EXRTRACTS FROM A NOTEBOOK FROM 2007

 
We are placed in a specific alliance tilting forward and backward, to one side or another. These slants of raised and lowered emphasis correspond to one another in an endeavour which is always underway. It is our relationship to the space we occupy in various ways which is a channel for our various occupations. This is our first language; our placement in relationship to all else; in relationship to one another. It is never static. It is a dynamic moment-by-moment re-allocation. The intervals that carry the eloquence of this statement are held and cherished because we manipulate our body forms compressing and extending them in a dance of opposites so that the given space maps a coherence in relationship to the shapes between us, which we configure.


Movement is time-based. Communication depends on the same time-based operation for a given period of time. This is how we apprehend one another. It is not eyes and ears, mouth and throat alone. Firstly the body positions the emphasis according to shared co-ordinate points. These are never abstractable. They are somewhere between the interchange of the one and the other. The shapes we make and the shapes between us are the web around which this point of shared focus emerges. This is the point of unity around which a dance of exchange is both drawing upon and is nurturing. It is the common point of exchange and the still point of focus. This is the basics out of which our life-execution emerges. It is our point of bearing.

In order to make contact with a child or adult whether they are verbal or non-verbal, in a position to carry their own weight or not, thrusting forward or falling back, it is necessary to catch into their movement which is constantly merging towards a re-allocation. Learning to dwell through moving into this process, creating exchange points at various approximations deep within the body fascia and in the space where bodies meet and separate is an on-going atunement.

In order to strike up the intervals of this exchange the emphasis must be followed to its epitome and then resolved into the interior opposing countenance which will then catch in and pump out into an outer manifestation. So feeling and expression go hand in hand and rely on creating a feedback link with one another. Sentient beings who draw out and feed back in to these evidential cycles create a loop of co-responses to what appears when stilted to be a staring out, coupled with an inhibition within.

Within this loop of affects what is inhibited will then become the very ground base and pivot of what needs to express itself by softening and completing its journey of sending back out.

This fluid cycle can be enacted with certain children by literally picking them up and gliding them through the air, dropping back down the weights through the sacrum, abdomen, pelvic area and seeing how in counter-flow the chest and arms and head and legs naturally thrust out and a lateral weightless distribution of body-mass can then apply. Equally, contact to the upper back can create a weightless rising of the abdomen-sacrum-pelvis area which naturally rights itself in relation to the spine.

Yet for this to be effective there needs to be a feed-in to the system of extension and containment in the body of the practitioner who acts now as a pivot around which the child turns now as an outer boundary upon which the child pushes, extends and re-locates within into their own central axis.

Interior and exterior is constantly relayed back and forth between practitioner and child. This is the exchange which is our first language of placement and orientation