(link to purchase the DVD)
"Material for the Spine"
(excerpted text from the DVD)
subtitles about from comments about performance and improvisation
Now, this I believe was in and it's the same old body.
Not a very hot performance in the sense that I was in the middle of a lecture and just showing the movement, but still,
I'm doing the movement.
Working with the spine, the scapulae, the pelvis ...
I guess the point I'm seeing is that I was doing all of these same movements in ', but I'm doing them much more consciously over the years.
That's the technical work.
It's just how to get the body's qualities or possibilities into this tiny little conscious brain.
Maybe that's the technical work right there, repeating enough and slowing things down enough so that the consciousness which seems to me is enmeshed in the kinds of speeds that we use in talking and thinking to ourselves, when we're kind of wordy in the mind.
So when you're trying to assess the feelings, in all the sensations, and you want to remember them and you want to remember the anatomy of them and you want to figure out the energy of them, when you're doing those things, it again seems to be at that speed, it's not ...
I mean, in improvisation you're doing it hyper-fast, you're going at the speed of action, with gravity, falling and all of that is happening ...
But to get it remembered, to get the principles understood, to build the improvisation from, because there are many principles
in the body you can work with. I mean, in Material for the Spine
I've used a few of them, trying to keep it simple because ... trying to keep it simple because ... Because I doubt that it's possible for someone to really teach you how to improvise.
I think improvisation comes from each person and I'm not even sure, I don't see any way to prove that when we talk about improvisation that you and I, in a conversation, would be
talking remotely about the same things, in terms of its actual palette, its actual materials.
So keeping the principles of Material for the Spine simple is to give a platform to push off of and discover more of interest in the whole thing.
And there are so many ways to do it.
Yoga is fantastic, once you start recognizing your sensations
as your sensations, they can be used, they can be composed with.
That's sort of what you're doing in yoga, but you come back to that repetitive thing.
What if those sensations were allowed to play?
What if it was like the sensations that you got from your tai chi class were the Blues, and you were ... you were going to play,
or dance.
I mean the idea that we have to be taught to dance is one of the minor insanities of this culture, I think.
I think you might have to learn technique and you might have to learn to notice that you improvise and then at a certain point
it's your responsibility both for the result but also for the process that gets you that result.
I think that's a good clear reason for keeping Material for the Spine minimal but puzzling.
That's the way it starts out.
(from his DVD: purchase link)