In this workshop we focus on the cultivation of bodies that are:

• Fluid (“a substance whose molecules flow freely, so that it has no fixed shape and little resistance to outside stress”), present, connected, conforming;

• Responsive (to feeling, music, breath, ground, partner{s} and any other inner or outer occurrence in the field, in the moment)

• Articulate (expressive, conscious, owned, practiced, specific, detailed, skillful).

With intention to offer our conscious bodies in occasional theatrical productions.

“It is sometimes thought that in improvisation we can do just anything.  But lack of a conscious plan does not mean that our work is random or arbitrary.  Improvisation always has its rules, even if they are not a priori rules.  When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design.  This kind of freedom is the opposite of ‘just anything.”  We carry around the rules inherent in our organism.  As living, patterned beings, we are incapable of producing anything random.  We cannot even program a computer to produce random numbers,; the most we can do is create a pattern so complex that we get an illusion of randomness.  Our body-mind is a highly organized and structured affair, interconnected as only a natural organism can be that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years.  An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution; all that we we are is encoded somewhere in us.  Beyond that vast history we have even more to draw upon; the dialogue with the Self—a dialogue not only with the past but with the future, the environment, and the divine within us.  As our playing, writing, speaking, drawing, our dancing unfolds, the inner, unconscious logic of our being begins to show through and mold the material.  This rich, deep patterning is the original nature that impresses itself like a seal upon everything we do or are.” – Stephen Nachmanovitch, “Free Play”