Movin' Easy Dancewear

Ballet brings me to the essentials of a Multiple dimensional paradise with Directional accelerations, Surprising anticipations, Multiple torques and crossings, Awakenings of electrical pathways long sense forgotten.

Ballet brings me to the essentials of  Multiple dimensional rejuvenation with Momentum of intimacy, Excellence of vulnerability, Unionof personality.

What more can I ask?

My ballet teacher is a Samurai.  Long tradition of the broad stance.  Breadth of knowledge of inhale and exhale.  Attuned senses to rhythms of breeze and storm.  Calibrated personalities from fierce to receptive.

What more can I ask of a teacher than to bring me into these well worn and infinitely changing moments of splendor.

 What more can I ask of myself than to enter with full exuberance even as my brain and body fail to understand the necessities of stalking stillness in circular pathways.

Finally taking ballet after so many years of delight in modern dance, improvisational dance, ballroom dance, and after so many explorations with healers and dancers into the inner worlds.

So finally I understand that dance gives me access to all of myself, not just my body, not just my ability to understand excellence.  Dance gives me access to a sense of myself, my personality, and my interaction with other dancers.

How does dance do this for me?  I can only ask my Samurai dance teachers how they are able to move my balking body and reticent spirit into so many states of quietness and boldness, simplicity and complexity.  How are these masters of dance able to knit together my infinite possibilities both seen and unseen.

My dance teacher’s words have changed the way I think, feel, and move.  I learned the value of keeping at least one area of my body open and relaxed while every other muscle is fully engaged.

“You don’t need to pull down your “lats,” let the muscles between your shoulder blades melt down your back.”  Arletta Logan in Pilates and in Ballet class.

“While your whole body is attentive, keep the space between your eyebrows open, relaxed, expansive.”  Powell Shepherd, student of Mary Wigman, in Modern Dance class.

“You have all the stamina you need for running toward something or running to meet someone.  Let light burst out of your solar plexis toward that.”  Deborah Hay in The Circle Dances, 1976 Austin,Texas

What dancer explores cell intelligence?  Since the 1970′s Deborah Hay has based her dance works on exploring the intelligence of the cells.  She uses the focus on the cells to bypass patterns of mind and body that limit the types of  movements as well as the creative and personal experience of the dancer.  She even anticipated the research that finds that cells have “eyes.”   See the science here:  http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/g-buehler/FRAME.HTM     See Deborah at  http://www.deborahhay.com

Finally!  We begin to understand dance from a viewer’s point of view and see how much interaction is taking place in the whole human system.  Here are some links to interactive video of dance with visual annotation of movement lines, cues, and alignments.

http://motionbank.org

http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/

 http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html

http://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/content.html#/TheDance

From this point, we can really look at a fraction of the information that our brains and bodies are taking in as we view dance.  I want to see the connections in the viewer’s brain as they interact with each piece of information.  And I want to hear the stories of choreographers and viewers as they encounter their own surprises, emotions, memories, wishes, and unknowable spaces where the dance takes them.

Thank you to Deborah Hay for her work that has immensely influenced the direction of this exploration.

 Tim Hurst04/13/13

Dancer Explores Insomnia.   Insomnia is a place to explore in moves and sounds.  In the Renaissance, the morning times between3 a.m.and5 a.m.were times of reflection when many people wrote in their journals or sang songs or simply reflected on their lives.  We are at a time once again when reflection is called for in order to navigate the heavy currents of change.

 Now as in the Renaissance, many chose to medicate their morning restlessness.  Yet a large number of artists and devotees of the inner life managed to benefit from the quiet solitude of the time somewhere around 3:33 a.m.and 4:44 a.m. that some call “angel time.”

 My morning reflections bring rich moments to my mind and body that can be called healing.  From a few faint humming sounds emerge soft songs and gentle moves of arms, head, and spine seem to join on their own.  Fingers, hands, and wrists seem to yearn to cross the mid-line of my body and my head follows suit sometimes in the opposite direction.

The faintness and gentleness of my sounds encourage my slight movements and engender a fluidity that I do not see in my daytime hours.  The movement of song and body join in ways I do not understand and what emerges is a gentleness with myself, a forgiveness of the roughness with which I carry on my daily life.

 Standing in this unique place, I have come to explore a Personal Presence of Life within me that never stops waking me to newness and to something deeper in my life.  I have learned slowly to trust this Personal Presence of Life as greater than myself and something I can call upon when the seas of emotions and consequences overwhelm my mind and body.

 The result is a different view of sleep as a grateful gift.  The waking hours of morning are a time to nurture myself in joining the gentleness of quiet with fluidity of movement and the soaring beauty of song.

The urge is always to get up like I am right now and create.  My encouragement to myself is to stay in bed within the gentleness for at least one or two hours.   Sometimes I will allow myself to get up for a brief time to write or dance using Ballet or Tai Chi.  Then I enter the quiet of the bed for more integration of the Personal Presence of Life.   TimHurst 040213

Movin Easy pointe shoe specialist, Lilia Benavides checks the fit Carla’s first pair of pointe shoes. Ballet Austin teacher, Libby James okays the fit.

Looks like she’s taking home a Suffolk Pointe Shoe. Good luck to all the girls at Ballet Austin we fit this Saturday! We wish them a Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Sewing Day!

Why such a big difference in the men’s and women’s gymnastic teams?  A ten year old tells it all.

I said, “The Women’s USA Gymnastic team should teach the men how to do that.”   My ten year old granddaughter said,  “It’s not going to happen.”

I said, “Why?  What’s the difference?”  She said, “The men can’t dance.”