3. Why Pray?

Brainstorm
After a long discussion around whether or not to continue our exploration of the choreography associated with "Baruch Atah YHVH," we decided that our initial session on choreogrpahy was a great starting place, but we were excited to take our inquiry in slightly different direction. Our goal became to work with the journey the blessing formula takes us through. This means delving into the move from directionality to no directionality, from groundedness to lack of groundedness, from movement where I am being held to movement where I am not being held, from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Our plan is spend the rest of the semester experiencing the arc of these words. Our first two sessions will be on this move from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Bring in the next part of the blessing formula "Eloheinu Melech haOlam," our third session will explore the move from the unfamiliar (YHVH) to the communal (Eloheinu). Finally, our fourth session will play with the entire phrase: familiar (Baruch Atah) to the unfamiliar (YHVH) to the communal (Eloheniu).

2. Why Pray?

Brainstorm
As we began to envision what this semester could look like, we talked about using previous forms, possibility of keva movement minyan. As our discussion continued we ended up moving away from this idea and towards a focus on our relationship to Gd and how that gets expressed through prayer. Adam brought up a Hasidic teaching that says that when a person prays, she should be so engrossed and passionate and intent that even the first letter, the bet of baruch, can hardly make it out of her mouth. We became interested in exploring the blessing formula "Baruch Atah YHVH" that we say so many times every day. As we began to delve into these words we started by writing the words of the blessing formula on the board, each in its own separate space. We thought about qualities of each of the words and the transitions between them. When we were done, we underlined physical qualities that we had put under each of the words so that we might more easily bring the language of movement into our brainstorm.

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?

2. Alone and Together

Movement Minyan comes to Burning Man

Examining Assumptions
My brainstorm about this session grew out of my thinking about the previous session, Alone and Together I - since they were both happening in the particular context of the Burning Man festival, and would happen over the course of two consecutive days.  In gathering and reformulating material from the final session of the Movement Minyan, I had to continue to reflect on what it would mean to bring this practice to a context and group of people who I didn't know, and whose familiarity with Judaism, liturgy, and movement I had no way of being able to predict.


Making it Cosmic
This session, in many ways, was easier to introduce than the first since so many people are familiar

1. Alone and Together

Moving the Minyan to the Desert
Adina and I discussed the exciting opportunities for challenging the Movement Minyan to explore new horizons by facilitating two sessions at the Burning Man festival.  When designing these sessions, we couldn't know who we were designing them for, but could assume they would bring a wider range of familiarity with Judaism than our regular "venue", Hebrew College.  Through sharing and reflecting on some of our experiences in workshops there, and of the space and energy of the festival, generally, some themes that could be particularly engaging to explore with people on "the playa" emerged.  We noticed that some of the themes we'd already explored (of "togetherness" or unity and alone-ness or separation) resonated most deeply in this discussion, so decided that it would be powerful to revisit two sessions we had already done and think about how to make them deliciously immediate and accessible experiences in a context radically different from Hebrew College.



Principle #10: Immediacy
We decided two of the richest sessions to harvest material from and prepare for the desert were the

4. Modes of Leadership

In the Deep Blue Sea

We began, of all places, in the ocean. To explore the experience of all together together we started by thinking about nature. What species do we know of that move all together together? The image that came to mind was a school of fish. Somehow, each fish is a separate organism, but as an adaptive and protective mechanism, the fish are able to sync up with one another and create almost a super-fish. How, we wondered, are fish able to remain separate, yet become so intimately connected that they move as one being? Further, how could we get a feeling for this experience through the body? Here's where our brainstorming goes wild!

One Fish Two Fish...School of Fish

For an idea we didn't end up going with, we spent a lot of time brainstorming, so we wanted to include all of that here.After spending some time excitedly browsing through YouTube videos watching swimming schools of fish, we

3. Modes of Leadership

Differentiating Modes

We began by thinking about the idea of praying "alone together", and how that might look as a movement flow.  After Adina and I had an initial meeting in which we had some difficulty differentiating between the mode of "praying alone together" and "praying together", which we felt would be a wonderful mode to explore in our final session of the semester, we talked about different movement activities we'd done that embodied this particular type of prayer experience.

Being Alone with Others

Ultimately, this particular session became an experiment in planning backwards: we had hoped to try to facilitate a session of the Movement Minyan that was inspired by something I had experienced at the Silent Disco.  At this type of event, participants each wear a set of wireless headphones to which DJs broadcast their music, so the dance floor is essentially silent, lending itself to people's individual experience of the music while they dance together in the same space.

2. Modes of Leadership

Initial Thoughts
For this sessions we wanted to make a very clear distinction between call and response, that is to say between moving/saying and stopping/listening. By exploring each of these dynamics separately we could then examine the dynamic that arises as these boundaries shift throughout prayer. One goal was to keep in mind the question: what does it mean to be fully alive in this space? We knew we wanted to at least start with something very structured to highlight the unique aspects of call and response. We continued to discuss the idea of presenting what we've learned to community at some point, using these modes to present.

