Cycling Through Awareness Protocols

Music and performance creation in heightened body perception

For over 30 years I have been developing a music creation practice based in a process I call ‘cycling through awareness protocols’. I also apply this process in trainings for dance and theatre.

Experiential practices based on awareness and embodiment, for musicians, dancers, actors. Improvisational Dynamics:  incorporating voice, movement, touch, text, time, and energy embodiment.

The practices help nurture “unexpected bridges” – invention cycles driven by enhanced intuition and awareness. 

Embodiment:   To develop an exquisite sense of things.

• training enabling one to become aware of,  assume and incorporate varying energy qualities;  and

• to manifest differing energy qualities as states of being.

One direct exploration on mind influencing body and body influencing mind is that of Experiential Anatomy, where awareness and attention are directed to specific body systems (i.e. bones, skin, muscles, fluids) developing a subtle-level relationship with how the mind expresses through these body systems.

Embodiment on an experiential level is one of the most immediate and subtle studies available to the performing artist. It creates more choices for experiencing and interacting within dynamic creation and performance. 

Explorations:

• The Shadow and other inter-psychic characters. Translating state-bound information out of an alternate state into a form which an ordinary waking state will be able to recognize.

• Experiential Anatomy

• Embodiment work: experiencing the energy quality and resultant energy quality of others, and moving and sounding through that embodied energy.  

• Oppositions -- the energized space between opposing tensions, utilizing Laban Effort Theory oppositions.

• Time Spectrum: ways of organizing and experiencing Time. Time Fields

• Polyphonic Theatre Transformations-- variation techniques

• Physical Genius 

• Vowel and harmonic practice.

• One-Voice

• Vowel Man’s Geography -- the body's energy center geography through chakra vowel toning

• Authentic Toning – living the sound and movement as one.

• Initiation Points – points on the body activated through touch, which become the initiation points for breath, movement and sound.

• Voice As:  Setting imaginative landscapes in the mind which influence the voice’s energy qualities, colors and dynamics.

• Sounder/Mover: explorations into the experiential joining of sounding and moving.

• Immediate Shift/Mutate/Develop/Transform/Alter:   improvisational dynamics in time. Noticing moments of experience.

• Text generation techniques

• Single and Multi State awareness skills – the practice of immediately and fully accepting experience.

• Intention

• Junctures, silences and Ma’s (energized spaces in sound)

• The Witness...the ‘observer’ in us

• Explorations in Energy qualities and their transformations

• Memory: Experiential Remembrance:   a process-based work intended to access personal memory atmospheres through ways in which include for example, Sound Markers (remembered sound events which bring us to the atmosphere surrounding memory events, reproducing sets of images and associations that go far beyond the raw audition of the sounds themselves). Sounds are woven with memory. A deep exploration of enriched personal history.

“Sometimes the body leads the imagination, sometimes the imagination leads the body.”

Evan Parker