Creativity, improvisation - and dance!

THE NATURE OF US

Since we live where everything is music, everything is dancing. Watch the dust grains moving in the light near the window. Their dance is our dance. We rarely hear the inward music, but we're all dancing to it nevertheless . . . Rumi

Now more than ever it is imperative for each of us to be grounded in our individuality, expressing our inherent and unique creativity. We need to find the sheer joy of creative engagement, and add our voices to our world. Democracy, community, and interconnection all thrive when we contribute our expression, our unique input, to the world. We need to improvise, collaborate, and find joy individually and together to create new solutions going forward on our planet.

While I am writing today about the creativity I experience through dance, improvisation applies to all endeavors: poetry, writing, music, earning a living, and just being human. Creativity arises through each of us from our source, hearing the inward music, our unique connection to the whole. When we pay attention to the impulses and ideas that arise, we find innovative pathways to express them.

The dance of inner and outer, the dance of the myriad strands of the holomovement, the dance that is the continuum of nature and body - is felt through our inner waters. Wherever our attention focuses, impressions stir within us, rippling through our inner sea. When listening to music grounded in our bodies, sound waves evoke dance through these waters. Sound waves move through us, inside and out. And sometimes we can feel ourselves as the pure fluidity of the dancing cosmos.

To improvise and play is to stir the waters, to feel and see what arises in our felt experience. The story below describes a simple exploration one evening, the interplay of improvisation and play with music. Like children, alone or with others, we can make it up as we go.

I had produced and dj’d a dance event for many years, Dance Spirit, where most of us had met and danced in the past together, and where Louis-John had drummed.

Making music, one night awhile ago

In the sun room at the back of his house, Louis-John had a collection of instruments for friends to play together. I had attended his improvisational drum circle one time before, staying in my comfort zone by just dancing. This past Monday night I went with the intention of helping to create the direction, and since they were all friends of mine, it was relatively non-threatening environment to experiment. I began by playing Jennifer Berezan’s Praises for the World and we improvised along with the cd, six of us using drums, shakers, bells, cymbals, as well as singing along. Then shortly after the chant to Tara, I played the dance version of the Gyatri mantra from Deva Premal’s The Essence. The room had great acoustics, and I thought we sounded great. 

We took a break, I brought out the animal medicine cards, and we each selected an animal to work with for the evening. My card was Moose, whose medicine is self-esteem, which was perfect for me. I grew up in the shadows of a very dominant father, who claimed that he was the only one who could carry a tune in the family. And I was told early on that I couldn’t hear the rhythm when I danced – also from Dad.  My lifelong journey to reclaim dance and music has been part of finding my self. I had always felt remnants of this paternal dynamic with Louis-John, the man who led the drum circle. Most recently, he been saying that he was going to teach me to sing.  Earlier that evening when I arrived, he repeated that once again. I answered in return: I can sing already.

After we drew the cards, with Moose medicine by my side, we began to improvise without background music. I was dancing, and sounds were spontaneously coming from me, as they often do when I dance. John, a friend who plays guitar, kept motioning me to the nearby mic, and finally I got the courage to try. I kept dancing, and the sound came through me, in huge long waves that opened the inner space in my body. This inner space felt like a temple, and my dance moves were shaping the sound as I stayed open. I could feel myself effortlessly improvising with the musicians, and when the piece finished my friend Marcia looked at me and said it was amazing, that she could feel the sound waves moving through her body - and it felt like she was feeling my inner space.

Everyone was enthusiastic, and we went on to improvise again together. I sang more, sometimes with others. I even made up a few words to one piece, Daddy, can you see me now? This was a very healing evening for me, made even more so by the presence of an old friend of mine who I had often felt inhibited around, projecting my father’s judgments of me onto him. I was amazed that my creativity was able to pour through freely on this evening – with the help of everyone. Marcia, who attends this circle regularly, said it was the best evening ever, that the group had been more cohesive and enlivened that evening.

Improvisation and flowing with others in the moment

Through my experience as an improvisational dancer, I have learned to feel within myself moment to moment and watch what is arising. When I pay close attention to the interrelationship of feelings, impulses, and thoughts, and as well track the interconnection of my bodily systems, such as muscles, bones, organs, blood, I discover an entire world of aliveness within me. I have learned to allow my awareness to rest within me and observe - and to some extent, choose which impulse to act upon, rather than purely react. 

