Dancing With Presence

Do you ever get halfway through a dance and suddenly get hit with the thought,

Boring. Same old same old. Going through the motions.

What is the North American default response to boredom?

More stuff.

Stuff more stuff into the dance. Learn more steps, more tricks and flicks. Be busier. Dance faster.

The Tango bumper sticker version of “Whoever dies with the most stuff wins,” – Whoever crams the most kicks and spins into a tanda wins.

And yet, your dance can still feel routinized, dry, empty, tedious.

How can my dances still feel empty even when I have stuffed them with everything I know?

Isn’t more always more? Not always. Sometimes less is more.

Boredom is seldom the result of simplicity or repetition of the steps. Often the simplest dance can be the most the most engaging and enriching. Conversely, a technical dance can also leave you feeling empty or alone.

What is the key ingredient that keeps our dancing engaging, exciting at all times, no matter what the technical difficulty? 

Presence.

The movement exercises with which Tracy Stafford has begun our classes for the last four weeks have reminded me of a great learning that I took away from a workshop, “Presence in Motion”  in San Francisco several years ago with Lucinda Hayden and Tom Wilson. 

Lucinda Hayden, international Focusing* Instructor, defines presence: 

“Presence requires staying centered and present in one’s own self, and at the same time listening with your whole body to your partner’s motions and emotions. ThIs requires flexibility, adjustment, and adaptation, always in an environment of safety, trust, respect, honesty.” 

We bring our whole selves to the dance.  We listen to ourselves, our partner, the floor and the music. We seek out the sensual as well as the elegant. We embrace each dance and our partner with curiosity, non-judgment, creativity. We infuse motion with emotion. 

Tom Wilson, Aikido instructor and owner of La Pista Tango Studio,  begins each dance instruction segment of the workshop with a presence/ mindfulness exercise with the anagram GRACE:

Grounding/ Relaxation/ Awareness/ Centering/ Energy

We begin with grounding, rooting ourselves into the floor, feeling our physical and psychic weight pull us down into the earth beneath us. Then we draw energy back up from the centre of the earth to our own center.

Next is relaxation. Shaking shoulders, breathing in and out, loosening the hips, the legs, the hands. Letting go of all tension, anxiety, expectations and agendas.

Awareness pulls us into our senses. Sights and sounds, touch. Where we are in the room. Where we are in relation to our partner.

Centering involves accessing our core self, our power centres. Touching base with our chakras. Aligning our axis. Checking what is going on inside and finding our inner dancer. 

Energy is the last stage, preparing us to move into the dance. Sensing the eagerness and responsiveness of our bodies to the invitation of the dance. Testing the softness and bounce in our knees, sensing resilience, alertness, shifting weight, inviting power into our legs and hips. 

Now we are ready to move forward with our partner. Basic motions: walking, stepping in harmony with shared energy.

Simple. Not easy.

But instead of it feeling redundant or boring, we feel enriched by the presence that each of us is bringing to the engagement. 

We feel the dance resonating through our entire body, into our being. 

We are enlivened by the closeness with our partner.

Our senses tingle to the weight of an arm on our shoulder, the warmth and gentleness of the handhold, the brush of skin on our cheek.

Our bodies pulse with the rhythm of the music.

We pause, we breathe, relax our embrace, strengthen our frame, collect, center and then again fold our being into Presence..

*Focusing is a mindfulness method, which teaches you how to listen to yourself in a way that helps your experience become more clear, similar to how a camera lens goes from fuzzy to ‘in focus’. This process was observed and later developed into what is now known as Focusing, a felt sense (Eugene Gendlin, 1981). A felt sense is not a mental experience but a physical one, a bodily awareness of a situation, person, event, an internal aura that encompasses everything you feel and know about the given subject at a given time. This knowledge is encompassed during focussing and communicates the whole to you all at once, rather than detail by detail (Gendlin, 1981, p.37).