Me an Merrique shot by Matthew Brown

For those of you who don’t know, I joyfully make my living as an art/erotica model/muse.  My work in the realm of still images celebrates the complexity of a strong, fragile, earthy, ethereal presence in the world.  I am a sensualist yogini pixie playing between boundaries and

Photographer: Matthew Brown

borderlands.

I was twirling my billowy skirt around at the ocean shore a couple of weeks ago when a wave came and pulled me under, then spit me out purified.  I somehow have no shots with the skirt, but I feel remarkable lighter and more deeply sri after my trip to LA.  This experience happens in auspicious

Photographer: Matthew Brown

coincidence with my deepening understanding of tantric philosophy in my first Anusara yoga immersion.  This practice is truly yoking together the best of my beliefs and appoaches to life

and giving me concise language–albeit Sanskrit–for complex beliefs that I have struggle

Photographer: Matthew Brown

for years to put into words.   The words whose mere definitions are currently touching me most are tantra, sri, and svatantrya.  If you don’t know these words, take some time looking them up in various sources.  See why I love them.

Here are some of the shots from my baptism day.  This was my favorite couple of hours in LA.  I must go back!

“Some god or Weltgeist has been making a movie out of us for the past six thousand years, and now we have turned a corner on the movie set of reality and have discovered the boards propping up the two-dimensional monuments of human history.  The movement of humanism has reached a limit, and now at that limit is is breaking apart into opposites of mechanism and mysticism and moving along the circumference of a vast new sphere of posthuman thought.”  William Irwin Thompson

“The only thing that really matters now is whether [wo]man can climb up to a…higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands.  But he can make no progress until he becomes very much better acquainted with his own nature.”  CG Jung

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you don not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”  Jesus Christ of Nazareth

“Inspired creativity can flow in a conversation when all the participants are open to being channels for something to come that is greater than any one individual can access.”  Sally Kempton yoga/meditation educator

“Where you do not find love, put love and there you will find it.”  St. John
“Keep asking ‘What do I desire?’  The other important questions will follow.”  Sam Keen
“No work of importance that one’s heart is bent upon with singleminded devotion will remain unfinished.”  Lama Govinda
“The supreme, the most faultless, largest law of action is to find out the truth of your own highest and inmost existence and live it and not follow any external standards.”  Mahatma Ghandi
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist…Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have a suffrage of the world.”  Emerson
“Not till we are lost …do we begin to find ourselves.”  Henry David Thoreau
“Never retain in the world of imagination (the ideal that) can be brought into reality.”  Swami Rudrananda
“Any time you think you need healing, heal someone else…Whenever you are confused and troubled, stop to think:  “When have failed to give?”
“All the gods and demons, the forces of light and darkness are within us….Those who want to conquer the Lord of Death will have to conquer the Lord of Death will have to meet him and to recognize him in the midst of life.”  Lama Govinda
“We cannot avoid using power….So let us…Love powerfully.”  Martin Buber
“Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself…I am large.  I contain multitudes”  Walt Whitman

PS

Clearly, though these ideas transcend sex, there is a stark absence of women’s voices here.  If you know of women who are writing/speaking about deepening human consious awareness of our own natures and the relationship between this and the Earth/cosmic environment and/or human culture, let me know.  I want to read them!

Remember:
-overdancer giving perpendicular pressure down through the bones reinforces the underdancer’s stability and creates strong support for the overdancer

i ground you from above so you can support my body.

I believe in CI as a social movement, a therapy, and a form of movement research within which to discover more and more about humanity and of what we are capable.  From having barely scratched the surface in my lab work so far  in (Juice and NYC), it is becoming increasingly clear that the explorations have direct and easily detectable metaphorical/social content which, provided the right scores to act as lenses, honestly and succinctly embody  relationships with ourselves, others, and our environments.

I went to the Monday night jam tonight because I wanted to get back to basics, to focus on the fluid rolling point, and to do it with beginners.  There are often plenty of newbies at the Monday night jam.

