4. Unity and Freedom (Two Versions)

Embodying Unity
In our fourth session, we wanted to explore the experience of "unity" by exploring and playing with its opposite, "separation".  These are abstract concepts, and we challenged ourselves to make them as concrete as we could by grounding them in specific movement flows that we had enjoyed in our respective movement practices.  I had done several partnered movement warm-ups in my training in contact improvisation that embody these concepts, and in our discussion, Ebn, Adina and I strung these exercises together to create a movement flow.

Contact Improv, Meet Drama Improv
The three movement activities we decided to use were 1) individual improvised movement, in which the mover simply responded to the music in their own way, 2) a method acting warm up by Augusto Boal in which partners respond to each other by moving into and holding poses, 3) a mirroring exercise.  Initially, we discussed exploring moving from a state of separation to a state of unity by
going from individual improvised movement to the mirroring exercise.  But we soon realized we were prefabricating people's experiences of the movement, and wanted to be careful, in constructing the flow, not to correlate experiences of "unity" or "separation" with particular movement exercises.

Subjective and Objective "Experience"
We instead wanted to allow the individual's movement to create a subjective experience of the connection between these two states within the conceptual frame we were offering, without simply having the movement objectively be the state of unity or separation.  For the purpose of this session, and because we were curious about how repeating movement exercises might effect people, we decided to do this by going from improvised movement to the responding exercise to mirroring, and then back to the responding exercise and finally improvised movement.

Repetition and Novelty
In this exercise, we repeated movement exercises.  People's reflections at the end of the session showed that they had an entirely different experience of beginning with individual movement versus ending with individual movement.  When we led the session for our rabbinical student peers at Hebrew College, we encouraged them to lead their own movement sessions on the off weeks, since we were only facilitating the Movement Minyan every other week, and were aware that people's diverse movement backgrounds could add diversity to the Movement Minyan outside of the series that we were planning. Adam facilitated this session again two weeks later at Moishe House Providence (this links to a few pictures).



Outline: Hebrew College
Music on in background.  Write the "Shema" on the white board.
I. Structure: (10)
Prayer structure: the movement from Shema to Geulah
A new approach to embodying unity as it relates to freedom, making a bridge between Shema and Geulah
Opening Question:
Carry with your through this exercise sensing where you feel most free

II. Movement: (30)
Individual > responding (contact?) > mirroring (contact?) > responding (contact?) > individual
-Music, but when interacting let person be cue

III. Closing Question: (10)
Which part made you feel most free?  Most constrained?  Most unified?  Most separate?
How can embodied experience inform prayer practice (and maybe Shema and Geulah in particular)?

IV. Closing the space (hand lift)

Outline: Moishe House
Since I had more time, in addition to the above outline, I added a warm up and general introduction to the session before describing the "Structure" and "Opening Question" for this session (as above).

I. Warm up: (5)
Everyone shares their name and a movement or gesture that comes from where they're at/how they're feeling/a need they have in this moment

II. Intro: (5)
The Movement Minyan is a laboratory.  It is emerging as a unique method in response to other types of "prayer dance" like 5 Rhythms, Sweat Your Prayers, Authentic Movement, etc, and has been primarily explored at Hebrew College amongst rabbis and cantors in training.

The rest of session outline was the same as at Hebrew College (see above)

At Moishe House, I was asked to prepare a discussion over brunch, so I include my notes from the discussion I planned to facilitate here, as well.

Opening:
-Interest in creating practice that isn't just "liturgical dance"/dancing dance of Shechina, etc. - but is part of matrix of other spiritual practice; this practice is designed to both inform and be informed by other work with liturgy/liturgical prayer, etc.
-Concern that spirituality/spiritual practice can end up being abstract/intellectual - can never be that way with body, especially with improvisation
Mechanics:
-Structure/limitations leading to freedom
-Teaching vocabulary of body

Reflections
One observation I made between doing this session at Hebrew College and again at Moishe House was that since the people at Moishe House had danced a lot together, and were comfortable with contact, a lot more contact improvisation happened as we went between Boal's exercise and the mirroring exploration.