15B. Face the Music

• Find a partner. One of you, A, begins by tapping a rhythmic pattern on the floor with your feet. The other, B, repeats the pattern. If B has difficulty repeating the pattern, A repeats it until B gets it. Don't discuss it. Talk to each other through your feet. Now, B taps a pattern on the floor and A repeats it. Switch roles back and forth, each time developing more complex patterns. Do this without looking at your, or your partner's, feet.

• The next step: Instead of tapping your feet, move different body parts— arms, little finger or knee—and do a rhythmic pattern that your partner then repeats. Again, alternate back and forth while increasing complexity.

• Step three: Change the expression of your face rhythmically. Have these facial expressions express changing inner states. Alternate turns and, again, go for increasingly complicated patterns.

• Make it hard for each other.

In many cases, music is simply sequential rhythmic patterns and silence. Musical relationships exist whether we notice them or not. Time patterns are always going on whether we notice them or not. One action follows another whether we notice that or not.

Face the Music is a "practice your scales" and focus exercise. The sensor)' receptors' ability to distinguish more and more complicated information increases with practice. So does the ability to translate that information into action. Students experience that action embedded in a moment-to-moment chain of change. Any distractions from the task at hand result in missed beats, lost information.

We control, mask, immobilize and don't feel the face more than any other part of their body. In Step Three of this exercise, the expressions of the face reflect inner condition. To change these expressions in a rhythmical pattern while truly being "in" them, requires the student to, in a sense, step back from his face and feel it as separate from him. It is an object with bones, muscles and flesh. It moves. He can dance with his face.

Both Episodes and Face the Music work at the underpinnings of improvisation. The first invites freedom, the second, control.

15C. Shift with Initiator

• Find a partner. You're going to do a "shift" exercise together. You're both in the same world, or scene, and you're shifting your actions more or less simultaneously. However, one of you will always shift first, as the primary shifter, and the other will always shift slightly afterwards as the secondary shifter. Your shifts are always a response.

• Keep this perspective. You're making scenes together. The primary shifter provides half of the scene. The secondary shifter completes the other half.

• Even though you're in the same scene and responding to each other, your forms of expression must differ. If the primary shifter is only moving, the secondary shifter must either speak or sound. If the primary shifter is using sound and movement, the secondary shifter has the options of sounding from a still body, or moving without sound or speech.

Here are the options:

Movement only

Sound only

Speech only

Sound and movement

Movement and speech

Speech and sound

Movement, sound and speech

You'll do this for ten minutes, discuss it and then switch primary and secondary roles.

You're walking down the street. A car screeches. You respond.

The stew boils over. You respond.

There's a knock on the door. You respond.

The phone rings. You respond.

A stranger says, "How are you?" You respond.

These are ordinary circumstances. But how about these?

A child flies by your front door.

Someone is laughing uncontrollably an inch from your face.

A door, hanging in space, is opening and closing over and over

again. Someone spins in circles next to you, making wordless

stuttering sounds. Someone kneels at your feet, holding his breath, smiling.

Responses to less ordinary happenings need not take any more time than responses to ordinary ones. Quickness requires only innocence, which we had when we were young; life could contain just about anything. Anything was believable.

What makes any primary or secondary actions "real?" When a child flies by your door, what makes that real? Belief. If the student believes that the child is flying by their door, then the child is flying by their door. Really. Response erupts from belief. Not as an interesting idea, but as truth at that moment.

In Day Eleven, the It Responds exercise prepared the student for this type of sophisticated structure. In Shift with Initiator both the primary and the secondary shifters are responding to each other. The scenario flows, one scene leading to the next. Students have to focus on content and building "scenes." They hold the content lightly so that the moments of action don't have to connect literally, but can stretch beyond the borders of normal.

Content varies from student to student. Some students thrive in fantasy, surreal, and non-sequitur realms. Others are more political, or psychological. Some draw from natural history, science, or myth. Some are funny, some serious. Some are more kinetic, some, more vocal. Some have a way with language. The entire universe is in the studio, embodied as students.

On occasion, a student wants to be normal. They want to respond in a "normal" way. Once one's awareness expands, "normal" becomes nuances, detail, and awesome peculiarities. Everything is normal, and everything isn't. Normal isn't normal anymore and every perspective is heightened.

Reframe

Refraining is another inroad into the imagination. Through her action, the secondary shifter may re-frame, or change the meaning, of the primary shifter's actions. She can paint another picture around the action to change its context and meaning. For example:

A is rapidly and desperately blowing on her hands to cool them,off as if they are too hot.

B reframes by selling her as a new kind of air-conditioner.

A is moving slow-motion, obviously euphoric, describing hisgravity-less atmosphere.

B reframes by aggressively playing him as a pin ball machine.

As in It Responds, the secondary shifts, here, are required to be expressively different. In addition to the options listed above in the exercise, they must differ formally in time, space, shape and tension. As experience accumulates, this just happens. B wants to "sense" their action, clearly defined, in relation to As. Students are drawn to the strength of counterpoint and difference.

Remember:

Everything your partner does is perfect. Your partner is perfectly being himself, always. Make whatever your partner does work. Your partners action is only action. It's not totally his, and is certainly not yours. Action is just action.

Also, remember:

Everything you do is perfect.

You are perfectly being yourself, always.

What you do works.

Your action is only action. Action is not a persons being.

On the one hand, we talk about "no separation" and on the other "clear boundaries." These are different ways of saying "separation." These are contradictory if we confuse action with identity. Neither we, nor our partners, are what we do. We're awareness. In awareness there's no "I," no separation of I, me, mine, you, yours. At the "We" or the "I" level, separation enters and boundaries between who I am and who you are become important. In this theater, we play freely with both constructs: "We," "You," and "I" as fiction, and the self we normally experience. We aren't rigidly bound into one conception of self.

A student can judge, criticize, be confused about, or question her partners action. Or she can accept her partners action as perfect, perfectly what it is. How can it be anything else, really? As identification slips away from action, the student perceives all action, hers and her partners, as impersonal and unowned. With ownership comes judgment, evaluation, comparison. Without ownership, each action stands perfectly.