How is ShapeShifting different than dance as we know it today?
Dance as we know it today: The choreographic process.
Dance as we know it today is basically choreographed dance. A person has an idea, experience, or event that they want to express through a string of movements. This thing that they want to express may be abstract or very personal. The choreographer then begins to lay out bodily movements to express or depict their subject. These movements may be patterned after some other dancer or choreographer’s movements or may in fact be their own version of movement based on a technique in which they have been trained. The artist may use their own body or other bodies to create this movement.
As the artist strings these movements together, they make choices about what movements or phrases to keep or throw out. The key question in all of this ongoing process is what movement will best express what they want to say. The tool that the choreographer uses to make these choices is their conscious mind.
When this editing process is complete, dancers will memorize the strings of movement and perform them as if they were their own. Once these movements have been recorded, the artist can copyright them and sell them as a product to be consumed.
This whole process is centered on the choreographer’s conscious mind.
This process which is solely based on the conscious mind has destroyed the power of the body to express itself.
Our bodies are the most complex organisms on earth. They are the result of billions of years of evolution beginning with the primal interactions of inorganic chemical compounds all the way on up to the millions of daily organic chemical reactions that take place in our bodies today. Our bodies carry the recorded history of this evolutionary process in the DNA strings that reside in every cell of our bodies.
This is, in a sense, a collective memory of all the organisms that have gone before us on earth. This may not be a memory that our conscious minds have access to. But it is still there. The energy that flows through our bodies in the form of electrochemical, mechanical actions keeps this memory alive at a level that our conscious minds cannot perceive. There are multiple levels of consciousness and intelligence that energy feed-back loops create in our bodies before they reach the level of our conscious mind. When you hear a loud noise or a bug suddenly hits you in the face, your body reacts nanoseconds before you are even consciously aware of the event occurring. As a result of this delay, our conscious minds are limited when it comes to understanding how our bodies interact with our immediate environments at any given time and place. This reveals at least one unseen level of intelligent consciousness (which exists in the active state of energy moving through our bodies) that could fill this awareness gap. This hidden level would have full access to our bodies and their ancient collective memories as well as those memories of our own encounters throughout our lives. There is a place in your brain and a consequent state of mind that allows your body to both fully remember and express what it knows about you and the world around you. This place is called your preconscious mind.
Your preconscious mind is not your conscious mind. Your conscious mind does not want to know what your body knows. Your conscious mind would rather denigrate your body and convince you that your body is a flesh sack of animalistic, thoughtless, and chaotic instincts which needs to be beaten into submission and buried under layers of disgust and fear. This is the same part of you that determines whether or not the kind of movement that comes out of your body is worthy of existing in front of peoples’ eyes. It is this limited intelligence that has decided for generations what is worthy of being called dance and what is not.
How then, can your conscious mind, which is repulsed by the memories and intelligence of your own body be trusted to tell your body how it should express itself? Choreography is a product of your conscious mind. It does not speak the language of a body story. It imagines what a body story might look like. It has the shell of a body story but it is empty and sterile inside. It lacks immediacy and truthfulness. That is why dance on stage is a dying art form. It does not connect with real bodies. What we see today is sterile dances created in sterile studios presented on sterile stages to a distant audience.
Over generations our conscious minds have boxed in, closed out, and denigrated the infinite expressive range and power of the body.
What can we do to once again set our bodies free to remember and express what they know about us?
We can open ourselves up to our preconscious minds. Our preconscious minds are where our bodies live and breathe freely. It is the place where their intelligence and power are set free. It is the place where our bodies create the movement that expresses who we are. And it is in this movement that our bodies relive all that they have gathered with all of their complex sensory mechanisms. When we are in our preconscious minds, we do not perform or regurgitate movement; we literally relive what our bodies know about us and our whole collective memory. This movement is uniquely yours and not someone else’s choreographed product imposed on your body.
And it is this movement that other people’s bodies will recognize as truthful and genuine movement. When other bodies “see” your body’s story, there is an immediate and complete connection that only bodies know. Our “body language” is read by other bodies at a level that our conscious minds cannot comprehend. There is a collective body memory that each body story taps into. This collective memory lives and breaths in our preconscious minds where our bodies live and breathe free of the conscious mind’s control and fear. When our conscious minds are out of the picture, our bodies speak and our bodies connect.
We can also open ourselves up to the eternal energy that flows with in our bodies and through our bodies. Energy is forever transforming itself from one form of energy into another. It is the force that creates all levels of consciousness with in us. It is the force that seeks expression through our bodies. Energy wants to be incarnated and it finds its embodiment in the movement of our bodies. Our preconscious minds are open to this energy wish and welcome it as a co-creator of our unique movement. This again stands in stark contrast to the process of the conscious mind. The flow of energy has no part in the sterile, constipated, detached editing process of our conscious mind.