One of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most beloved and remembered phrases from Letters To A Young Poet reads, “I would like to beg you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day” (35).
The dance is one way we can practice living the questions themselves. Rather than learning pre-choreographed movement, we put questions into motion and allow the inner choreography to unfold as we investigate. We bring our attention to what is happening, to what we are being shown by the movement, by the sensate experience, and that becomes our learning. I want to be clear, I love learning choreography and often attend dance classes where we practice choreographed steps all together, which has its own particular magic. I simply want to make the distinction that on the Open Floor it is inquiry that guides the movement; the exploration of questions and our relationship with what arises becomes our dance. We sense the textures that arise, the openings and closings, the tensions and the moments of insight, the heaviness and lightness, the stuckness and the flow and everything in between, the “I don’t know” in all its varied shapes, the intimacy and the avoidance, and we learn to follow the scent of what feels most alive and beckoning for our attention. By offering questions to the body and allowing the body to speak through movement, we open the possibility of entering some of those locked rooms Rilke refers to, hidden places that might have insights to offer: insights about how we relate to life, to ourselves, to each other, to being itself. We do not dance for definitive answers; we do not dance to get somewhere better or higher. We dance to come more fully alive in relationship to our questions – more alive in how we move, how we respond, exploring inner and outer landscapes and allowing ourselves to be moved by what’s there. We dance to become more aware of how life moves through us, and with more awareness, we have more choice. Do I want to keep repeating this automatic familiar way of moving? Do I want to continue relating from this same perspective? Or do I want to try something new? Something fresh? We bring our curiosity; we play; we don’t judge ourselves when we get stuck; we simply notice, and keep moving ever deeper into that stuck place until it begins to shapeshift into something else. In a way, we learn through our connection with unsolvable questions – unsolvable, because every time we step onto the dance floor we are different, made of change, just as everything is made of change. No dance is ever the same.
What questions might we ask the body? What does inquiry look like on the dance floor? Open Floor works primarily with universal principles of movement – how life moves, the physics of being. In the Open Floor curriculum we call these movement principles Core Movement Resources with the idea that we resource ourselves somatically for awareness, capacity, and creativity in our relationships through deepening our relationship with how life moves. We could ask questions about ground, for example. What is my relationship with ground today? With the weight of my being? Can I feel my substance? Can I let the earth within me make contact with the earth beneath me? Can I feel the earth reaching back? What parts of me can I feel? What parts seem distant or numb? How am I relating to gravity? What does it feel like to resist gravity? What does it feel like to give in and let myself fall? Do I tend to fight or surrender? Is ground even possible or is groundlessness the only option? And what if ground is nothing other than the capacity to stay in relationship with what is? What if being “grounded” actually means being intimate with our lives in such a way as to be able to stay in relationship with what’s happening from moment to moment? The questions and the exploration of ground are endless.
We could ask questions about expansion and contraction. What in me is open today? Where can I feel the breath expanding? What part of me is contracted, gripping, resistant to softness? Can I allow it? Can I go towards what has a hold on me? How does it feel to allow myself to take up space? To be big? How does it feel to shrink myself, to hold myself close in? What posture is more familiar to me? How does this show up in my relationships? Can I allow myself permission to change? To be dynamic? To be big, small, fast, slow, loud, quiet, open, shut? Do any emotions arise when I open? When I close? What wants to stay hidden? What wants to be revealed?
We could ask questions of direction and velocity. We could ask questions of release and dissolution. We could ask questions of pause and space. We could ask questions of what activates a response and what settles us. We could ask questions of what we are moving toward and what we are moving away from. We could ask questions of center and edges. Explorations are endless, and we can work these questions solo, in duos, in small group connections, in connection with the Spirit of life itself, and open ourselves to what gets stirred up. Like archaeologists digging for artifacts, unsure of what they’ll find, we excavate the body for clues to hidden worlds, hidden possibilities, and open ourselves to surprise. We allow ourselves to investigate the multitudes we contain; to shapeshift our way through many different ways of being. We let the dance itself be our guide – no right steps or wrong steps, just movement that takes us deeper and deeper into connection with the way life moves through us, the way soul moves through us, the way the essence of our being can bubble up through all the layers of our conditioning when given time and space to move.
This is a glimpse of movement as inquiry. A glimpse into the practice of dancing the questions themselves, not to find definitive answers, but to come alive in the asking.
Works Cited:
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Translated by Joan M. Burnham. New World Library, 2000.
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