Early Rise & Ecstatic Dance

Yesterday was certainly the highlight of my time in the City so far.

It began with an early morning rise, 6am at the foot of Grace Cathedral. I motivated, called Albert, arranged to meet him for coffee at 6:30am, and rapidly packed my gear and headed down the street. The early rise and hot coffee kickstarted it perfectly. He gave me the key to his place so I could store my stuff and take a shower. I walked on over to Yerba Buena Park and did a 30 minute intensive calesthenic / yoga workout. Headed back to Albert's place, shaved and showered. Combined with the haircut yesterday and the shower last night, I was really beginning to feel like a civilised human. I put on my rave pants, a clean shirt, my new sunglasses, and went out to make love to the world. All that and it was still only 8:30 in the morning!

By 9:00am I was at the library, getting my list done of topics to research and photos to post. At 11:30am I left the library to meet Albert for lunch, and for the first time since I arrived, I was opened by two ravishing girls sitting on the steps of the Asian Art Museum. We had a pleasant little banter and I continued walking. Note to self: clean shaven, freshly washed, well costumed, with sunglasses is a good look for meeting people.

At noon I met up with Albert and got treated to a delicious spicy and mightily filling Thai lunch. Back to the library to wrap up some things, then walk/jog a brisk 2 miles to meet Rosie at Cafe Gratitude...

This place lived up to expectations, and then some. The Cafe itself is simply a genesis point of positive energy and intention in the universe. There are signs everywhere expressing happiness and positivity, there is good art, glowing people, and don't even get me started on the food. Rosie showed up a little after I'd gotten settled in and introduced me to Treasure, who I'd seen practicing handstands on the outside wall. Yes, free balance handstands are a big deal in our little community of yogis, acrobats, and circus performers. Even better is getting up into them in style, kick-free. But more of that later.

Rosie and I sat down and caught up on eachothers happenings, threw some thoughts around regarding a Burning Man art project shes involved with (a wonderful piece called The Heartbeat Amplifier, and found out we were both to be participating in the same dance celebration that same evening. We talked about what plans I had to live and work in the city, and shared intel about yoga / movement play and an upcoming yoga teacher training in Brazil. She ordered the Aloha juice and I the I'm Cool Milkshake.... which merits its own descriptor:

The I'm Cool Milkshake is comprised of all organic ingredients, fresh mint, ice cream, spirulina superfood for the green color, and crushed cacao nuts for the chocolate... making it just the perfectly sublime mint chocolate chip delight ever. I tasted it, Rosie asked me what I thought, and then she said "wait for it... wait for it..." and the delicate bitter of the cacao nuts hit me, a full 5 seconds after the sweet coolness of the initial sip. Galactic Yumminess!

Rosie introduced me to the manager of the Cafe for a potential job opportunity, with decent pay for the work [...and just as I was writing this, I met someone with a room to rent just 4 blocks away!] We parted ways and I enjoyed a nice breezy walk to the BART train. I bought a ticket and literally as my foot came off the escalator, my train arrived. I smiled and did a little jig as I headed East to Ecstatic Dance.

Historic Sweets Ballroom was literally a 2 block walk from the BART station, wondrously convenient. I walked in, where I was greeted by a gentle man who checked me off the guest list. Deep shamanic sounds and chanting could be heard from upstairs as I ascended to the ballroom. The energy felt good.

The ballroom was ginormous, and perfect. Massive hardwood dance floor, over two hundred and fifty feet to a side, with a stage. A few couples doing some nice flow contact improv. A girl in a purple dress setting up an altar by the huge two story windows. A cellist improvisationally playing, who I find out later is in fact Mystic Pete.

I flowed through the space a bit, then moved into some basic yoga and warm-up stretches. Soon, Alicia circled everyone up, and we began a series of loosening up exercises, alternating between silliness and vocalizations, animal behaviors and roleplay. And then it began time for the "formal" contact improv to begin. We started with about 15 of us in circle. Everyone was asked to emanate a tone of their choice with their breathing. A sublime harmony and strong vibration filled the room. I entered the contact theatre.

The rest of the night just got wilder and wilder. I had spent the day reading the "Art of Courtly Love" and the related "Code of Chivalry." That was good. It caused me some minor amount of restraint and allowed me to breath slowly and naturally through some very intimate contact movement.

