two decades in October


Douglas Ray

Uniqueness, having a particular suchness, is extremely close to being here and now. - John Cage 1

This is not a ‘how to’. This is my path. This is ‘why’.
This is what I am passionate about, this is what keeps me coming back to CI after injuries, after the dances that don’t quite connect, after that day in ‘98 of five consecutive rejections. This is a student, at 40, who has left two careers and now trains in Alexander work. This is two weeks of finding what I needed to say, and it starts here:

Thursday 12th October 2000
I’m riding home on the 96 tram, eyes closed in sunshine. Opposite me sits a Russian conversation, light, friendly, two young women. Into the seat beside me settles the familiar smell of garments impregnated with old tabacco smoke. I glance across the aisle, then rest my eyes again. Age stained skin under thin hair, in his seventies, stooped. Across the aisle a mother carries a newborn baby in a sling at her breast.
The cushion shifts - he’s risen; a short journey? I see him returning from the ticket machine. He seems a little giddy with the effort, and he sits himself down again. This is when I notice his breathing: shallow, constricted, hoarse. I slowly identify advanced emphysema, and am bewildered, trapped; the sound has waited in my memory eleven years to surprise me, now: the the sound of my father, in hospital, dying. Age 76. Age stained skin under thin hair. I turn my face to the window and cry silently in warm sunshine, hoping he doesn’t notice, not wanting to burden him. The Russian chatter continues. Some time later, it can only be ten or fifteen minutes, I feel him leave.

No description is ever complete. Words select experience, and even the naming of an experience is approximation; no two moments are exactly alike. What we know we’ve experienced is less than what is actually sensed, and what is sensed is still less than reality. No description is ever complete.



Be with me. Be with me. Allow my small dance, allow me to be open to you, accept the overlap of our room, gaze, breath, touch, just as it is, but entirely as it is. How clearly can you be present with me? How simply can you be still with me? Do not hide behind moving, behind moving me. Allow moving to come from the act of being we share, the being we create new in this instant, this present which extends fraction of second and joins now with now with us with floor with gravity.
For me, this internal technique precedes external technique - the learnt vocabulary of lifts, hooks, balances. ‘Internal’ is a misnomer - it would be as easy to label them psyche and soma, subtle and gross, but the one is always reflected in and reinforced by the other. Alexander never spoke separately of mind and body, always referring to a ‘psychophysical whole’. I need much practise, and it is easier to start practising internal form with stillness, with simple movement, with pedestrian movement. Pedestrian movement is not merely pedestrian if I come back to being, and being with, and being in - self, other, room, community. Being is a journey as long as my life. It is the challenge that changes as I change. If I can’t maintain my body-mind in pedestrian movement then practising something else is just practising a separation of being and doing.


Centre first. One of the most important things I learnt in my first term at the Alexander School was the importance of first finding the potential wholeness at the centre of someone, the kernel of integration, rather than their faults or misuse. It is essential to acknowledge and allow a person’s existing integrity, and to let this expand to include their faults, rather than to approach them through their faults. If you take the fault first, you have a distorted picture of the person, and can easily miss an underlying cause. I didn’t learn this from the teachers, initially; I learnt it first from being a student amongst students.
Before moving. Listen for their centre.
My body, in some ways, has rarely been worse than now; I’m once more one of the clumsiest people on the floor. In other ways I’ve never been better. Soon I hope to be able to stand, and even walk, more easily. I acknowledge the skill of those of you who have done more with your bodies than me. If you find it incongruous to read me here, listen for the centre. I may never again be as fit as I was in July ‘98 - though I’m not giving up just yet. I do hope to have the freedom I had then, and more. That is not certain. Life is in the being of it.


Groups. I have two problems with groups. The first is the simplest. In the context of CI, group movement tends to become more choppy, rougher, and contact comes from more directions more unpredictably. I used to love this, but have found it too dangerous when I’m carrying injuries - most of this year!
Less understandably, I’m simply scared of groups. This is a broader context than CI. Random crowds are fine, but social situations - foyers at interval, parties - often wrack my nerves, and it’s been this way as far back as kindergarten. This is rarely a problem at CI in terms of dancing, but can make me taciturn at the social periphery of the room.
Why do I say this? I am not asking for special treatment, and in any case I prefer candour to politeness. What I ask is that you don’t take offence, unnecessarily.


It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take the time to find what interests him. - Adam Phillips 2

1980. I start the Music course at La Trobe Uni, and am finally experiencing minimalism and chance as fundamental processes in music. The first thing I learn is about my own attention, and its limits: perception, ebb and flow, meandering and steady. One limit of attention is boredom, and this gives me a revelation, that boredom can be the beginning of a useful process, is even sometimes a necessary path. I’ll use ‘boredom’ loosely; I’ll not distinguish between loss of interest, and attention wandering elsewhere. In either case boredom could be accepted as a lack of discrimination in the process being offered in the music, a reminder that I am back to surface structure; or it might indicate impatience to attend to some other goal. One then has the choice. Attend to something else; or re-engage with the music. Accepting disengagement, rather than fighting it, allowed me to re-engage.
Not exactly waiting for someone else, he is [...] waiting for himself. - Adam Phillips 3


Use. I’d hoped to say more of the Alexander work, of spirals4 and the jaw5, but that will have to wait for another time (another author?). For now, just this point: the key element of Alexander work is not posture; it is ‘use’, the use of body and mind together. Posture is only a symptom of use. Under ‘use’ there are some half dozen themes which Alexander taught as ways of engaging with the body-mind.


