Thursday, February 24, 2011

1. Why Pray?

Beginning Again
In thinking about opening the Movement Minyan this spring at Hebrew College, we knew there would be a mix of old and new faces, people both with and without basic awareness of and comfort with movement.  Like our very first session, the goal for this first session was to introduce bodily awareness to this diverse group of people by drawing upon our respective movement disciplines to create enough structured movement that everyone would feel safe participating and taking personal risks in this space, and eventually building up to improvised individual movement.  As we brainstormed, we paid particular attention to how to structure our movement practices, and articulate natural feeling transitions from paired stretching to improvised movement.  We also reflected on unexamined assumptions we'd made in previous sessions: in many of our paired movement exercises, is there a particular reason we don't we instruct people to switch partners?  What would be lost or gained in trying this?