I am learning a new language of improvisational movement, a communication of waves/movement, both within myself and interconnecting me with all species, all life, within the deep inner sea. Overtime, I have come to see life itself as an intricate and ever-surprising improvisational dance - and that I am that dance.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully describes this dance of aliveness in his poem Interbeing:

The sun has entered me.

The sun has entered me together with the cloud and the river.

I myself have entered the river;

and I have entered the sun

with the cloud and the river.

There has never been a moment

When we do not interpenetrate.

But before the sun entered me,

The sun was in me –

also the cloud and the river.

I was already in it.

There has never been a moment

When we have not inter-been.

Therefore you know

That as long as you continue to breathe,

 I continue to be in you.

Here Thich Nhat Hanh poetically describes what he calls interbeing, everything co-existing within everything else. Each of us, and everything in the universe, is interpenetrated with everything else. In Peace is Every Step, he states: ‘To be’ is to inter-be.  We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing.

Tribal peoples always knew this truth, and communicated with all that surrounded them. Through their dance they communicated with the soil, the sun, the water. They were embedded in the land, immersed in interbeing. In the epilogue of The Universe Story, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry describe how our ancestors were connected with their surroundings:

The Native American peoples were especially distinguished for their sense of participating in a single community with the entire range of beings in the natural world around them. The drumbeat was experienced as striking out the rhythms of the Earth itself. Their dancing was associated with the various animal peoples inhabiting the area. It was all caught up in the sacred realm of the Manitou, Orenda , or Wakan Tanka. This we find especially in the ecstatic experience of Black Elk where at the song of the visionary stallion, ‘The virgins danced, and all the circled horses, the leaves on the trees, the grasses and the hills and in the valleys, the water in the creeks and in the rivers and the lakes, the four-legged and the two-legged and the wings of the air – all danced together to the music of the stallion’s song.’

When dance is a lived, moment-to-moment interaction with one’s world, the individual enters into a profound level of inter-communication. Through dance I have learned to be embodied and to communicate on many levels. To be embodied is to feel within the body, experiencing the tactile dance of life within us - and at the same time be embedded in the living world around us - feeling the world as part of us.

Throughout Thich Nhat Hanh’s poems and short stories, we find beautiful descriptions of the ever-changing present and the interpenetration of everything. He is a keen observer of the moment, seeing and expressing the innocence of creative arising. In his moving poem, Please Call Me by My True Names, Thich Nhat Hanh writes,

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow –

even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving

to be a bud on a Spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with still fragile wings,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and cry,

to fear and hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death

of all that is alive.

In improvisational dance, each move is unique, arising out of the music, the sea of dancers, the body nearest me, and the patterns of light on the floor. I am wave responding to wave, riding waves on the sea, joy arising in each moment, playing like a dolphin, tiger paws sinking into earth, endless shapeshifting, feeling and form, shaping and reshaping. This is the pure creativity of life arising - and the dance of interbeing.

Returning to the dance, I return to my true nature. I am creation arising out of the infinite sea, ever becoming. I move so deeply into the bones that I feel myself deep in the diamond heart of the earth, the heart of matter. I move as the ever-changing dance of existence, in the innocence of birth, creating. My dancing is shaped by everything around me, and all that I have ever experienced. 

Improvisation and play, making it up in the moment, experimenting - be yourself and let your inner waters resonate and delight. There are so many ways to explore the creative impulses that move through us. And sometimes we heal old wounds along the way, as I did through dancing and singing.

This is the time to fully be ourselves, to pay attention and notice what wants to come into the world through our unique individual expression. Each of our voices is needed, each perspective, improvising together together in new and innovative ways.

Thank you for joining me here today!

Sabrina Page, MA in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness If you are interested in exploring your unique creativity and individuality, I would love to work with you. I focus on somatic inquiry and embodiment, to support you in living life fully, freely, and fluidly, intertwined with nature. As well, I have studied movement, dance, and astrology with some of the leading individuals in their fields. My private sessions are offered on zoom, phone, or in person in Bolinas, Ca.

More information is available on my website, sabrinapage.com

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Here’s an essay from the past you may enjoy:

This earth, this world, this lovely being