Authentic Movement virtual meeting in the UK with Emma Meehan (Leamington Spa) and Amy Voris (Manchester) in honour of Mary Starks Whitehouse

We took part in the Global Virtual Event Long Distance Authentic Movement Circle to Share Your Dreams for Authentic Movement
October

We followed the score for Movement:

Connect to yourself, open your awareness to include the space that you’re in, and eventually your peers you are moving with.

Begin to open your awareness to all the other movers around the world. Follow your inner impulses in relationship to this awareness of the larger collective. Be curious and notice if you have a wish or a dream for our community.

Following a transition period of writing and drawing, we shared witnessing via Skype.

Emma’s writing

Lying on my back, stretching right leg then left leg out to side, a gentle opening, restful. I feel a breathing space between joints, muscles, bone, a gentle spreading and opening of hips, groin, knee, ribs, and a releasing into the floor. I wish for more time to move and movement to become part of my desk work.

Feeling of warmth and opening and sensitivity in my chest, imagining Amy move in Manchester– I can visualise and feel her closeness, proximity, warmth, sounds, feeling connected. Coming back to this room, how can I get a sense of connecting without imagining? Thoughts crowd in and I feel confused between here and there, trying to find a ground for sensing my own body and connecting with the virtual world. Constantly moving arms and legs, soreness in neck, trying to reach arms over head. Gentle moving –connective tissue being opened out, breathing life into it, opening spaces and gaps between fibres and tissue and muscle and bone.

Kneeling on floor, hands upturned. Stillness and a sense of solid core, imagining threads connecting me to the rest of the world. Imagining other movers everywhere, like me, doing Authentic Movement, breathing, reaching an arm in the air, like me. I feel a sense of confusion and frustration and unsettling in nerves, wondering how can I connect here and now? Leaning forward into a child’s pose, messaging shoulders, aching in muscle.

Amy’s writing

I am pushing into the wall with right hand

and left foot.

Playing between pushing

and yielding.

Feedback from the wall into my

bones is satisfying.

A slotting into a place.  

Leaving that place.  

And returning.  

There is warmth that turns

into heat and then back to warmth

again.

Dialogue

We discuss connections in our moving and witnessing with previous conversations about finding a place or a home.  We also note our explorations in Authentic Movement in performance, where Authentic Movement ‘materials’ are revisited through repetition with a difference.

We move on to the sense of confusion about the word ‘community’ – what is a community? What is the Authentic Movement community?  Is there a space to express and contain tensions? What is the relationship between elders and the next generations?

We explore these questions in relation to our moving.  In Amy’s there is a wish for resilience in the field to handle the tension between points in the community.

In mine, there is a wish to find space as a way of connecting – like connective tissue or a web of connection, with substance and space to allow contact, relationship, movement.