Exploring The Change of Thresholds Between Body Systems

(This post assumes knowledge and experience in embodiment work and experiential anatomy explorations and their applications within the performing arts over the past 35 years.)

(The experiential anatomy explorations (initially from the Body-Mind Centering® work as developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen) began to profoundly influence my process in the mid-1990’s. For nearly two years I ran a weekly exploration in Amsterdam (the Amsterdam Working Group) which explored the phase of the process I call Experiential Listening. These meetings were perceptual investigations examining the influences the different energy qualities of the body systems could have upon our relationships to musical works and creation.)

When we’re creating through the body systems we can get to some very extraordinary places in terms of energy quality colors and sensations by exploring the liminal space between two body systems. We can access this through slowing down the sensing process and finding or acknowledging the midpoint between the two thresholds of the body systems being explored. It’s based in the practice of embodying a system (say bones), and then to slowly transition in our attention, intention and awareness to another system (say skin).

Liminal spaces --- what and where are they ? Liminal is used here as the combination of two states of being --- the wide threshold between different states of being, yet possessing the qualities of both states in very fine transitions: for example, we can sense the continuous transition threshold between sea and land; between inside/outside; between sleep/wakefulness; between brilliance/shadow; between consider/begin. Within this work we also focus on developing the freedom to move freely within liminal space, finely between states and sensation.

Options

If you are creating with limited choices or options within a dynamic – one’s Energetic Signature as I call it – the creative range can become predictable and compressed. Change in sensory stimulation is very important. As Bonnie Cohen put it: “By approaching everything with the same mind, you are constantly initiating activity from the same place….(It is important) to develop increased differentiation in sensation.”

The liminal/threshold explorations with the body systems unfold a new creation psychology.

Beginnings

So what is the starting point, the conceptual framework for these explorations?

Again from Cohen:

“Each moment should be a dialogue of response and change. The immediacy of experience. To have a point of focus and a place of entrance.

1. through breathing into an area 2.through sounding into that area 3. through a hissing breath. 4. through moving from that area or system.”

So to add to this, we would experience a body system, say the bone system, through touch, movement, images, the imagination to bring into awareness the qualities of this system on a personal level. Movement for example from these body systems gives the experience of how they can lead us to access often radically different energy qualities and sensations of weight, time, flow and space.

The imagination process is a good framework to work through on a daily basis: we first Generate sensation of the system to be explored; we Establish this as clearly and distinctly as we can; we then Maintain our awareness of the system and its energy qualities; and then we allow it to Transform.

Bonnie Cohen points the way quite clearly in Sensing, Feeling, and Action, 1993, Contact Editions; “We go from one system to the other–now we’re going into the senses, now we are going to acknowledge the information from the skeleton, now from the eye, now from the muscles, now from the organs, from the glands, the brain, the blood, etc. By acknowledging each one, we see that they are channels that can be acknowledged by choice. Once they’ve been acknowledged consciously, we can utilize that information without it remaining primary. One of the things that I think is essential with sensing, is that we reach a point where we become conscious and then we let it go, so that the sensing itself is not a motivation; that our motivation is action, based on perception.”

As a baritone saxophonist, exploring the liminal space of two body systems is an important part of my daily practice. I choose two systems, generate and establish one as I am working with a sound color and slowly transform this towards an awareness of the 2nd system. When I have embodied both systems in the liminal space, I bring the sensing into action by acknowledging how the combined energy qualities of the two systems are ‘enhancing’ the sound color and my general relationship with my instrument. Later in the practice I can generate whole improvisations from this enhanced space.

Zoom

“Each moment should be a dialogue of response and change.” One can take a sliver of the liminal space, zoom in and establish it and then transform it. Working with bone and skin for example, the threshold between bone and bone/skin and between skin and skin/bone of the combined liminal space is a wild place to explore.

Time Field: It is also important to gain the skill to vary the speed and timing of the one’s movement sensually in the liminal space. Consciousness of the Time dynamic helps to bring sensing out into action.

Sensing to Action

It is important to bring the sensing into action. Cohen points out that “if you’re sensing it’s not such an emotional space. But if you’re feeling, then you get the emotions. A lot of sensing work is an escape from the emotions. It actually represses emotional integration if it’s not balanced. I found sensing was…a way to get insight. But then the emotions got cooled out, and that became an imbalance.” She goes on to state that the fluids of the body (the fluid system) are important in supporting feeling and action. My interpretation of this over the years has been to create a vivid fluid base to my explorations. The bones for example are derived from connective tissue – and as Valeska Schöne has pointed out, connective tissue viewed in videos has a crystal fluid type movement quality. So we can support our explorations with a fluid life as we bring the performance work out of deep sensing into action.

Experiential Journal

The following are extracts from journals of experiential work in Amsterdam in 1997 with Valeska Schöne and others, and a revisiting of the material in Germany in 2015.

The process is dynamic and alive – a swift marriage.

The dynamic edge of threshold and liminal space -- physical, emotional, spatial.

Liminal spaces – very fine transitions between different states of being.

How long does it take a threshold to dissolve? – Something that penetrates light, heat, open and closes.

Joe: Just in the 30 min. exploration I felt that the two systems were more nuanced and I felt this liminal area could be a great potential for accessing energy quality.

Valeska: Yes, and finding new structures because skin and bones for me – they are very different and still there is something similar – a very interesting potential for very subtle structures in the middle of the two of them. Also this sense of intimacy in the transformation. Skin and bone are a very intimate process – it’s like touching yourself from inside.

Joe: .. and this dynamic of touch –it’s bidirectional – because when we are touching something we are getting two sets of information – the object we are touching and the sensation of the body area we used for the touch – ourselves and the object and the sensation is interwoven.

Valeska: With the ‘intimate’ –what you just described would happen inside – underneath the skin. It’s like touching yourself with this bony quality from inside.

Joe: We feel the flesh around the bones -- the bones start to move in the flesh inside also – then blossom out into the experiential thing you were talking about – the inner touch.

The skeleton suddenly becomes the skin. Threshold – where it is not one or the other – a blending of the two states of being.

Valeska: When you understand Threshold/Liminal not as a thing of matter but as an energetic thing – it’s an ongoing phenomenon. The space between bone and skin –entrance and exit for sound.