6A. Hard Lines/Soft Curves

• Find yourself a place on the floor and stand still. Watch your breath. With each exhalation, release any tension that you are aware of. On the inhalation, continue to send that tension out and away from your body. With each breath, become more quiet and more still.

• I'm going to call out words that indicate particular qualities of movement. Improvise movement within these qualities. By improvise, I mean that you make it up as you go along. When you hear each consecutive word, shift abruptly into the prescribed quality.

• Hard lines Soft curves Vibrations Jumps Heavy lines Angular paths Complicated circles Percussive starts and stops Jumps and turns Thrusts and stabs Swings Spirals

• As your body moves through these different physical modes, states of mind—emotions, feelings, and attitudes—may come into your awareness. Manifest these states through your actions—tension in your body, expression on your face, focus of your eyes.

• Within the next few minutes, associate with someone else in the room and interact with them using these same qualities. I'm not going to call them out. You're body knows them by now. You decide when to change from one to another. The choice will depend on what your partner is up to. Be clear. Keep the qualities distinct. You and your partner may interact with similar or contrasting qualities. These qualities are your language. Talk to each other.

Putting our bodies in unfamiliar shapes can be as awkward as trying to speak a foreign language. It takes time for the experience to be­come comfortable.

When we're studying a foreign language, we're happy just to use the right word at the right time. As we become more fluent, our lives become influenced by that language and how it orders and describes perception. Our experience becomes concretized by the collective intelligence of those who speak the same tongue.

In Hard Lines/Soft Curves students explore movement as language. Instead of rolling their "r's," they roll their hips. Instead of sharpening their consonants, they sharpen their thrusts and jabs, expanding and articulating their newly acquired movement vocabulary. At first, they approach it technically, as a task. At some point, students let go of movement as technique and they just move. The movement is guided by its own voice and moves itself.

Different qualities of movement inspire different moods. Different moods and aspects of mind call for different qualities of movement. Body and imagination work in tandem, pushing and pulling each other into new terrain.

Breath Again

Breath goes deep. When we turn our attention to it, we can feel it. It's one of the few things inside that we can feel. It's a channel leading to our inner body awareness.

Our inner body (organs, vessels, nerves, fluids, muscles) and our outer body (skin, facial features, fingers and toes, legs and arms) don't appear to have much to do with each other. In fact, for most of us, the outer body seems to run the whole show. If it moves, then we know the body is moving. If it's still, then we assume the body is still. We often forget that our skin covers up the biggest parade in town. Pumps, squeezes, charges, thrusts, leaps, oozes and every other possible move­ment follow one another in a never ending procession. Within a single cell, there's enough squeezing and jostling, consuming, discharging, entering and exiting to make the outer body seem asleep in comparison.

Yet, out of all that commotion, we can find our breath. Through our breath, we find our voice.