ecological dance - extended touch - sensitive energy

after 20+ years of dancing outdoors I gave another class called 'dancing in the park' in Rotterdam tonight. we started with sensing our navels while remaining open to other impressions. then to grounding via the heels, practicing leg-alignment. finally this connectivity was expanded to the hands, head, fingers, toes, crown, tailbone. these 'lines' could be open-ended or closed. at one point i realized that it was my inner organs' motion translated through the muscles & skin when I felt a line to be most open & the movement most 'endless' ...

while I worked on with environmental elements from having taken Viewpoints classes with Deborah Black and the all-encompassing open awareness from Butoh with Rhizome Lee, I finally could get a better sensation of the physical tangible presence of all the grass on the meadow, people's presence further away.

of course this is partly guess-work and highly subjective. but I keep finding it very worth-while to train my perceptivity towards further and ever more inclusive sensitivity, even if it turns out that in fact I am very far away from sensing the actual, ever more remote, tangible feedback from another energy/presence.

Gaia & planetary consciousness : sensible ecology
in two of his novels, Russian-American writer Isaac Asimov described a fictional planet he calls Gaia, where the arriving human inhabitants learned to share their consciousness with each other, and subsequently include all animals, plants and anorganic parts of the planet, no matter how residual or minimal.

I believe that we already have this planetary consciousness right here, but may not be very aware of it, or that it has been too formed into specific cultural patterns that highlight certain phenomena but exclude or won't recognize others. I also believe that, what was named late- and postmodernism in the European-American zone, actually opens up this very cultural zone to such a realization of ecology as a felt and sensible process. (Anna Halprin, Elaine Summers, Mary Fulkerson-O'Donnell, Pauline de Groot, but also Charlotte Selver, and so many others)

so for the coming three weeks I plan to work further on this concept of extended touch as a way to move with and within the entire environment, practicing how I can open myself further and further while moving ...