Right now the choreographer part of me is hungry for a group of dancers, and what I would want to explore with them is stillness. Why stillness? I hunch it is my reaction to the time we are in and the necessity of sheltering in our home. How do we handle this? We can be as busy and in full motion at home as the times when we go shopping, meet up with friends, and rush around with many errands to do, or we can decide to take some time to be really still, silent and just BE. Maybe this pandemic is asking us to do just that.
A lot of us are meditators with a regular practice, and sometimes our minds quiet down to a “stillness,” and lots of time they just don’t. I am finding it interesting that I have been meditating less the past four months, caught up in the challenges surrounding me here. Last week I had the opportunity to join a local Buddhist book group via Zoom that began with a half hour of meditation, and I was amazed at the impact of just that half hour of sitting quietly.
It has encouraged me to get back to a more regular practice of meditation, and it has also triggered my interest in wanting to choreograph a dance study exploring how to move (not even particularly fast) and then find an easy position to hold and remain there for a while until something either internally or externally calls one to move again. And then repeat the process until you find another position that calls you to be still. What does it require to hold the position? Do we tense? Do we relax into it? Are we aware of our surroundings or do they melt away? When we begin to move again what kind of movement do we want to do? Rarely do I long to have a group of dancers to work with, but creating a piece where we explore the beauty of slowly moving in and out of stillness is calling me.
I wondered if such a piece already existed and began a Google search. I found lots of writers using dance and stillness together as a metaphor for what they wanted to write about. I also found an interesting article in Dance Spirit magazine about how dancers have handled holding a pose on stage. https://www.dancespirit.com/how-to-make-the-most-of-stillness-onstage-2502557437.html But so far no link to a dance that explored going in and out of stillness as the theme of the dance and that is what I would love to do right now. So since I have no dancers to work with other than[fix]myself, and I don’t see this as a solo and my range of movement is very limited, I am thinking I can again turn to art and see what I come up with.
Probably why I am so attracted to this theme is the strong need I am feeling in my own life for just being quiet. In the book that the local Buddhist book group is reading, “Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching” by Thich Nhat Hanh, one chapter really stood out for me. It is Chapter 6, “Stopping, Calming, Resting, Healing.” I love the end, which says:
Our body and mind have the capacity to heal themselves if we allow them to rest.
Stopping, calming and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, the course of our destruction will just continue. The world needs healing. Individuals, communities, and nations need healing.
When I turned to painting, what I ended up with was a watercolor sketch that might be useful to begin creating a trio. And then later in the day, while enjoying watching a hummingbird come to our feeder, I noticed that even it found time to just rest, and I was able to catch this silhouette of the bird resting calming for quite a while before fluttering back to the feeder.
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