Lines of energy

As energy flows both within and through your body, it reveals itself visually as lines of energy which extend through parts of your body and into the space around it. Think of this almost as rays of light shooting out of your body’s extremities: arms, fingers, head, legs, etc.. Your body is both responding to the ambient energy (the energy of the immediate environment around you including the music you are moving to, the people and objects around you, etc.) and directing that energy. Your body does this as it gives shape to this combined energy flow. Your body shapes this invisible energy and sends it back to the webs of energy from which it came. Your body is that instantaneous physical flash of movement that is on the eternal string of energy flow.

Clip #1

In this video clip notice how the hands and arms direct your eyes and how they give shape to both the energy that flows within the body and the energy that surrounds it and flows through it.

Clip #2

The beginning lines of the body almost shoot the energy out of the upward pointed feet. It seems to flow from the front of the body through the feet. Because the body angles are sharp, the velocity of the energy is forceful. That same focused energy pulls the body over and shifts the lines of energy to the hands. The hands proceed to shape the movement of the body into spirals, arches, and sharp angled shapes.

Energy flow

All of the movement that your body creates comes from the flow of energy both at work within your body and surrounding your body. Your body’s movement is a physical expression of this combined energy flow. ShapeShifting is all about allowing energy to express itself through the movement story that your body tells. Your body is giving shape to the eternal presence of energy. In a sense you are telling both your own story and the eternal ongoing story of energy. There is great power to communicate in this story.

When you are in a preconscious state of mind, you set your body free to tell its story through the flow of energy within it and through it. The movement that your body uses to tell its story also reveals the flow of energy. This movement does not come from the conscious mind. It is not a thought out, mentally edited process. It is a spontaneous physical expression that springs from you body unedited by the conscious mind; it is free of the control and the judgments of your conscious mind. This is not a bunch of shapes strung together by a conscious thought process. This is a flow of spontaneous movement given shape by a free body animated by the flow of energy.

Hopefully, what you will see in these video clips is that unrestrained, preconscious flow of movement/energy.

Clip #1

In this first clip the left arm clearly becomes the embodiment of the energy flow through this movement. It mixes and directs both the ambient energy and the energy flow within the body into one long flow of movement. In the second clip both arms slice through and gather together the ambient energy and pull the body through space.

Clip #2

Even though the music is adagio (slow), the energy flow is full and at times the movement is very fast. As the phrase develops, the movement seems to be unpacking the intensity of emotion in the music.  And at the end of the phrase, the body vibrates with the energy that continues to flow in it.

Clip #3

The flow of energy through this one arm is explosive and it literally drives the whole body with an unrelenting determination. It concludes by acknowledging its unknown source of energy with unexpected surprise and awe.

Clip #4

Your eyes will follow the flow of energy through the body as it enters and exits through the arms.

Musicality

Moving to music is a great way to allow your body to tell its story. Your body can use the sonic energy of music as a partner to help tell its story. If you allow yourself to surrender to the energy of this partner, you can move into a preconscious state or what jazz musicians and free style rappers call “the zone”. This place or state of mind is a space in which your body can move spontaneously without conscious thought or judgment. Your body is free to give shape to what it is sensing in the energy of the music. When you do this, there is an ease and flow of movement that has an inherent beauty, grace, and presence that communicates with other bodies and cannot be achieved in any other way. Once again the flow of energy within and through the body is present.

Clip #1

Pay attention to how, specifically, the hands and arms and, more generally, the body as a whole follow the phrasing of the music. It is as though the body is giving physical shape to the music.

Clip #2

Again, pay attention to how, specifically, the hands and arms and, more generally, the body as a whole follow the phrasing of the music.

Clip #3

Watch how the minimalistic movement at the very beginning picks up on the improvised wordless music of the singer and expands to fuller movement as her singing becomes more verbal. From there on the movement follows her eight bar musical phrases with mime-like punctuations of movement every now and then. Towards the end of the clip the singer returns to her wordless improvisation and the movement becomes less full as well.

