MOVEMENT

What the heck is movement, really?!

This is what I asked myself when I was designing my “Movement Therapy Center” in 2000 for my BIARCH Thesis Project.  Such a simple & obvious concept, & yet so abstract and all-encompassing at the same time.

I wondered why I had this hunger to design a “Movement Therapy Center”.  I knew it couldn’t Just be a “Dance Center”.  The more I dug, the more I realized “movement therapy” to be a thing, & a fascinating one at that.  I went to New York & visited Juilliard, NYU’s Tisch School of Dance, & the LABAN/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies.  I was drawn to a quote by Trudi Schoop, a comedic dancer & dance therapist, whom I recently googled & thought once again, “She is singing my song!”.  The quote was, “I envision a being, a human form as it was meant to be & to function in its complete perfect state reveling in it’s breathing exulting in its motion beautifully assertive in its total involvement with existence”.

Recently I discovered her saying, “I think most people are not really deeply involved in life. They look at life. They live, they drink their coffee in the morning, they earn money, they buy a dress; but, I think there are not many people who really feel they are living, that they have one chance to live, to see, to smell, to touch with all their senses. I think most people are bored and afraid. The more I teach, the more I realize I would like to involve the human being in life–in suffering as well as in beauty and harmony. I think we would be happier. I think we are very unhappy human beings. Of course there are moments in life when people are really happy, for example when a woman has a child. When you see how sad and miserable the faces in a town look, you realize how rare those moments of involvement are. I think when you move you become involved and you learn to love yourself. When you love yourself you love life, you love others, you love!”

HELLO!  I share these sentiments so often, & it’s thoughts like these that have inspired Messy Monkey (@ it’s birth) & PLAY JUMP EAT, etc.  It’s (again) about RECONNECTING to life, stoke, & flow, aka:  to genuinely experiencing joy, beauty, and a sense of abundance, which I often like to trigger or catapult through play/movement.  Because, I believe it’s sitting there in us.  Our life force.  Our birthright.

We are not drones, robots, sheep…

We do not have to be overwrought with overwhelm & busyness, tho it’s tempting to find our “worthiness” there.  Wait!  Time for a check-in on both a macro & micro level!  What are we doing here again as humans?  What’s the point?  To impress others?  To achieve, achieve, achieve, do, do, do, perform, perform, perform?  We lose ourselves VERY EASILY.

I’ve found myself drawn to the RE’s recently:

REBOOT.

RECONNECT.

REALIGN.

REDISCOVER.

More soon.