By the time contact improv was wrapping up, there were about 25 people in the ballroom, and Alicia wisely encouraged us to welcome the newcomers. Someone had told me earlier "no talking on the dancefloor", which was awesome, because as a fairly well understood guideline of the community, it meant we could use only our bodies to communicate intention, or to invite another to dance with you. I had learned the magic of contact improv invitation a month earlier in Atlanta, which was basically to saddle up next to someone, and to either gently or vigorously (as the spirit moves you) come into skin to skin contact with them. That moves to eye contact, and with subtle pressure and a deep sensitivity to how hard the pressure is returned, a couple moves into contact improv play/dance.

The music transitioned as smoothly as I'd ever witnessed between the natural acoustic cello and a chill intro by Haj of Sub Swara, one of my absolute favorite dubstep/electronica bands who I first encountered during my tenure in NYC. The sun begins to set, more and more beautiful people come in, organic food and a big water cooler is set up, and the dance starts to move in full swing. Before I knew it there were well over a hundred people moving and gyrating and hooping and yoga-ing and acrobatting and contacting in fluid, graceful, ecstatic time to the seriously deep bass beats. It reminded me of the Hooper's Ball, without the hoops, and with far deeper pair contacting. I shared both deeply intimate and ridiculously fun movements with a series of rapturous partners.

Playing with different partners energies was a really wild exercise in humanity. Some had the strength of goddesses, some were hyper, some wanted strong lead, some were dramatic, some felt like equals, and there was every different style present. I was both fascinated and enthralled by the interplay between gentle, mutual touches, and strong, firm lead... it all depended on the partner. I learned through the course of the night how to deliver a firm, confident leading touch / handhold -- and how to emply a grip of steel when your wild partner decides to do a full backbend supported solely by one clasped hand and my counterweight.

The flow continued for hours as we danced and danced and danced till midnight, when the music finally came to a raucous close and everyone gathered in small groups for conversation and cool-down.

I chatted with some newfound friends, shared some hugs, and headed back to the streets of the City for a delicious slice of Italian Pizza.

AcroFlow 2.0

Just got through my second private AcroYoga jam today, and it was as blissful as I dared to imagine.

We had all the time in the world, so we started real slow with partner stretches, and some of the stuff I had warmed up with in NY at the Om Factory. That was nice, since my practice had been getting more and more acrobatically, and simultaneously, macho oriented. Which only means, acro / circus has a tendency to jump straight into the advanced / highly physical stuff, and I've begun to really miss some of the really basic stuff which is the real foundation of the practice: like, two people coming into trusting physical contact.

What really brought this home to me was class on Sunday, where there was a 60/40 mix of complete newbies and experienced acroyogis. The experienced group was really pushing into some new ground which, with some of the heavier partners, was really beginning to strain my shoulder, so I went back and played with some of the new kids. To see, feel, and spot the instability of some of their basics (folded leaf even), really brought me back to foundations... and then to see the look on their eyes after completing... pure bliss and joy!

So H and I went through the foundation and got really relaxed and comfortable prior to a deep therapeutics session. My stated intent was to really start working on our flow... as in, really intuitive, natural transitioning through poses and full sequences, so we could get to that magic place of being.

We went through three or four sessions of intense practice, and worked verbally and bodily through some intriguing places and body spaces. One of the synchronistic highlights of the afternoon was when I had her up in throne, working through some nice one leg poses and arm movements, and she placed her hands above her head and said "wow, this feels like a halo..." literally at that precise moment the chandelier flickered and leapt to like 300% brighter than it had been. I looked up and saw all the arms of the chandelier (which she was perfectly positioned below) extending from her head, and it was a moment. :)

Since it was just me and H, my body/legs needed to recover between sessions, so we often returned to the mat and just did gentle partner mirroring work while having a natural conversation. Being able to have conversation while in physical flow was something completely new to me, and it was refreshing and fun. Normally I am so caught up in the blissful physical intensity that I am speechless.

So tonight I'm up now, after crashing early, and I received some intense dream intelligence about acro flow.. yes, finally I'm getting to the real reason for this post :)

Working through acro-flow with a partner is like a microcosmic mirror of working through a relationship with a person. The way your bodies feel, touch, balance, move, and flow together, how it feels for each of you, where the sticking points are in the pattern, how you choose to work through them together, the dance of flyer and base... these can all be seen (and in my dream, they were literal manifest) of the story of flow of the relationship... THIS MIRRORING IS THE CORE TRUTH OF THIS DREAM.

the real kicker was towards the end of the dream, where we started to add mechinical externals to the core acroyogic play. I visualized this as actual metal knobs bolted onto our hip bones for external attachment. H is an aerialist as well (trapeze, silks), so soon this will probably integrate into the practice. And the trapeze is a form of technical gear, a step away from purity but also an augmentation... and then I woke :)

Capacitor

Weave Death

Well, this was inevitable. And now I progress to the greater evolution of this precious flow art.

