Dancing up a storm

Continuing this post, the quoted article mentioned "certain intense states of absorption" like dance as a means to take a break from our isolated head trips. As a dancer myself it is no accident that it is mentioned both literally and metaphorically as one of those embodied methods into another form of knowing and allowing. It is not that the head is ignored in dance but rather that it is syntegrated with the heart, body, a partner and the environment. But also as an intellectual I know that dancing with each other around ideas can also be one of those embodied practices, as long as we keep in mind/body that as dance we respond to each other openly instead of imposing our own fixed notions and models to subsume each other. I've seen male dancers do the latter to their partners and they don't like it, and it doesn't make for much of an aesthetic experience for an observer.

In dance the means of establishing rapport is through physical connection, where our bodily boundaries touch. At those connection points we relax enough to feel into each other and yet simultaneously add just a tad of resistance against each other. It is through that slight resistance that we can both tell the difference from each other and at the same time feel the connection with each other so that we can communicate and work together to produce a performance as a team that is more than each of us separately. We can use that method as a metaphorical means for doing the same in our intellectual communications. The new book Dancing With Sophia is but one such example.