Offering Over Telling

Offering

Over

Telling

To offer, to share, to invite. These are kind words, they build an atmosphere of trust and possibility. 

When being told how to move, we can often find ourselves tying a steadfast mooring rope around the body of the ‘teacher’ and of our own. Our bodies are tethered with brute force to fly with the winds of technique and historic dance class disciplines. 

But, the rope slackens and our bodies broaden when we are ‘invited’, when we are ‘offered’, when we are ‘shared’ with. Movement is simply that, it’s no longer a code to decipher, a test to get right or wrong, it shifts into a more joyful space.

Growth Cycles

Today I asked a body to exist outside of itself for just a second. To ground one part of its being where it currently was and shift its physical form away from it, always leaving something behind. It helped me to see growth. That wasn’t the aim, the aim was to create imagery for movement but as I ritualised this process, I thought about my own growth. 

She is here                 she is here                she is here.

The spaces where we ground ourselves, shift ourselves, reestablish ourselves are our growth cycle. This is how we move through. Not against. Nobody really needs to know that in order to grow, we grow in so many different ways constantly without wankily intellectualising it. But this helped me trust my own growth cycle. 

The Importance of Nooks:

I’m a social butterfly who, instead of having babies and dying off for the winter months, retreats to a nook. Preferably, a nook with a book. My favourite nooks have a hard exterior and a soft interior to support my body but feed me comfort. I feel as though nooks are different for everybody. Some bodies fancy their nooks as a safe space, some need them to be grassy or watery, for some it’s simply a quiet corner of their brain- a happy place or memory. 

But my nook is square, I’m much like a cat in the way that boxed spaces attract me most. My nook has books. I’m not an avid reader but I am an escapist artist, which is to say that I am an artist in need of escape. An escape that books provide quite well. 

My nook has me, an artist, a dancer, a fiercely quiet mover committed to social change and the liberation of bodies through movement.

My nook takes the weight off my feet, pelvis, spine, and head for a minute. It allows my body to adjust to being in the brain space, to rest. And I know you’re going to laugh when I say rest, but I hope you don’t. I hope you unlearn that terrible dancer mentality of never feeling like you’re allowed rest. 

So please, draw, visualise, create or find your own nook… and find rest.