My weave dance is about over. This, because I shot a video of it. And I looked at it without seeing the poi. And all I could see was a hunched over person focusing all energy internally, hands tied together and staying close to body core.

I didn't want my dance to look like that. I want it to be free and expressive and OPEN. I began to really move my arms and hands OUT from my body, stretching to maximum extension and re-discovering those BASIC poi moves. It felt good. For the first time in a while, I got the good ole spine tingle... for me, that means I'm opening up new energy channels. Yay!

The FINAL nail in the coffin was when I realised that my "tight weave" manuever could be best explained by saying "pretend like you have handcuffs on"... I did subsequently confirm that I can do forward / backward / spinning weave while handcuffed, but was that really the dance I wanted to be putting out into the universe?

So, farewell continuous weave, hello OPEN SPINNING.

With Open Heart Forward,
+h30ry

Weave Flow

Yay I'm celebrating for a new "trick"... not really a trick, more like a natural flow.

First I had to nail my front to back weave transitions, so I just kept doing them over and over until I could do them without thinking. This is where you rotate your body 180 mid-weave and simultaneously transition from front weave to back weave or vice versa. It was a lot harder smoothing out the clockwise rotations than it was the CC, go figure.

Once I got these rotations nailed, I realised that I could do a continuous circular body rotation instead of just moving 180. So I started doing FW-turn-BW-turn-FW-turn, etc. continuously.

A few days later, I realised that I could rotate my weave without rotating my body, so that if I could be running a forward weave with my torso torqued 90 degrees leftward, than I could simply rotate my torso 180 (to the right), keeping my feet firmly planted, and in doing so switch to the back weave, on the right side. Neat!

It was only natural at that point to realise that I could stop, start, or reverse both my body rotation, my torso rotation, and my weave direction at ANY TIME in the dance, and I didn't need to have set entry / exit points or "cardinal directions". That was where the fun began. For like 20 minutes I listened to a series of songs (a good mix of 180bpm techno and 45bpm folk FYI) and just freely explored the bodyspace inside the coccoon of the weave. I stopped thinking about where the poi actually were and my body naturally rotated, my wrists naturally reversed when needed, and I reveled in the dance.

look, pa, new tricks!

yay, this week I learned two new hoop tricks:

1. the ability to do a lift and without hesitation bring it back down to the waist (with an optional acceleration, nice)... the trick to this was to realize I needed to rotate my hand full around the barrel from inside to outside kind of using my thumb like a hook... I got it from doing: lift, beat, drop, and kept going until i removed the wait beat.

2. that thing i see everyone do where they pump their arms in and out of the hoop one after the other (it looks like some crazed 60s go go dance :) ... that was way easier than i thought, and again I got into it by just putting one arm in, waiting, remove arm, wait, put other arm in (down), wait, etc... then just got more and more in tune to the beat of the hoop and started pumping it without the waits.

3. the neat thing is, both these things have allowed me to come a lot closer to achieving one of my own holy grails, the precision timing of the hoop rotation to the beat of the music.

4. the laser hoop is coming! stay tuned!

Dancing with Planes

the most fun and chaos im having presently is the issue of "controlling my planes". sometimes i feel like i OWN them and can place them in whatever relationship i want... at other times they seem to completely have minds of their own and defy my every mental /physical suggestion.. either way it makes me laugh.. in the end i think the poi are in fact manifesting our unconscious desires into the material plane and its good to "play" with them like they have volition of their own... this way the poi dance is a living tapestry woven of our conscious decisions (how do i want to move next, what feels good?) and our unconscious motives (independent of what i want, where do the poi want to be right now?).

i'm also getting a real metaphorical hoot out of the chapter called "theory: moving your planes through space" from scales of poi... i couldn't wait, i bought that thing rapido.

Keeping the Dance Alive

i came up with the solution (consider it preventative medicine)
to stay in dance mode and never get overly obsessed with the technical aspects of the poi (a constant temptation).

1. always keep your feet moving (i.e. move your base, keep it dynamic)
2. hop to the beat! (i.e . generally only have one foot on the ground)
3. smile!
4. play in 3space, i.e. hop up on tables, chairs, beds, stairs, anything that can get your body off plane, adding a third dynamic to the physical equation and a spontaneity to your movement.

with these going, its hard to get lost in the tech. dancing ensues!
oh, of course, you've got to have music playing!!! LOUD!

Chris Bailey provides the perfect example: