SHIFTING traces - series of movement workshop with HELEN KINDRED

Few weeks ago, Helen Kindred and I concluded series of online movement workshop with a wonderful and open minded participants. I would like to thank you ALL  of you who participated again for this magical opportunity. The classes were guided body experience in order to achieve a sense of femininity, softness, security, based on breathing, movement and grounding. This awareness of the kinesphere and of our personal space were restored through experiential different movement qualities that led to feeling time-space-environment expansion and to acquire more close acquaintance with body perceptions and intimacy with one’s body and the others by constantly tracking CHANGE in the body. With the use of kinaesthetic imagination and visualization we were looking for new energy forms and way how to re-connect to the social influences of the moment which can be useful for nurturing our body and safety states. We were exploring our movement capacity through experiential learning to deepen our ability to focus on ourselves and our actions and integrated Bartenieff Fundamental legacy on awareness and practice of Space Harmony Scale work. While thinking, while moving we were thinking-in-motion all the patterns of space balance in natural world and all the images and association with the Shape form including: waves, waterfalls, hills, curves, wind, whirls, twist, breeze, domes, umbrellas, mushrooms, jelly fishes, parachutes shape like… We exploited the full body ‘as’ environment. From movement to art, from movement to touch, from touch to movement, from movement to sound, from traveling in the breath, feeling weightless and floating, finding support to giving weight and widening a breath,…we walked together and prepared our intimate space, our personal cave where we could feel safe, move and balance a bit, or leave any trace…We were intentionally focused spirituality and somatically involved movement through bodily enactments within the compassion and ambiguities of existential phenomenology to the lived body. PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE is lived in a moving synthesis, in cells and tissues - held in bone, imprinted in smiles, gestures and glances,…

Moving imagination as a  special form of consciousness thus supports unlimited possibilities, nomadic wanderings, spiraling meanderings crafted and explored within moving fluids and tissues of body enable mover to loosen contingency, crafting forth new potentialities and freedoms. Understanding one’s life journey is mediated throughout TEMPORAL investigation in movement. We offered some of the movement scores (trust, breath, intuition, ritual, reflection,  befriending gravity, shifting pelvis, surrendering, vulnerability, female movement,  identity, etc.) that have emerged from these movement sessions. The scores illuminate further the somato-sensorial occurrences of thinking through the movement and offered an invitation to engage with improvised exploration; how to look at breathing without judgemental eye, where to start feeling the movement/ life force impulse or simply how to stop and being still in movement.

First Wednesday we started very calm, slow and ghostly with the traces of finding breath in our body, spiritual dynamic alignment, our ritual, roots, ghostly gestures and meaning in body parts and finished  with phenomenology of roundness (with shape of concave and convex) to find positive Inner Connectivity  & Outer Expressivity motivation for moving forward.
Second session was more about  widening space of breath and sternum with a storytelling imagination, developing hand gestures, finding movement  in the flow of weight. We were creating movement in conversation with our thoughts, emotions and state of presentness combined with 3 D movement and three planes presence with play of  STRETCH/REACH/LET GO
CONDENSE/BOW/EXPLODE

All sessions were accompanied with music the helped us to achieve a whole bodily experience.

Third guided movement exploration helped us to channel a sense of breathe, stability, connectivity, colorfulness of our body, traces, ritual and calmness within the body. Connecting with our bodies in unusual way or parts of the bodies which we may not usually associate with it, such as imagining breath within the feet. A sense of breath within that helped some of us with stability of our body and connecting the entire body to the ground from the source that connects us with the Earth combining with yield-push, reach- pull, push-pull,...

The last session was about experiencing gathering, lightness, floating, airiness, calmness, vastness of our infinite possibilities, thinking about our body as a structured or malleable entity and using visualization as a powerful tool to make those experiences less abstract, more real and intimate.  

SHIFTING traces classes offered possibility to us, as facilitators and practitioners, to be as we are, to dance as we are, to think as we are, to shift from fragility to strength, to understand how gravity and emotion works together, to find physical and spiritual alignment, to find calmness and happiness (everyone in own individual way) to find ourselves out of comfort zone through movement storytelling, evoking through rich imagination ancestral signs and creatures from mythology and perhaps reveal a sparkle of darkness in us. The most important thing is that we were working on finding ourselves in a safe space, in a shielded cave from where we could explore and witness our own rejuvenation and re-growth, with our own embodied shadows. To accept that, we accepted our wholeness, our fantasies, our femininity, our environment, our happiness. We accepted to be who we are. We accepted Others and the environment around us.