My first dance was with a woman who clearly had introduction to CI, and who, nonetheless was fairly new to the form.  I found the most effective approach to enjoying the dance with her was not doing…waiting for the subtle shift, or the unignorable impulse to move us into the new moment.  In fact, this was the way I approached much of the evening.  The man I danced with after her was utterly new to dancing, CI, the whole gamut.  I took him onto a strong back/butt shelf and encouraged him to relax, go to sleep, before softening him back into the floor.  He had a tendency to move a lot, and lose his balance from exerting far more effort than necessary–stiffening his body into a board that was always slightly off balance and catching itself.  Distal to proximal body parts, replacing with another distal to proximal was a pattern that happened with us.  This repetition and slowing down seemed to soften him a little…and we managed to have some fun, too.

There’s a tendency in men who’s initial exposure to CI is at jams to see and be excited by the lifting going on.  They often try to replicate the idea, but through constricting the movement of their partner’s limbs in order to accomplish the lifts more dangerously than they realize.  I did a fair bit of warm resistance to being pinned and lifted dangerously.  One of these dances tonight became a game of chase to lift.  I was the tricky chasie, perpetually finding ways out of and around impending  binds, and sometimes find ways to sneak in a lift of my would be lifter..hah ha!  Good fun.

My final dance of the evening was  with a seasoned contacter who was just as intent on trickery as on being in the gap ( contextualized here).  It was just the balance of daring and being that I needed to conclude my Monday night.

Backstory bullets

• Egotistical self conscious dancing to express oneself repels me in the context of concert dance

• addressing a multitude makes me anxious

• when I stopped dancing, what feels like a short lifetime ago, in addition to being heartbroken about my negative (I’m not sure when my net worth will be a positive figure) financial situation, I was at a loss for the value and relevance of contemporary dance–whatever that is–in today’s socio-economic-impoverished-educational-entrenched-in-war-food-desert-rife-earth-destroying-capitalist US landscape.

My slow halt from dancing and dancemaking started two years ago after I finished the laying of hands project.  It was the biggest grant, honor and time frame (we worked on it for 2 years) I had ever gotten, from the Chicago Dancemakers Forum.  When the project ended I was exhausted from the demands of self producing and the anxiety of feeling like I was in a constant process of trying to impress potential resource people/organizations.  My main concern, though, was that in the midst of working on the project I failed to apply for future monies to sustain my investigations upon completion of the project.  My understanding of most grant resources for dance was that they support projects with clear culmination dates/places/numbers of performers, performances, and budgets.  I wasn’t clear where my investigations would go after the project, and surely couldn’t answer for all those elements.  I left the grant game altogether, and worked with a small group of dedicated contact improvisers to investigate on our own for the sake of research.

After taking some distance from my whirlwind of anxious questions (and lots of meditation), I am ready to start coming freshly, and fully into sustainable ways to grow my dance/performance research and  production.  More to come.

What we did:
Head study
1. Solo warm-up in which the one rule was that we had to maintain contact between head surface and the floor at all times- 15 minutes

2. Repeat with the potential for partnering adding that the partners body and the dancer’s own body parts could also serve as interchangeable floor replacements with which to maintain head contact.

3. Exploring the free weight of the head and it’s relationship with eye gaze and spinal/whole body follow through. We started standing together as a group holding hands in a circle. Taking care not to crash heads, to greater and lesser degrees, sometimes initiated by the trajectory of eye gaze, sometimes not, we tossed our heads. Each toss followed through to body of the tosser and caused a weight shift in the entire circle, a series of simultaneous ripples affecting one another. Eventually the circle broke apart into an open dance.

Observations and sensations:
3. It is challenging to use the gaze of the eyes as an initiating limb and maintain a visual awareness of what is happening in the space around you. Finding the orientation within this disorientation, the heightening of wind and temperature senses, allowing softening and sharpening the gaze to happen as a response to the needs of the moment. This adaptation response allows for a degree of scintillating risk to exist within and drive the dancing without the danger to could result from insensitivity.

2. Folks tended not to take full advantage of the sudden huge openness that the new possible surfaces for head contact provided–particularly maintaining contact between the head and various interchangeable surfaces of the dancer’s own body. This blows the realm of possibility wide open. I’d like to explore further.

1. Warming up with the head in perpetual contact with the floor was an incredible warmup for the spine and the perceiving organism coming up with various ways to move and locamote within this unusual confine.