

Anna tells her assistants to pull out all the cushions from the studio. She instructs us all to lie down with the pillow under the upper back. “Let your jaws relax or you’ll hurt your necks.” We lie there for a good 15 minutes gradually circling our arms overhead to which she exclaims “Oh my goodness Colin I’m very worried about you. You need to do this everyday!” Colin is not a dancer, in fact most of the people here are not dancers. It’s a testament to the reach of her work that such a wide range of people have been drawn to this workshop. Whilst I’m lying there with my upper back in this extremely extended position, I feel gravity slowly stretching out my diaphragm and abdominals. Of course, being a Pilates teacher means I spend most of my day loading in the opposite direction. No wonder my entire abdomen goes into spasm once a month. We then placed the cushion under the pelvis, creating traction in the lower back. “Could all the assistants please develop eagle eyes”, she yaps. Her old-school manners sometimes come across as quite harsh.

I was relieved to hear her talk about her two favourite muscles: The trapezius and the gluts. Her largely self taught knowledge of anatomy was quite impressive. Clearly she spends a lot of time thinking and learning about movement. She talks about western cultures being more removed from the earth, losing our ability to ground. Whilst african cultures are more earth bound. Their tailbone opens backwards more, orienting the pelvis forwards, so they can commune with the earth more easily. She asks us all to raise our arms upwards by rolling the the chest backwards to access the lower trapezius. This is sky. She then instructs us to drop and ground through our feet to create a connection to earth. The centre is your horizon, the point of intersection between sky and earth. If sky and earth are two polarities then the horizon embodies both qualities. I think that’s a really interesting perspective on the centre, not as a fixed point, but as a dynamic interplay between the polarities of earth and sky.

Anna insists that we feel the earth polarity in our bodies. So she instructs us each to focus on grounding, whilst another person attempts to lift us off the ground. Obviously none of us budge. Then she tells us all to do it again and “just think about what you had for breakfast”. Lifting us off the ground this time round is a piece of cake. Wow! So it’s real! Anna stands up from her wheel chair. To give you some context, this 96 year old recently slipped on some dry leaves sending her shin first into the deck which cut across her shin bone. To avoid putting her weight onto it she started to walk differently which then led her to fall, fracturing her lumbar vertebra. So though still able to walk, she’s been instructed to keep it still and is in a wheel chair much of the time “for the next 6 rather than 8 weeks, because I have too much to do” she says. As we’re all trying to feel grounded she lifts herself up to standing, plants her two determined feet into the ground and gets her assistant to try to lift her up, fracture and all. Her face looks furious”You Won’t Lift Me!” she shouts. Surely enough Rosario cannot lift her.

Another resource is how we relate, because “you cannot exist without being in relation to others”. Anna describes two more polarities, Active and Passive.  We work through scores involving touch. In the first score we’re asked to lead a partner who’s eyes remain shut. We can leave our partner at times, and select someone else. “Did you feel anxious when you were left alone? Was it hard to leave someone?” We worked through different variables within this score. Both partners had eyes open, both could select to lead, to follow, to leave or hold on. “It’s important to be  clear in a relationship. It’s important to recognise when it’s no longer comfortable, when the relationship isn’t working anymore.” The intersection between life and art is no where more evident than in this abstracted relationship practice. It created a lot of food for thought. I noticed that my dominant action was to lead and got into a few power struggles when the person I was trying to lead refused to give in, taking us both into spins.

The body is also a site of emotions, what am I feeling emotionally? Physical sensation and emotions are linked. We inhabit our emotions in our bodies and in our movement. Anna instructed us to sit back to back with a partner, giving and receiving weight in turn as we went into flexion and extension. Moving with empathy for our partner’s body. Then she gave us the following score: starting back to back with your heads touching, slowly turn around to face your partner without losing contact between your heads. This has the effect of bringing you very close to your partner’s face. In the background she played a piece of music by Meredith Monk. I think the sound will haunt me for a long time. I’m not really sure what happened. My partner was a lovely older woman, Anita, who, as we turned to face each other, put her arm around me and smiled. I don’t know if it was the kindness of this gesture or the emotional manipulation of the music, but I literally began to sob.

Physical sensation, emotion, environment, relationships. Each of these resources form part of the self. Each of these resources impact on each other. For example: My environment can impact on my movement which can then impact on my emotions which then has an impact on how I relate to others. By highlighting these different resources, we create options that give us a sense of agency. If I move differently, how will that impact on my emotions? How will this changed state impact on my relationships? And how, in turn might this impact on my environment. Through the use of scores, Anna offers people a chance to play out these different dialogues through a process she calls the life / art dialogue. This is the basis of the work of the Tamalpa Institute, the organisation she co-founded with her daughter Daria Halprin. I’ll talk more about this work in the next post.

My trip to Anna Halprin’s Summer Workshop 2016 has been made possible thanks to the support of the Lisa Ullman Travelling Scholarship Fund.

I am writing this from sunny California, where I’m lucky enough to be participating in Anna Halprin’s Summer Workshop. I’m still finding my feet here so I’ll give it another day before I get into describing it. I feel like I really need to address another issue today, about something that has been ticking away on my mind recently: Judgement.

Over the last month I have been preparing for my next dance project. I’m in an extremely lucky situation of having a dramaturg, Chris, to work with. Our preparations began as discussions in a cafe and then shifted into a studio space. We started by talking about everything I don’t want this work to be and everything that’s stopping me from making, for fear of creating something I don’t want it to be.

