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3. Find an improvising musician and work together. Discover the expectations and desires you have for the relationship between music and dance. What relationships do you fall into? Is there a tendency to work with matching qualities and rhythms? Try pushing the envelope you create together. Do any new forms or relationships of working together emerge for you? Consider degrees of contrast and counterpoint, mixing differing amounts of stillness or silence, types of responding—questioning, challenging, agreeing, for starters. 4. In an improvisation, play with the idea of partnerships—with the floor, another person, the space, music. 1 I N T E R L U D E 4 Notes to Myself: Listening Since I know nothing at all, I shall do whatever occurs to me. —C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections There seem to be two parts to listening with the body. First, there is listening to the phenomenon, but then there is listening to the body’s response to the phenomenon to see what flash I get. I tend to listen and then calculate. But instead I could learn to hear what the first flash is and pay attention to that. For some reason I often put off acting on the first thing I hear, but when I put it off and then do it, it’s already old. In improvisation, I need to practice listening and then listening to what occurs to me. And then I need to just go and not get involved with my judgment or calculation, because I can’t be everywhere at once and know what is going to happen and if I wait it isn’t fresh news. I have to catch the tail and hang on. The more I learn to trust catching the tail, the easier it is to catch the ride, I imagine. If I enter knowing what I am going to do (planning) then I miss (shut down to) all the reads and what is actually going on. If the body plans, what does that feel like? It seems like the body can alter its course very quickly because of the reflexive tuning it uses to plan. In the end, there aren’t any absolutes. I can just use everything all the time—whatever occurs to me. What else is there? INTE RLUDE 117 ...

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