Hellene Gronda

The Given: taken for granted, known, fixed, what "just is," substance also an unexpected blessing, bounty, grace, bonus.

I am dancing with you. My skin is in contact with yours. I feel the weight of my body falling toward the floor, or swept along by a horizontal velocity. I try and feel where you are, where your weight is going. Our pleasure and safety depend on a heightened awareness of our bodies. In CI everything, ultimately, must be shared. If I share my weight with you, I also share my history, my genetic and cultural baggage, my psychic and my physical peculiarities. I bring my possible futures, my hopes and dreams. There is no ideal body but ideally, the body which is in space and time will communicate. The actual body - the given body - will make its presence felt. In dancing, the 'given' is that place from where we must start, our unique embodied ënow.' It is the gift of the moment. The present of the present.

It can't be argued with, but it can be ignored. I can be so disconnected from where this substance is that I end up injuring myself or my partner. We are dancing. I am dancing with you. But I am also imagining the moves I would like to be making. I am wishing that you would take my body up and onto your shoulders so I could experience flying. Or I am hoping that you will follow me to the floor because there I feel much safer, more in control. Compare and contrast. I am thinking about my skill level, and comparing it to yours - this might make me feel bad, or good. I am also catching glimpses of people I like, or dislike, or a dance that looks more or less interesting than ours. Compare and contrast.
My materiality is inescapable. I am my body, moving inexorably through time and space. How strange that I struggle to become "more" embodied...

This, my body, the place where I will die. I can't know much about death, but I do know that it will be here, in my body. Really feeling that is a peak experience - I can't force it and I can't sustain it.
I am dancing now. Yet I am also comparing this dance to past dances, good and bad. Plans for this evening and memories of yesterday drift into my mind. I might be hoping that this dance will never end, or wishing that it were over. I might be deliberately avoiding the dance, as in "quick, think about something else!" I am cursing that I can't have this dance after my next technique class. Compare and contrast. I am imagining telling my friends about this dance, afterward over coffee. The virtual and the actual are engaged in a fierce competition. So in what sense could I be said to be present to my dance? My body is clearly doing it, but where am "I"? Why is it so difficult to come into the body, to "drop in" as they say, when it is also in the most literal way, unavoidable?

Dance with the body you have. Dance the dance you are dancing. It's like a mantra. That's the only way to get the gift in the given. Doorways appear if you actually look at the walls. But the present can be a frightening or an abusive place. What kind of a gift is that? "Now" can be a place you don't want to be... but then you can't move out of danger till you realise you're in it. Improvising, I practice accepting my actual body as a starting place.
Sometimes, it's just boring.
Boredom. I reach a plateau in my dancing, feel bored and frustrated with the moves I could make, feel trapped and inauthentic, like I'm just "making it up." (Of course, in a way that's what improvising is ... I like how Martin Hughes puts it: "I'm making it up, but I follow it.") Feeling stuck, losing the connection to whatever it is that creates the feeling of connection, has happened to me in all the forms of improvisation I've trained in. A frustration worsened by the sure knowledge I can't willfully overcome this state. Why can't I stay in the place of authenticity? Why do I have to get stuck? Questions steeped in resentment, laments against reality, a grown-up form of foot-stomping. Waiting for something to be given. What is the given in that moment? It is, like it or not, boredom.

Can I affirm the boredom itself as a valuable place to be? Be more bored, be really bored and stuck and frustrated, go into the experience as far as is possible, go as deep as I can. A metaphysics reveals itself about "the seed of the solution lies in the problem." Affirmation rather than cure. This is the dance I am having. This is the body I've got. Western philosophy has spent a lot of time being bored with the body. The body is part of "the given, as such": what can be taken for granted, what is unchangeable, fully knowable, determined, the bottom line. Yet in movement improvisation your own bodily state and signals can become the creative source. You start with the given and discover its gifts.
This, my body, the place where I will die, the place where I live.
Dancing teaches my own familiar body gateways, paths and options that I could never predict. This material world might be maya - illusion - but there is no escaping it. There's no way out, but there are ways through. Ecstatic, gorgeous, unexpected gifts of the present.

vol 6 ed 1 - ed 2 - ed 3&4 - 2003 vol 5 ed 1 - ed 2 - ed 3 - ed 4 - 2002 vol 4 ed 1 - ed 2 - ed 3 - ed 4 - 2001 vol 3 ed 1 - ed 2 - ed 3 - ed 4 - 2000 vol 2 ed 1 - ed 2 - ed 3 - ed 4 - 1999 vol 1 ed 1 - ed 2 - ed 3 - ed 4 - 1998

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