Summer, end of season and writing
- Berrak Yedek
- 1. 7.
- Minut čtení: 5
It is Monday and 18:07 and of course I am a little late for writing the blog. However my day was full with events and thoughts, sensations and actions, even with short daydreams.
It started with a walk in the forest with Gigi and the summer air was really taking me into its dimensions. The heat was carrying various smells into my nostrils: dried grass, freshly dried out mud, flowers sweating, shits, dead animals and the fragrances of herbs and flowers of summer, the stones in the heat and the cut tree trunks letting out their intense perfume.
A true delight in all aspects, plus the hot air, at times burning sun, and cooling shades… Coming up the hill through the trees and meeting the fields, which have been cut last week, I am always touched by the ever changing landscape of the fields. and this time two dears greeted us and then merrily hopped away over the meadow. It was too hot for Gigi to run after, but she did just for 20 meters and then turned around and came back to the shade with her tongue hanging out from the left :)
The walk was inspiring and I was not thinking much because I had been thinking a lot before during the week. My thinking was crowned by the experience of the last workshop of the season. I was blessed with the beauty that happened during the work. The participants had a very honest and deep presence. As if they had agreed, they all had a healthy gravity, and a well balanced joy in them, although inside everyone came with a unique luggage of past experiences. Magically the work took us to the ‘true encounters’ as my dear colleague Beliz would say. And I was able to close my last notebook of the season, filled with notes, comments, ideas and impressions of the lessons at the end of the workshop.
Intimate and ephemeral relationships
The workshop was about the expression that happens during the dance. This time the work was more for experienced improvisers and participants familiar with Somatic Dialogue. I had the intention of making them experience the birth of expression in the body and the mind then meeting this physical movement expression with the imagination and ideas or internal images, as opposed to thinking of an expression and then letting it shape the movement or dance.
It was fascinating for me to see how the expression of each person was slowly emerging from their depths, at first shyly or even bored, but with time and patience the participants were spellbound by the expressions flowing through their bodies.
On the second day of the workshop the participants worked in duos and had the task to lead a movement dialogue with each other, without touching each other physically nor having direct eye contact. A very interesting space of relationship opened and magical moments caressed our skins, making our eyes water. The intention came true in its purest form: Intimate and ephemeral relationships happened between each person in the couples. Light and dark, life and death all met in the in-between space.
The fear of death
Somehow the theme of death was present during the weekend and invited me to think about it more: in our body life and death are coexisting phenomena, they either follow each other and happen simultaneously. For example we have dead tissues and living tissues that make our shape. We even honour and embellish and decorate our dead tissues. Our cells die and are recreated, our breath too, our ideas die, fade, our body is constantly killing its precedent shape and moves steadily towards death.
Relationships die and are recreated and when we dance the movements we shape, and the expression we witness is dissolved into the moment with every other step, every transfer of weight, every fall and rise. And our emotions are high and as soon as the experience ends, at one moment the emotions fall low.
How is it then that we are still so afraid of dying, of aging, of keeping the traces of time on us? Why do we spend so much time to forget and distract ourselves away from death… and by preventing death and time to mark us we forget to live fully, accepting that as we live something, another thing in us must die. (I am not thinking right now of sudden death, or accidents or the horrors of war and murder, but of the idea of dying)
I’d like to think that we can dance ourselves closer to the idea of death. As we connect more and more deeply with our body and its sources, the physical ones as well as the non-physical ones, we can “feel” the acceptance, and understand it in an embodied way. When we are fully present in an improvisation and can accompany our actions with our mind, we experience something very strong, it is as if we “touch” the life inside of us. And when it is over this strong sensation, or moment of consciousness is gone. Like a little death, a breath, a sigh, a tickling on the skin… and even the memory of it dies, and we just keep the bliss of the moment.
Magical workshop and end of season
I could go on writing about these moments, but I should really bring them into the book :) Yes, the workshop has been magical. And it is fulfilling to close the season like this. However we are not closing the work. A lot is happening in the studio’s mind and preparations 🙂
This month however is my month of writing. I am very excited, dear reader, and please accept my excitement: my dear friend and writer and storyteller Nazli Çevik Azazi is coming to stay with me for the next 3 weeks. I have been honoured by her project and I will try to serve her the best I can: She is writing a book about Somatic Dialogue, in dialogue with me.
I am writing a book about Somatic Dialogue and the Textbook. And somehow my intuition tells me we will finish the books more or less at the same time.
I will be talking with her, she will motivate me to be more and more clear about what I do, what I say, and her (a brilliant writer and storyteller) writing will motivate me to write also. How luckier can I get? I am so grateful for this encounter and for her decision to write.
It feels like the scenery from from window, the abundance and the peace of the greens of summer:
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