
To Be And Not To Be
authentic movement workshop
Essentially, this AND NOT practice is a mode of free association of the entire human organism.
While a collective experience, it is a one-by-one practice:
witnessed by the group – with eyes closed, you follow any impulse to move (or not), to sound (or not), or to speak (or not).
Each person takes a number of turns, with variations in length of time and ways of entering the time, of being witnessed.
After an unled warm up, I often start the work with a brief eye-hand exercise.
We also decide as a group how – or even if – to talk about what we witness – both as mover and as watcher.
Whether witness or witnessed, an other kind of seeing, listening and being is accessed.
One's aliveness is – changed.
‘Authentic Movement’ was originated by Mary Starks Whitehouse in the 1950's as a diagnostic tool in the frame of Dance Movement Therapy; it was given a more mystical grammar by her student Janet Adler, z"l. She called its other kind of access an interior descent.
While it’s become a creative, compositional tool in the live and film arts (where I first encountered it), AND NOT workshops are not ‘performance’ workshops – although it certainly can produce material for work, visible, audible and written.
Questions of 'performing', of 'showing', of being seen and of who's watching are fundamental to its act.
No experience necessary (or … possible?).
Because the authentic in "authentic movement" is questionable – as is the free in 'free association' – this is precisely part of its power, as well its distinct relationship from, and to, psychoanalysis.
Please get in touch if interested.