Tuesday, April 15, 2008

To just be

My dance and music classes this semester have been quite a revelation to me . It has been something like stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something new . Its not like I have not danced or sang ever , I have been doing them ever since I remember . Its was more about doing it in a different environment with a different set of people but mostly about learning art forms which are thought of and interpreted so differently .

When I learnt dance or singing in India , it was more about going over the sequences till you got them by heart and learnt well . We never talked about our body as an instrument for singing , stressing on different parts that could help acoustically if used in a certain way . While there are a lot more technical details that I learnt in these classes , that not what I want to talk about in this blog.

Today we went to a painting exhibitions by one of the people in my dance class. She had a bunch of these abstract paintings and I asked her why she made them the way she did . She replied that she painted mostly on intution , she just felt that something should look like smthing and then she did that . This idea was something pretty new to me . Being an engineer , for me every end result in guided by a logical reasoning as to why something else was being done .

Later on we had a discussion about this in the class , my class had a whole bunch of artsy people ...actors , dancers , historians etc . They all talked about listening to your soul or intution or inner feeling while producing a creative piece . In there words you need to just be and that is when you get your answers . My teacher is trying to design an ending for her dance piece and all she does is she "just let herself be " , till the piece finally enters her ....

A lot of my dance class has been about improvisation and understanding your body ...when I started it was all in my head zone ..I am slowly learning to let it just be ...and there is lies a totally new realm of myself that I never knew .

I am learning that in my life too ..I can think really hard about a problem trying to find answers for it or just planning things in a certain way ...then later on when I just stop doing that and let myself just be ...poof!!! the answer pops out ...

I do not know what to call this realm of myself ..something like muscle memory ..a new term I learned in the dance class ....my teacher tells us we dnt always have to remember sequences in our head ..our body knows the most natural sequence after a certain step and thats the way it goes ..it remembers them in the muscles ( if that makes any sense ..)

I would think this is what happens when you start to get in sync with what you really are ..than what you project yourself to be ..!!!