creating a/broad, March 30, 2013

Cohen's Lesson
by Cameryn Moore
@camerynmoore

It’s amazing what lessons pop out when you’re looking for them, or at least open to the idea that all experiences have a multiplicity of meaning. Moving through the world becomes something like rifling through a tarot deck, where there is no externally laid pattern, but rather a welter of images, and whatever meaning you find is what comes up in your own head after you’ve thought for a little while.

This week, as it transpired, my lessons are stillness and intention.

It’s my director’s fault. Or maybe to his credit. Probably the latter. Because while I can be quiet if I have to, my default mode is talk talk talk all bloody day long. I don’t think that I mindlessly blather—I think I have a lot of good things to say, and I’m a good speller for my Facebook status updates—but I suppose blatherers don’t think they blather, otherwise they’d stop, right? And I do enjoy the sound of my own voice, and get a little anxious during unplanned silence. I rush to fill it up, ask a question, crack a joke. Again, I’m very skilled at speaking off-the-cuff, so I entertain people. But that’s not everything that communication is about, it’s only part of the equation. What’s in the rest?

My show that’s premiering in, oh, god, a week and a half, it has a fair bit of stillness and space in it

Well, there’s listening. Making space to listen. Breathing while listening to the hard stuff, taking it in without thinking the whole time about what I’m going to say next. I ride that line all the time doing phone sex, but I certainly don’t do enough of it in the rest of my life. In phone sex, it’s easy to know what I’m listening for: yes, turn-on, or no, god, what, are you weird? It’s pretty binary, like playing Marco Polo with heavy breathing. In life, in the creating and performance of art, listening is harder, for me, at least. I don’t always know what I’m waiting for, what I am holding the stillness for.

My show that’s premiering in, oh, god, a week and a half, it has a fair bit of stillness and space in it, especially at the beginning. Most shows start with a sound effect, a word, a song. This is pure stillness, me moving around and setting the stage, with the lights set in such a way that it is clear that the audience is supposed to be witnessing this. But there is only space, and simple, utterly utilitarian movement. That goes on for only a few minutes, but in my skin, already jumpy and stretched from working on a new show, those few minutes feel like an eternity.

Now, I get why those minutes of stillness are there, those minutes and the deliberate pauses and the deep aching pauses for breath throughout Release. Tanner and I have had some pretty meta conversations about these spaces; when he found the beginning movement sequence, we talked about symbolism and meaning and blah blah blah, and I believe it. But I’m pretty sure there’s more there. I don’t know how to get there, but I think it will happen as I work more with intention.

I got a kick in the head about intention last night, watching Dance Me to the End on/off Love at Centaur Theatre. I’m not going to review it here; someone else has already done it. I’m just going to say that I have not witnessed such marvellous intentionality in movement performance for many a long day.

There are pauses there, too, or shorter beats, or just moments for a breath, maybe two or three, there is space there for micro-creating intentionality, too.

I don’t know if those performers retain the intention for every minute of every show. I find it almost impossible to imagine that they could. But even if they don’t, even if they have rehearsed that careful, open waiting quality into their bodies so that the acting of it is indiscernible from the actuality of it, at some point, in rehearsal, they spent time with that, found the focus of each movement, and sunk themselves so far into it that the only way out was to move through and wait and see what was on the other side.

I’m sure this is stuff that other performers know. Dancers or improv people or really post-modernly trained actors. I feel like I missed it somehow, coming up as I did through the ranks of burlesque, hip hop dance, comedy, improv storytelling, hell, even the spoken word that I’ve been dabbling in. These forms don’t have time for long, drawn-out pauses. But I think I have been playing only on the surface the steady stream of action and/or words that seems to define these performance genres. There are pauses there, too, or shorter beats, or just moments for a breath, maybe two or three, there is space there for micro-creating intentionality, too.

I hope so, at least. I don’t know, but I want to see if I can find a way to slow down my own sense of time, like those slow-mo bullet-dodging sequences in Matrix and others, slow down and drop deep, so that I can dance among the lines and movements and sound-cues and lights, find my careful cautious path of being between the drops of doing.

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