The high point of my summer so far has been Pracownia Ruchu Sytuacje’s week-long dance improvisation workshop with Nina Martin and Andrew Wass at Studio Burdąg, which luckily had a spot open for me as my summer plans wound up falling through. In attendance was also CI teacher Andrzej (AHN-jay) Woźniak (VOZH-nyak), but this time he was basically one of us (though burdened with organizing everything, so not like us, actually).
As so often happens, I took photos. This post is mainly an excuse to show a selection of these, but since I’m here aanyway I’ll also mention what Nina and Andrew, PhDs, taught us in the studio.
Andrew has described my photos as “clear yet soft,” and I’ll aim to convey the same charge in my writing. In fact, I feel like being clear-and-soft universally from now on, at least until the next wave of kairos* topples my life in ways I’d never agree to if I had any say in the matter.
One method, which we practiced over unhurried morning warm-ups, is known as Re-Wire, a technique Nina developed for dancers but soon found applicable as a physical therapy among people with cerebral palsy and other movement disabilities. Colloquially described as the “fussy baby” score, Re-Wire struck me as the discombobulated pre-verbal cousin to shaking’s cogent rhythmic pulse, and it seemed to be a kind of miracle cure for tension in the body, and maybe also for tension in the mind. One lies on the floor and juts and jerks like a motorically yet-unformed infant. The movement is rapid, random, short-pathed, and crucially irregular. In Burdąg our group practiced this into duets on some mornings, into looped sequences on others. Possibilities for application abound, presumably both for performative dance purposes and in somatic healing work.
Nina mentioned how she once glimpsed a non-native English speaker’s notebook with “fuzzy baby” jotted down by mistake, but my imagination can’t stop running with this. With “fussy” the semantics get, well, fussy, since this baby is not upset but merely twitchy and not yet patterned. So I find that “fuzzy” is the better descriptor in this case, close enough to “fussy” to ring the right bell among native speakers, but weird and random enough to embody the essence of the practice, which moreover can be said to have much in common with blurry phenomena. But enough about me, what a method! It sets the body up for a spirited experience with any subsequent stillness or deliberate movement. According to Nina that’s because synovial fluid in now flowing madly and countless cellular processes thus jump-started have brought about profound chemical change in the body. And it’s change that makes initiating both movement and thought rich with possibility, maybe free here and there from some of our burden of habit.
The other method was the main course of our daily practice and it’s what Nina and Andrew have named Ensemble Thinking. Here the group is primed to act as a collective. The movement scores inspire improvised dance performances that seemed to me to be part alertness game, part mindfulness practice, part telepathic experience. Though we worked with this material much more over the course of the week I will now say much less than I did about Re-Wire because I can confidently let the pictures do the talking. But I will mention this—for someone like me, who has struggled with feelings of belonging and group-based everything for as long as I can remember, a week of exactly this might have been the answer to my prayers (not to mention to other people’s prayers). Maybe the material had a hand in how easy it felt for me to feel ease all retreat long sharing bathrooms and mealtimes with the others.
If all this leaves you hungry for more, see the course description on sytuacje.com.pl. Plenty of relevant writing is also available on ninamartin.org, wasswasswass.com, ensemblethinking.com, and lowerleft.org. The latter two sites are for initiatives Nina and Andrew run as a team. And what a team they make—a pleasure to watch, soothing to be around, fun to listen to, easy to learn from.
How well-timed my surrender was to getting schooled by kind teachers and favorable circumstances. Life is what happens while you make other plans. In Burdąg this summer life happened with a bang for me. Thank you Nina, thank you Andrew, thanks Andrzej.
*Kairos is a bookish term for when life overwhelms you so hard all you’re left with is awe, helplessness, and the raw power of loss (or something like that). I have my mom’s voracious reading and diamond-honed intellect to thank for introducing me to this concept just yesterday. (And Piotr Augustyniak, author of the newly published Boga nie ma, jest życie, whose hard-won atheism harnesses the emotion of religious experience and who writes about kairos in language that shows as it’s telling.)
All photos taken with the Fujifilm XT-5 and the Fujinon 56mm f/1.2 by the author and posted with permission from organizers, teachers, and participants. I’m also happy to share that Sytuacje is compensating my documentary work with a work-exchange arrangement I find satisfactory and exciting.