Call and Response
For this session we wanted to create a group experience involving listening and responding in order to explore the dynamic of call and response in prayer. Our center focus would be on the figure dictating action, as it is in traditional prayer. However, even as we looked at the different rolls of caller and

1. Modes of Leadership

Planting  Seeds
We began by setting broad goals for the Movement Minyan as it moved into its second semester of existence - namely that we wanted to use it to create an ecstatic communal experience, surface new ideas in relation to prayer and G-d, use the body to answer questions, and ensure people left the Minyan with a sense of a quality they want to recreate in their personal and communal prayer experiences.


Collective Action
Some of the experiences Adina and I discussed working with this semester included exploring in the dark with the body, doing partner poses, and guiding intense meditation sessions.  We also explored the idea of bringing in another Contact Improvisation exercise that involved the whole room moving and each person being responsible to respond.  Continuing to delve into our own experiences of ecstatic movement, we talked about my

Visions of a Movement Minyan, Part 2

It's All in the Question
We came back from winter break excited to expand and deepen our work with the Movement Minyan. In our initial session with Ebn we reviewed what we learned from our work with the Minyan first semester. One primary learning was the value of asking a question that can only be answered through the body. From being in school all day engaged in intellectual matters, our tendency was towards brain-centered questions. With Ebn's help we were working to shift these questions so that the body could provide the answers. Ebn was also helping us to break down a complicated question to its essence in order to make it answerable. For instance, there are so many nuances that could be focused on in the flow of prayer from the Shema to the Amidah. Ebn's questions and direction helped us narrow and simplify so that we could focus on one dynamic: the interplay between oneness and freedom.

Facilitation
Not only were we learning what questions to ask, but how to effectively facilitate an experience to

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

3. Unity and Freedom

The question we began with: If Shema stands for oneness/unity and Geulah stands for freedom, what does it mean to say that oneness frees me?

Boundaries
To answer our initial question we began by searching for what we could take from previous classes to build on for this session? Last time we used the diea of boundaries and structure, starting with formal boundaries that progressively got looser and looser. We asked ourselves what question we wanted to put out at end of next session? Ebn reminded us of the power of doing something more than once ie) doing last week's class again and adding 1 element to it. Using relationship structure we could ask new question or same question in a different setting.

Three Poses
We decided to use three set yoga poses as our boundary or limiting factor. We would choose three

2. Unity and Freedom

Shaliach Tzibbur
Our discussion began with questions. In what ways did we want to engage the community - through group learning, group conversation, liturgy or a combination of all three? What sort of questions were we, as rabbinical students, currently addressing--through our studies or through work--regarding prayer? As rabbis we will often be in the position of leading prayer for our community. How do we both have an experience of prayer for ourselves and facilitate an experience for others? This question brought to our minds the role of one who facilitates prayer, the shaliach tzibbur. Knowing that we wanted to explore the relationship between G-d, the shaliach tzibbur and the kahal, we became interested in how the shaliach tzibbur simultaneously maintains a relationship with G-d and with the kahal, keeping the connection between all parts of the triangle (as Ebn diagrams it) alive. Whether leading prayer or participating with the community, what is our awareness like during tefilah?

Dynamic Tension
We knew that we wanted to draw on the shared knowledge of our rabbinical student community and to

1. Unity and Freedom

Starting with a Question
In brainstorming with Ebn, we decided we wanted to start with a specific question, "What's tefillah about?" as a prompt for a one word answer, and to think about that idea in terms of movement, and finally build the process of the session around that idea.  We took the "answer" of "close and distant" and explored how we could create a movement process with this theme.  Do we want to involve touch (sitting back to back - coming away and back towards the other person)?

Body Awareness
In any case, we wanted to keep the movement simple, and decided to start with body awareness - perhaps by doing a "body scan" and perhaps 5 Rhythms.  The way Ebn framed body awareness was using the image of a landing strip and talking about "how many bulbs are lit up around body".  Ebn  also brought up the idea of increasing people's "body literacy": how one movement affects other parts of body.

Visions of a Movement Minyan, Part 1

"Movement Minyan"
In our initial planning discussion with Ebn, Adina and I began to articulate the goals of the Movement Minyan.  Our broad goal was to create a "laboratory" that explores a specific question over a series of sessions, and figure out how to learn about it through movement (i.e., the question of "What is tefillat tzibbur," or communal prayer).

Dance as Prayer
One question we wanted to explore before planning our sessions was, assuming we can pray in a non-verbal mode, what makes dance "prayer", rather than non-prayerful movement?  Some of the factors we suggested were the way the movement space would be set up, people's internal experience of the movement, and the time that the movement happens.

Body and Practice
In creating our specific sessions, we decided we wanted to start with an introductory session to introduce people to their bodies and their relationship to Jewish practice.  Part of the goal of this was