dreaminginthedeepsouth:The biggest benefit of creative movement practice is direct experience. When

The biggest benefit of creative movement practice is direct experience. When people experience physically and fully, they discover something greater than themselves. Direct experience sounds like a simple thing. Practically, it is on the contrary, it’s exceptionally rare. Life has its strange ways of educating us to turn our back on experience and move towards efficiency. We specify how to move, what we like to move and whereabout. This specificity is like saying to new movements “you have nothing to offer me”.

It is similar to spoken word. When babies and kids hear new languages they get curious and want to understand it. Serious adults, hear words that are different than their mother tongue and think “there is nothing there for me because I don’t understand it”.

Philosopher Kierkegaard argued that most humans live in the realm of ‘Human Concern’. This realm moves between representations of past, present and future. In between temporal considerations. “I came from X so if I do Y I will arrive to Z”. But X,Y and Z describe only a network of abstract ideas that point towards a representation of reality. A system of values based on disconnection, speculation and comparison. These temporal considerations lead to life lived in the eyes and the head. The realm of human concern is the opposite of direct experience. Direct experience is connected to the only expression that is unequivocally original, the expression of change.

Change is not a set of premeditated projects. True expression is discovered through what lies outside of us.
What is outside the realm of concern and the temporal? Meaningful discovery. The physical experiences that stay beyond the moment of their happening. They accompany us “timelessly” despite our inability to define what exactly makes them so special.

We don’t cage ourselves from meaningful discovery in a single day, we get habitually caged, gradually and slowly. Step by step we stop moving and stop taking risks. We stop taking leaps of faith.
Movement practice should be a leap of faith. To consciously become without trying to achieve. Leaping and moving towards what’s outside. Relearning that we don’t know much more than what we know.
Movement Archery