Does this happen? On occasion? Rare occasions?
In the zone. Those experiences where the dance happens to you rather than you creating it. Lost in the moment. Caught up in, even consumed by the motion and the music. You are your partner are merged, blended, one spirit.
You are not thinking, barely even aware. Nothing is being filtered through self-reflection. You have no sense of yourself as something separate.
My partner reflected after the dance, “We were really in the zone.”
My thoughts: OK. I will take your word for it. I don’t have much of a recollection. Except that it was so smooth and effortless and without thought or complications. It just happened. Kind of a blur really. Yes, I guess we were in the zone.
We speak of the power of Tango and struggle to describe it in personal or individualistic terms. The difficulty is that it is not a personal experience. It is transpersonal or even more so, supra-personal. It is an experience of being gathered up together with another person into something greater than yourselves. It is Spirit.
Markus Scott-Alexander, (senior faculty at The European Graduate School and director of World Arts Organization, part-time resident of my hometown Edmonton) describes this experience in his book Expressive Arts Education and Therapy:
When I relax and respond to something, something opens up between me and that which I am perceiving/responding to. There is a particular quality of intimacy in that which is occurring. “The Third” opens up.
The Third then has the power to lift me to another level, to a more inspired level.
What is that phenomenon? I can say that it is always different and always the same. It holds me and fills me and opens my awareness into something magical, taking me to an inspired place.
When I work with a group of dancers, at some point, very often there is a kind of quickening and thickening in the air…. the entrance of the third.
A higher frequency infills the space between us creating a cohesion that was not there before.
It can feel holy and sacred and also clarifying and cohesion-making.
When I am relaxed, I can bring my awareness to The Third which makes it feel like it is always there. Whether it is created or acknowledged it is indeed a phenomenon that supports any creative practice and transforms an ordinary interaction into something that holds and moves the mystery.
My words for the “Third” might be the Dance, or Presence. Whatever our word for it, it is the essential spiritual experience of being caught up in something greater than ourselves, of being transformed through participation in the co-creation of something of beauty and magic.
It is being in the zone.