Clip #4

Notice how the flow of movement is periodically punctuated by stop motion on the starting and ending of melodic and rhythmic phrases.

Phrases

ShapeShifting uses a number of sources to generate phrasing as it gives organic structure to its spontaneous movement meditations. Your body spontaneously and naturally creates movement phrases as it tells its story. If your body is moving in response to music or verbal energy, it will also create movement that incorporates the phrases inherent in these art forms. Ambient sounds, people, and objects in the environment give rise to your body’s movement phrases as well.

Phrases are an organic way to communicate information of all sorts. Like grammatical sentences they relay larger thoughts in digestible bits. There also seems to be a human/animal rhythm to our heart beat, breathing, thinking, waking/sleeping, etc.. There is something satisfying when things have a beginning, middle, and ending.

As your body moves it often moves in sentence like phrases. As you eat peanuts you pick them up with your fingers, put them into your mouth, chew them, and swallow them and so on. This is a phrase. There is also, artistically, something satisfying when things have a beginning, middle, and ending.

When your body is moving in silence or to ambient sounds, it will spontaneously and organically create its own phrases based on how the energy flows within and through it, how fatigued it is, where it is in relation to objects in its environment, etc.. When it is moving to music or spoken word, it can follow the phrases it is responding to or it can break up a single phrase with multiple movement phrases  or visa versa or it can move in opposition to the mood of the music or spoken word and more.

The clips in this video depict movement phrases that are responding to musical and verbal phrases/energy.

Clip #1

Note how this relatively easy paced phrase suddenly explodes towards the end even though the melodic line continues at the same easy pace. The movement adds an unexpected punch to the end of the melodic line.

Clip #2

Here are two back to back brief phrases which use the quantity and speed of movement to add depth to an even-paced melodic line. The first adds a little movement punch at the end of a sustained musical note and the second one throttles up the speed of movement and then suddenly slows into the end of the melodic line.

Clip #3

This phrase has a number of excellent elements: musicality, energy flow, body story, carving out space, going to the floor multiple times with turning jumps coming off the floor, and consistent fully energized body movements to name a few and it is all done with one arm behind the back.

Clip #4

Here is a long phrase packed with intense emotional movement that ranges from fast as lightening to slowly dramatic. The quick change of pace within a phrase can be very powerful.

Clip #5

Though this phrase has an overall flow to it, it is peppered with little duetic bursts, alternately, with the oboe and violin which visually enriches the texture of the long phrase. Your body, at times, will be caught by energy flows within energy flows. It is representative of your body’s incredible sensory intelligence.

Shapes

Shapes have the power to tell stories. This story telling power does not reside in the shapes themselves. The power of shapes to communicate is centered in the energy that creates them. Energy and physical shapes have a symbiotic, inextricable connection. Energy is the source of these shapes but shapes also give physical expression to this same energy. Neither can exist without the other. Shapes do not exist without energy and energy cannot be revealed without shapes.  As a result of this intrinsic connection, these shapes spring c from your body without thought. The shapes that flow out of your body are created by the flow of streams of combined energy from within your own body and from the energy flowing through it from the environment that surrounds it. The shapes are the flow of energy through them.

This process stands in stark contrast to the shapes that are created in traditional choreographed movement. Choreographed movement does not spring from your body spontaneously. It is solely created under the control of your conscious mind which is a feeble attempt to mimic genuine body/energy created movement. This thought based movement does not speak with the power, truth, and beauty that body/energy based movement does. It may on some level speak to other minds but it does not speak to other bodies.

The place where your body is allowed to tell its movement story through energy based shapes is in your preconscious mind. This is where your body lives and breathes and remembers and tells your body’s story.

These video clips may help to give a more visual representation of the relationship between energy flow and shapes.

Clip #1

Each shape flows into the next seamlessly.

Clip #2

What energy flow story do you see here?

Clip #3

Which body parts are energy lead points in this series of shapes?

Clip #4

Here is a series of very dramatic and powerful shapes fiercely driven by a flow of energy.

Clip #5

There is an energy flow of push and pull focused in two places of the body that basically gives rise to all of the shapes in this series.