Music For Airports, II · 7 June 2008

I held off from saying what I needed to say about dance for the earlier post to make sense. I did not clarify that I was talking about the kind of dance you do like nobody’s watching. The kind that maybe you do drunk at weddings, in dark bars, and definitely in unadvertised meetings of openminded healers in deconsecrated churches and temples in Santa Monica.

I don’t write about this because even if I can dance like nobody’s watching, I can’t write about dance like nobody’s watching. The truth is I’ve been dancing free-form every Saturday since October. It’s SO revealing. About modern spirituality (whatever that might be), about embodied practice, about the boundaries of self, about what’re the point and the possibilities of contemplation. About how groups form and how people really communicate. There’s just a whole anthropology of this little supercreative edge of culture waiting to happen. It's also in some ways old as it is new, like Susan said in the last comment.

This morning when I arrived in the huge old temple space, they were playing Music for Airports and for the few minutes before I stopped thinking about outside things I remembered the drive across the Golden Gate from Marin two years ago, after a first Vipassana retreat. That is music for breaking a long silence, in my experience. The theory of the Five Rhythms is that one of the tempos of life is stillness… this also makes MfA a good place to begin.

A woman was weeping in the corner and my friend Fred, a psychotherapist in his mid-60s, was holding her hand like a brother. Nobody was at all uncomfortable or self-conscious about her emotions; and nobody tried to resolve them too quickly. For the first 30 minutes the still tones of MfA would come up over and over under much faster music and some people would notice and slow way down. Me I felt good to mix in the associations I have for that music with more chaotic, high-energy kinds of experience. To find the Music for Airports when everyone around you is knocking on the door of the big kuckoo. As corny as that sounds. Both rhythems are just techniques for letting go.

I think I’ll stop trying to talk about any of this now.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , sound , spirituality

Comment

1. After a long silence, do you feel you must break the silence? Do you feel it must be broken ceremoniously? Or do you feel you’d rather maintain the silence longer?

   I’ve read about the absolute, perfect silence of places like the Yukon in wintertime, etc. and I feel like I need to go experience that.

   Posted by: Carl · Jun 8, 10:20 AM · #

2. I’ve got an accent. I think it’s really as simple as that. No matter what kind of dance I’m doing, I get called out for having spent years thinking about the port de bras and the core. Partners feel it. Yoga teachers see in in my forward dive and my warrior 2 and ask me about it after class. It gets into every physical expression, probably especially if I’m drunk and a wedding and just don’t care anymore if anyone sees me bringing on the Russian.

   I tried to shed it so that my swing could be more earthy-heavy bottomed-low, instead of milky ballroom à la Ginger Rogers, and it takes a lot of undoing. I decided not to care.

   I am ecstatic when I’m dancing: never ever happier. Or feeling more, whatever the emotion. But maybe I’ll never know what kind of abandon you’re describing? Is it abandon? I don’t know that it’s chaos I’m touching. I checked out the 5 rhythms you talked about. It seems to me that all traditions of dance have all 5. I know I feel them all when I’m moving. I know I can’t NOT move the way I do without a studied deconstruction of the movement. What would the movement be if I could take away my back-story? What could it look like? What does free-form mean?

   Owl this is v. v. interesting. I hope you’ll try to write about this again. I wonder to what extent your dancing gives away your ashtanga. There’s no such thing as a tabula rasa dancer, right? So much can be guessed from the way you hold yourself, all the myriad little choices you make. Even where you come from, who your people are, what kind of work you do and money you make (as bad as that sounds), but also what moves you, touches you.

   I’m going to listen to some Music for Airports. I am so ignorant about ambient music. Is that even the right term?

   Posted by: joy · Jun 8, 10:41 AM · #

3. This free-form dance sounds incredible. Would you be open to sharing where you do it, or what organized group sponsors it, if that’s the case? I’m interested in knowing if this is going on in Chicago. Please pardon the repetition if you’ve mentioned this elsewhere, I only stop in here periodically.

   Posted by: Guest · Jun 8, 11:42 AM · #

4. There is usually anxiety about silence- breaking. It’s often something I don’t want to do, even just in the mornings. After days of silence, yes; I definitely want the first sounds to be made with some ritual or special notes around them.

   Joy, yes. Ambient. Begin with Steven Halpern. Everything you say about accents, and about how we are marked by body hexis, is beautiful and sounds right. There is a lot of body-sociology visible and sensible to me in “freestyle” dance; and yes social class is a part of that. In a huge way, actually.

   I don’t know if you like crabby old French social theorists, but Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction has much on body hexis and the ways we are marked.

   I could probably write a whole blog on dance instead of ashtanga. But I won’t….

   Carl, this might get you rooting around. Guest, it looks like the kids in Chicago communicate by a private email list. Here. If you want to dance in LA, just drop a line under the Information tab at right.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 8, 05:51 PM · #

5. Beautiful, thanks.

   Posted by: Guest · Jun 8, 06:31 PM · #

6. Thank you Owl, I will check out Bourdieu.

   Posted by: joy · Jun 10, 05:52 AM · #

7. Lovely post. Maybe I will finally read Bourdieu, Distinction could be an interesting place to start. One thing I wondered- why “deconsecrated?” Maybe you meant that you use converted spaces, but I found myself thinking about boundaries/definitions.

   Posted by: natalie · Jun 10, 12:40 PM · #

8. Hi Natalie!

   When I wrote “deconsecrated,” I was thinking of the opening scene in the Arlo Guthrie film Alice’s Restaurant. A preacher is officially de-consecrating a church that is being turned in to a house.

   Two of the dances are in temple spaces, one a former church that I assume has been similarly de-consecrated.

   But maybe I shouldn’t be so credulous of the movies.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 10, 02:21 PM · #

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