Blue Oak Ranch Oct. 11, 2014 (Duskin, Gretchen, Carolina)

Featured image: the dance of three.

1.dancer- on the table

2. witness- doing the work/ practioner

3. container- (blue oak trees, other humans, grasses, animals, wind…) holding the space

speaking

< Notes from DUSKIN
yesterday, i went to another part of ohlone land, to the hills above santa clara county, to a place called Blue Oak reserve.

what did I experience…. first, what i am thinking:

kevin”s choreography nicely echoed a common sense description of a basic performance relationship. performer, audience, theatre. actor, participant, stage. dancer, watcher, floor.
kevin’s figuration, has the person on the table receiving the cranial sacral treatment as the dancer. kevin, as witness ( like the audience) this figuration echoes the acknowledgement in theatre studies of how much contribution the audience does by allowing the performed events (fictional or otherwise) to happen.
then other people and the landscape, are figured as the “container”…
the pressing ever present relations. the other participants are invited to become with, or open to the already with the landscape, and sink into the awareness of the land and air, holding the dancer. capacitating the dance.
( i like how this figuration, puts the people on a flat ontology with the rest of the participants who are togethering the container, the oak trees, the birds, the grasses, the santa clara valley…)

i was reminded of reading about the yage ceremonies which raise and lower different nets of relations in the selva. nets of dangerous venomous creatures and plants, nets of delicious foods and prey.

~ i found myself wanting to offer Kevin, Frank LaPena’s book about dance in Indigenous Northern California….and Reyna Ramirez’s book about Santa Clara county – called Native Hubs~

what i felt. starting at the end. i jumped up and shouted in joy for the sun that just set. i often want to spring into motion and prance about after cranial sacral treatment, or massage, or acupuncture or mediation. I usually stay slow out of respect for my sense of genre, that these physical genres are supposed to left slowly….
my first slow move was to turn on my left side to watch the sun set..

before that laying, there focusing on the ingathering before movement. feeling a wave of filling energy gathering, and when i didn’t move, the wave withdraws, and then my focus alerts me to the gathering again, and withour moving it withdraws agains, i thought it felt like the wave of energy moving up the spine and roling forward through the cranium and back down the frontbody as described by some cranial sacral practictioners who have treated me. once my thoughts figured, the wave like energy sequence
of ingathering and observing, with the story from those theorpists, then i felt the wave of moving in myspine and body but a kind of expaned energy body not bounded at the edge of my epidermis rather extending out into the container like a lightning bolt hitting a bay, seeming to dissipate as the lighting divides into more and more tendrils til its fuzzy or mushy,

the mushy edge of my felt imagined energy field in the container.

early , while kevin touched my face i felt falling up through my face, with a visual echo behind my eye lids, of a kelidiscope of gold.white framed retangles with curved sides ( like islamic lattice work) expanding from center of field of vision, a visual complement of the senseation of falling up.

earlier, i experience the rocking of the ocean, like i was a boat or maybe even feeling the edge of the continent with the ocean lapping the edge, but also like i might be waves and water sloshing intensely but comfortably.

earlier, i felt a falling experience similar to the one Caro, described earlier, i was energized but not scared, my thoughtfeeling was this sensation as the free falling of orbital rotation with the planet. (or could it be one of the birds)

the entire session as the dancer, was marked and remarked with narrative visions. these visions had full sensory range, sight, aural, probably scent. some popular media leaking into the visions. but also lots of strange dramatic narrative, like dreams, of people I don’;t know. some intense emotional experiences like profound irritation becoming anger, similar to the irritations and angers that i experience, but it wasn’t mine in the narrative, somehow the container intervened at the height of the rage and allowed me to let it go to let it dissolve… and a fell out of the vision back into my own body— this was just one of the many intense narrative visions i experienced.

my session as dancer was also littered with memories and echoes of dreams and visions from sleep and other trances. such as several years ago, i went to a guided hypnosis, and there i had this vision of walking on a path that led up still connected to the earth, an earthen tendril out into space until i was looking at the earth from an orbital like view but still standing on the path connected to the earth, and gold tendrils of light twined from all over the planet like a diagram of the magnetic fields of the planet, but penetrated through my body giving me feelings of connection or at least responsivity to suffering or so many beings. i sobed and cryed.

another dream vision, i reconnected with was a dream where I was a small deer, and when I woke up my body still felt like deer’s and i was super scared until the deer body slowly faded out of my flesh…

~~~~~
when i was with the container, i enjoyed the other parts of the container, moving and osscilating out of background attention into foregournd, rippling changes in scale and focus. the continent, the planet, a bird, the raven’s call at the end of gretchen’s session, a particular tree and its’ interconnections into the soil giving giving the hill its form and holding it all together.

the texture of bark onthe tree., the breathing of the wind, the dancer and the witness,

and so on
“`
out of time to write for now.

thanks kevin.
duskin drum
dwdrum@ucdavis.edu
Performance Studies
University of California, Davis

strong>Comments by Asia Seltzer (experiencing the work as a container):
I feel like I am taking part in an embodiment ritual
finding /exploring practices that help connect people to their bodies and through their bodies they connect to the ecology
creating more immediacy between them and their surroundings

immediacy – what kind do you mean?

less filters between them and their surroundings

different kind of interconnectedness

because of hectic lifestyle, working on computers, living stressed out, we put all these filters between us and our surroundings

-people are experiencing their bodies again as if it is brand new- they are remembering how to experience their bodies with that immediacy

then through discovering the body again for the first time you can come back into relation to the things around you for the first time

you can then start making choices about how you come into contact with the things around you and decide whether you want to come into a different relationship to the ecology that is you and not you

it gives them this choice?

when you are already here plugged in its hard to make a choice

when you release the pattern through attending to the body differently you sense into another kind of way of being