Unarchiving: Amnesia & Innocence
"Losing self
--between room
--zwischenraum
-aim-"
Naptime
Netflix
Masturbate
Sit Down
Time for a coffee
This was a hard one. “Losing self”, alone, evokes drama and survival reactions. My first impulse would be to grasp wildly to not lose my “self!”. But this is a bit forced and obvious and disconnected to a more warm and dropped-in body.
Between room and zwischenraum. I think zwischenraum might be a german expression that means something very specific, but I’m not sure exactly. I remember maybe someone explaining this, but I can’t totally recall. It’s familiar but amnesiac without me even trying.
Losing myself is not hard, neither is being between states or being undecided, necessarily. The difficulty for me lies in the worker mode of needing to bring my body to a state or an exploration that would match something of indecision but with an angle of losing an orientation of my desires or my intentions. I feel mostly a lack of energy and lack of motivation. I want to take a nap, but that would be too much. I need to stay between a nap and an active, “worker” state. I cannot fall fully into struggle either. It’s a state perhaps that I need to allow rather than generate. It makes me sleepy and bored though. This energetic field often signals danger to me in the possibility of losing time in the time I’ve carved out to focus and/or in the space I’ve decided to rent out for dancing, or make for experimenting.
Thinking about it, Netflix or masturbation or sitting down or thinking I need a coffee is a coping mechanism against exhaustion. Perhaps I feel that I cannot fully rest or allow myself such and indulgence in the face of a sense of “so much work” that needs to get done. I do, indeed lose myself. I’m operating at half power and half spirit and half concentration…which is potentially something, and most definitely it is absolutely increasing and cultivating an energetic drain.
AIM. Even doing Sara Shelton Mann pointing and precision practices is hard to maintain. What’s the point really?
Maybe zwischenraum needs a collapse or a giving in. ?
I tell people in contact improv class when they’re rolling the point of contact with their partner that instead of forcing an awkward trajectory and possibly skipping over a solid point of contact that they can instead pause and be with that awkward point for a moment. Take a breath. No need to do or go anywhere. It’s a resting spot like an outlook point on a hiking trail. Hang there for a while. Be present. Let the moment shift your awareness and intensity and inner state. Feel the gravity of silence and stillness and the breath of you and also your partner. Something will happen. The point will want to move, the body will want to move. It, something, will happen. The path will present itself when it’s ready.
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR, aid programm DIS-TANZEN by the Dachverband Tanz Deutschland