Small dance. It’s not just a warm-up, not merely an exercise. For some it is the key to CI. Small dance is part of my practice for its own sake. I overlay it with BMC’s cellular awareness, with Deborah Hay’s meditation of paradox, with Butoh multi-image/multi-focus, and back to simply itself, the shifting play of freedom and potential, the movement in stillness, the stillness at the border of movement.
Change the world - be still with someone.


1989. I stopped performing in ‘89; the last piece, a mixed media performance piece was as far as I wanted to go with technology. I was tired of the disjunction between studio and stage, of the packing and hauling and cabling that made an hours performance a days preparation and cleanup, just for hardware.
I decided if I ever went back to performing, it would be with the simplest technology I could think of - my body.
I also vowed never to become caught up in bodily technique. Doing a music course you see a lot of student performances, and, given very little thought, will be struck by the problem of good musical technique but poor performance. My response was to take the Drama components available at La Trobe, and though I made a terrible actor, I later put together some good music-theatre pieces.
But for the time being, 1989, I’d done enough. Both as performer and composer I was having a crisis of technique. I’d said all that was immediately necessary. The rest could, should, wait. Then Dad died, I fell into my first full-time job, and nine years passed.


Friday 13th October 2000
He is still dopey from the anaesthetic. We carry him out to a favourite tree where he can piss. Arthritic hips and degenerate disks: he can no longer cock a leg, nor run, and with the anaesthetic he needs help just to stand. He submits to the new indignity calmly, this animal I’d seen race the wind for joy, golden fur streaming back from him, a shock and thrill of speed, the most graceful runner I’ll ever know. After a few hours the anaesthetic starts to dissipate. He still can’t walk, but has spasms of shivering. We can’t tell if it is pain, exhaustion, or some reaction to the anaesthetic. I dim the lights. I put a hand to his nape, and ask for contact. Gradually the shivering subsides. Finally his breath frees and deepens. It’s the longest time he’s allowed this still contact.


Core Contact. A teacher once offered the image of all our different modes of experience and perception being available simultaneously, that the connections and relations are always there. Accessing one is not a matter of changing awareness so much as moving or giving attention to the experience: listening, or attending; using oneself in a way that doesn’t interfere with the listening.
One doesn’t strain to listen; one stops doing the things that interfere with listening.
There is a mode of contact which some people label ‘chi’, some call a ‘neural awareness’ or field (denoting direct experience of an aspect of another person’s nervous system activity). If these aren’t the same, there is at least some overlap. I’ll call it ‘core contact’.
Disbelief negates possibility. My experience is that it is possible to direct another person through a sensory contact that precedes any mechanical change in touch. If you haven’t experienced this, you might dismiss me by saying I’m merely experiencing (giving) very subtle changes in mechanical touch, so small that I don’t perceive them as tactile changes, but nonetheless find (give) some kinaesthetic direction from (through) them. I can’t prove this, nor construct a disproof 6. But here are some clues:
1) Being directed, I experience the cues throughout my body, as an impulse to change motion.
2) It only seems to work when both people have a clear experience of core contact.
3) Working with someone inexperienced in this I could distinguish clearly the physical cues for movement - which they couldn’t entirely inhibit, at that time - and the core contact cues: they were simultaneous and distinct.
But directing someone/being directed is not my primary interest in core contact. Just finding it, being with someone in this relation or interaction is wonderful. I associate it with affirming self, other, mutuality, acknowledging the endless humming universe surrounding us, within us, connecting us.


So this is why - why I do CI, and why I do it the way that I do - because of these faiths and needs and understandings:
that the internal form supports the external;
that core contact is available, and is precious;
that giving time for absence is part of finding oneself;
that I am afraid of age and disability and death;
that each year my injuries take longer to heal, and heal less fully;
that I am not ready to give up.
That there is a wholeness available at the centre of each person; and, touching that, allowing the touch, makes us most alive to each other, to ourselves, to the world.
That what it is to be alive, what is available to us, is still a mystery.

References
1 John Cage, Juilliard Lecture, 1952; reproduced in A Year From Monday (Calder & Boyars, 1968) p.99
2 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored ch. 7, On Being Bored, p.73 (Faber & Faber, 1993)
3 ibid., p.72
4 Raymond Dart, Voluntary Musculature in the Human Body: The Double-Spiral Arrangement, first published in The British Journal of Physical Medicine, v.13 n.12:265-8, Dec 1950, and reproduced in Skill and Poise (STAT Books, 1996)
5 Raymond Dart, The Postural Aspect of Malocclusion, first published in The Official Journal of the Dental Association of South Africa, v.1 n.1:1-21, Sep 1946, and reproduced in Skill and Poise (STAT Books, 1996)
6 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, ch.1 section 6: Falsifiability as a Criterion of Demarcation. (Unwin Hyman, 1990, 4th rev.; tr. Logik der Forschung, 1934)


vol 6 ed 1 - ed 2 - ed 3&4 - 2003
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