The creative space is a tricky one. When you’re running to the studio from teaching and know that you have exactly three hours before you have to run off again to teach, switching the creative machinery on is no easy task. The worst of it all, and the most frightening thing for any dance artist who’s about to embark on a new work, is facing an empty studio. So Chris and I thought about how to approach this time. How could we support the creative space, what questions, props, thoughts, attitudes do I need to have with me to place me in the optimal mode of ‘making’? I needed to learn how to shift gear. What rituals would help me make this transition?

On the night before our first studio session I was packing my things in preparation. I pulled out my new notebook and leafed through the empty pages. Then I pulled out some card and cut it out in the shape of a door hook, like the ‘do not disturb’ signs you get on hotel doors. Using a black sharpie I wrote out in big bold capitals: I SUSPEND JUDGEMENT.

I realised that the biggest hindrance to my process, the biggest hindrance to my creative journey was my own judgement.

Judgement can be a very useful tool. It stops us from doing things that might hurt us. So it plays a role in self-preservation. But as the master improviser and Dance Theatre teacher Sten Rudstrom says: ‘The Tiger has left the room’. Most of us are not judging ourselves and others based on an immediate threat to our existence. Our fear is unfounded. Most of us are locked into patterns of judgement that are learned. Patterns that we’ve adopted to fit in, to keep us safe from ridicule. But there is no doubt at all that this kind of judgement stops us from fulfilling our true potential.

For the last few weeks I have held this idea in my mind in a number of different contexts. I realised that it had huge relevance in my teaching work. I noticed when clients and students were judging me, for example. They want to know that their time and money is worth my work. They want to protect their investment. So they have to employ some element of judgement. It’s completely understandable. Sometimes I notice clients actively trying to suspend their judgement. Other times I notice people cutting off, withdrawing. Judgement says ‘it’s not my fault’, ‘this is how I am’, ‘i’m not good enough’, ‘you’re not good enough’, ‘this is crap’.

A few weeks into my process, I walked into a Yoga class on a Friday evening. It was a hot afternoon and by the time I got there I was tired and dehydrated. I put my water bottle at the end of my mat. The teacher walks in and demands that I get rid of my water bottle. “You don’t need anything”. Can you imagine how indignant I felt? I grudgingly put my water away in my bag at the back of the room. “How dare he” “How does he know I’m not ill” “If I over-heat and pass out I’ll sue him!”. The protestations in my head got to a point where I was very close to storming out of the class. Oh dear… this suspending judgement thing is a lot harder than I thought! I didn’t leave the class. I didn’t pass out. I did a strong 90 minute practice and I learned something.

Suspending judgement is about meeting another person where they’re at. Applied to oneself, suspending judgement is about meeting yourself where ever you’re at. Because sometimes the point we want to move towards is just beyond the discomfort of this place we judge. Judgement keeps us stuck in one place. Suspending judgement allows us to shift and grow.

Each time I start a new studio session, walk into a class, teach a class or a client, I now imagine I’m suspending judgement as I walk through the door. I metaphorically place my judgement on the threshold. My studio notice hangs up on the door handle. Each time I feel myself shrinking I say it in my head: “I suspend judgement”.

I remember Ros Warby talking about her process in a ‘meet the artist’ discussion after her Dance Umbrella performance some years back. She talked about how she begins from the space, and how content comes “from the ground”. She doesn’t start with an idea. She starts by just starting. Someone in the audience asked her how she manages to generate the funding to create a new work when her starting point is so open. She admitted it was difficult, but that she would talk to programmers about her process and help them to see that the quality and identity of her work was the result of that process.

I don’t think it’s irrelevant that she is a female artist. I wonder sometimes if the reason women find it harder to secure investment for work is something to do with our approach being less linear. Maybe we’re asking the wrong questions when is comes to the gender debate?

I want to write this to say something about my process. I’ve spent the last month writing about my next work. But no matter what I say, I’m finding it hard to create the punch. And the reason for this is very simple: I don’t know what this work is about yet. I have interests and starting points. But the about-ness needs to come out of the process.

When I started making “Where am I?” I had no intention of making a piece about a brain in a vat. I hadn’t even heard of Daniel Dennett. My starting point was the much drier “I want to make a space talk back to a performer” or “I want to map a talking space onto a dancer’s body”. Somehow you can see the brain in the vat within the starting proposition, but it wasn’t explicit. In fact the brain only turned up in week two of my research.

Similarly “This is a Square” was meant to be about “Strange Loops”. My starting point was Escher, who led me to Hofstadter and to an obsession with recursion (that was also the starting point for Where am I?). The square came out of the work we did in the studio in the second week of rehearsals. In fact I had all sorts of clever ideas about how the space was going to fold in on itself etc. But what stuck was some lines of tape on the floor.

What I’m trying to relate is something of the messiness of artistic work. Funding structures are set up to support “Good Ideas”. What if I don’t really have any good ideas? What I have is a good process that leads me to ideas I could not have thought of previously. That is why I get into the studio. It’s not because I know what I’m doing, it’s because I know that if I dig around this rough area then I will find the treasure.

An analogy that stuck in my head some time ago was this story about a sculptor and his apprentice. The apprentice watched as his teacher chipped away at a stone. By the end he had created a sculpture that really stood out from the stone itself. So the apprentice asked: “How did you know that was in there?”.

When I approach the making of a new piece I don’t always know the outcome. I have a faint outline in my head. But what comes out is really the result of listening to the materials I place and select in front of me. It’s the process not the idea that creates my work.