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?


Outline
I. Theme (3 min)
Body awareness


II. Frame (2 min)
Introducing Movement Minyan, body awareness, building community


III. Warm up (5 min)
Body scan, entering the body with breath


IV. Movement (35 min)
a. Partner stretches: passive/active where partner supports the stretch, switching partners after each stretch.  Goal: to connect everyone in the room (15 min)
b. Partner movement: each person takes turns starting as a "rag doll" moved by the partner, and moving with increasing levels of activity so that each person in pair initiates a contact dance (10 min)
c. Individual free movement: follow any sensations or movements you want to investigate on your own (5  min)


d. Shavasana (5 min)


V. Reflection (5 min)
How did your body respond to being held in the stretch by your partner?
What was your experience of being moved? Of being the mover?
How did the exercises influence your personal movement?


VI. Closing (5 min)
We'll be leading roughly every other week
We enthusiastically invite others to lead in the off weeks to set up Wednesday as a movement day every week
We'd be happy to help work with people on ideas you have
Blog - read, comment, post!


VII. Hand closing (1 min)

Reflections
After the session, Adina and I talked about languaging.  Rather than ask our reflection questions and have people enter them from an intellectual place, Adina suggested "take a moment to go inside your body and connect with what it felt like".  I noticed that I found it easier to offer instructions on the paired movement exercise while doing the exercise with Adina and noticing what was happening in our movement in order to guide others.  We would like to continue to become increasingly aware of the way our instructions affect people's ease of movement and personal expression.


Though the Movement Minyan is already an interactive and participatory space, Adina and I brainstormed ways to respond to people's interest in getting more involved with this project, including making space for Kaddish at the end of each session, encouraging people to either post their insights and reflections on the post of the session they attended on the blog, allowing people (besides Adina or I) to facilitate different sections of the minyan - whether tefillah or a particular movement practice.


Some personal reflections: David's looping and our movement, particularly during the free movement, created a sense of sound and space becoming responsive to the energy and physical exploration happening in the room, almost as if the room became an organism.  One participant said, "I felt both enlightened and vulnerable in being stretched by a partner".  Another, said "I wish I could be moved like a rag doll every day!"