100 words

This is the first threshold in between mind and body exercise that I suggested to your attention. I tried to ask for 100 words in order to limit the useless words or even get rid of them entirely. So, I may have shortened some of your contributions. The exercise has an absurd component because it asks the writer to explain what happened when his mind was not aware of what happened. Therefore it can sound confused, or abstract, or just telling a story like it happened to somebody else.

Moving thresholds, dancing kairos


As a dancer I draw lines. Choreography is a book of passages, dance is a succession of presents. Its face is visible, yet it defies memory as a reminiscence of “what was just before” and the expectation of “what comes immediately next”. Time is synthetized in dance. Origin and Now become entangled before the audience. Dance is a phenomenon of self-evidence. The sensing of time as kairos.  The body becomes a matter of life and a subject of self-donation through space and time. Dance embodies the forever imminent confrontation with freedom. From conceiving a temporal synthesis to discovering each dancer as a soloist of limit, the body is metamorphosed in the mimesis of itself. Zarathustra was a dancer. He drew delimitations in order to become wiser.

Joana Duarte Bernardes

This bike has thin tyres and I feel every inch of the road, puddles deeper than they look. I’m repeatedly in and out of attention about the traffic, pedestrians stepping out and not looking, about a dog loose from its lead, and about the sometimes perilous state of the road: in between, there’s that state of ‘flow’ where my body is just getting on with what it’s doing, blood is pumping, I’m inhaling and exhaling. I’m not thinking. I’m doing. I’m simply being, if only for a moment or two before consciousness nags me back into noticing the everyday around.

Joanne Lee

 

One evening 61 years ago I was wearing a tuxedo and dancing a slow “fox-trot” with a young lady in a ballroom dress. My steps were very rudimentary: left foot forward, right foot forward, right foot rightwards, left foot rightwards, then again left foot forward.... I was thinking about how heavenly it was to be dancing with this wonderful girl, cheek to cheek! She said to me, very sweetly, “Mark, there’s something I’d like to ask you.” – “Yes, Mary Lou, what is it?” (I was full of delectable anticipation; I knew she liked me!)  – “Could we go around the other way?”

Mark Lindley