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difficult about the task. How did the experience of memory change your perception of the points you chose? Was it easy or difficult to remember? Do you remember more by the points or the passage of the journey? Next, try the same thing, but this time make curved pathways through the space. Again after six to eight points, stop, close your eyes retrace your journey in your mind’s eye and then physically. How was this experience different from the one with straight lines? Again, discuss this with your comrades. You can also experiment with changing speed. If you are running, is it easier to remember? In the arcs, do you remember the pathway more than the point? What is your relationship to the other bodies moving? (This exercise could be done indoors, but it’s especially nice done outside.)”—Jennifer Monson, a Navigation Score 2. Take a “blind walk” (close your eyes) with a group of people—down a corridor, across a field in the rain, pick your spot—and then do a ten-minute free-write focused on the experience. Share your writings with each other. How do experiences overlap and how do they differ? Pick a contrasting environment and repeat. 3. Moving with a group of people (this is especially fun with a large group), maintain equal distance from your adjacent partners at all times. Try this with chemists! Ask them how it simulates molecular behavior. (Nancy Topf referred to this as the “Equidistant Score.”) 4. Start standing back to back with a partner, mutually sharing your weight through a point of contact. Now cross the space together, allowing the point of contact to roll between you. Check in with your partner afterward, each of you describing where your attention was drawn or something that you noticed. Next time, close your eyes. Check in again. Did your experience and attention shift? If so how? 1 I N T E R L U D E 4 Notes to Myself on Not Knowing As an improviser, I’m building something, but I don’t know exactly what. I’m only knowing it as I build it. There is a phase of not knowing, and that can feel extremely disconcerting because generally in our lives we know what we’re about or at least have plans. We may be fooling ourselves, but we operate as INTE RLUDE 141 if we do know what we’re doing. So in improvisation, when I throw myself into a possibility of being somewhere and not knowing what I am doing there, I can feel very lost. Developing a tolerance for being lost, or, another way to say it, a tolerance for ambiguity, is a useful skill in improvisation. Then, the recognition phase can be very exciting: “My God, I had no idea where I was, and look where I am!” Suddenly it happens that I recognize where I am because I have been lost long enough to make some sense of my surroundings. My surroundings give me information about where I am, and either I recognize it because it is familiar, or I just recognize that I AM somewhere, even if I haven’t been there before. And that is exciting. Then I arrive somewhere, and it can be, “Oh no, not here again!” But that is more about snapping to a judgment about a place—anticipating it without entering into it and living in it. What does it have to tell me today? With some improvising skill I can sometimes negotiate and shift my destination within an ensemble. “Not that diagonal again!” There’s a recognition and then a response to realize it or divert. There is also this thing that can happen where I am improvising and I am lost, that is, not knowing where I am at or what I am doing. But again, suddenly I find that I have been lost long enough that I can dance that “lostness.” My lostness brings me into a dance state in the Simone Forti sense, which, after all, is what we were looking for to begin with. Found. 142 INTE RLUDE ...

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