Tag Archives: body

Feb12

bodyscape

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(I apologize to the photographer, Marconi.  I cannot find a really good link to his work.  If any of you have one, please pass it along.)

I don’t usually include the work of other photographers in my blog.  It feels dishonest, a little like cheating.  But that is just an old tune in my head. When I find something this beautiful, it has to be shared.

Here is what I love about this photograph.  It is completely kinetic – when I look at it, I can feel the contours of the landscape in my body, can feel the breath and music of it so clearly through my terrain of skin, muscle and bone.

When I was just out of college, I took a dance improvisation workshop with the great choreographer Trisha Brown.  One of the things she asked us to do to create movement was to “read” the a wall in the studio with our movement, to translate what we saw into dance.  We all got busy dancing the basketball hoop, the windows, the bleachers, the sky beyond.  That experience kicked open a door to something that has always stayed with me – connecting what is outside with what is inside – finding that creative, generative impulse from everything around me.

I teach a workshop called Cookbook for the Bonehouse.  Here is a recipe for you:  Sometime today, maybe right now, stand up and face a direction you usually don’t.  Let your shoulders or your hips or your nose “read” (translate) whatever you are looking at into movement.  Do it again, but this time slow it way down.  Do it again fast.  What are you feeling?

Tell me about it!

 

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Feb4

landscape, bodyscape

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Laura Von Rosk

Tamara Lempicka

I have been writing about the landscape of the body and its relationship to the body of the earth and the bodies of other creatures.  About the sense of our own bodies as landscape, to be discovered, explored, savored.

These two paintings are by two of my most favorite painters.  I met Laura Von Rosk many years ago during a residency at Yaddo.  Her landscapes were the most sensuous I had ever seen.  I bought one she had done in Minnesota.  It had a perspective of gazing up the hilly thighs of a woman, across the fields of belly and breasts and into the sky beyond.   I recently reconnected with her work at a show in Hudson at the Carrie Haddad Gallery.

Lempicka’s work invites us into the contours, the hills, valleys, the hidden caves of the body.

If you lie on the floor and roll very slowly from back to side to front, how do you feel the landscape of your own body?  How effortless can you make that movement?  Continue on, rolling to your side and then ending on your back.

Imagine this as a little meditation, a way of calling the earth of your body into awareness.

If you are a rider, can you feel a deepening harmony of your body and your horse’s body as you ride?

Jan24

the attic, the basement

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Photo:  Pam White

Teaching often brings me into a state of heightened awareness and vigilance for sources and new connections.  I was talking to Pam this morning about how setting up the “Books I Love” page on my site has done this as well.  The idea to post my reading list came from Linda Stone’s site.  I love the way that resources can be passed and shared digitally and physically.

So I am culling, diving into what is old, what is new, what is still exciting. (By the time I finish, all the books will be linked).  I feel as if I have been visiting the attic and the basement of my mind, my library, my study.  The attic is a place of storage and the basement holds a different kind of energy.  I was thinking about the body and the chakras, and the relationship of the supportive holding of the basement to the lighter storeroom of the attic.

When we moved into this house, the attic was what it was originally when it was built in 1790.  Old curved chestnut beams and low ceilings.  The previous owner had put in skylights, and we insulated under the eaves and put in lights.  At first it was a playroom for the kids and held their treasures plus out-of-season clothes.  Now they are in college but the remains of their play is still there:  shelves of children’s books they elected to keep, toys and dolls they have not yet surrendered.  The basement is an old stone cave, and holds the workings of the house.

I like feeling the relationship between the two:  what sits below and above – the roots and the branches –  and feeling the relationship of all of that to my own body.  Because the body is also an archive:  a breathing reservoir of thought and movement, earth and air, above and below.

How are you feeling all (any) of that?

 

Jan18

improvisation life

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Improvisation life is not just about following the muse or being an artist.  Or about spontaneity or creativity.

It is about our choices and how we make them.  About focus.  About cultivating a continuous, flexible thread of attention to what we love.  About deep listening (see Pauline Oliveros).  About waking up to what is here right now, in this moment.  About unexpected ways of dancing with what is.

Beginning Monday, I am teaching a five-week guided meditation on moving into an improvisational life.  This is some of what I will be including:

  • ways to nourish and embody your creative practice
  • suggestions for how to reduce the commute between art and life
  • playful, improvisational ways to deepen your work and relationships
  • specific improvisational practices for movement and writing (music, painting)

Registration closes on Friday.  You can sign up here. 

Questions?  Leave a comment and I will respond.