David Appel reported such an
experience:
I just finished a sequence of events where I became aware of the edge, of the border,
of the line of play between movement that's erupting, billowing forth,
and a sense of experience, craft, body knowing, that (is) there from previous times;
how these two mesh, and melt, and interact, and encounter each other, and converse...
There's a feeling in dancing that something is singing through me.
There's a question of allowing my-self to be a conduit for that;
and at the same time, I'm noticing that I can responsive to that song in some way.
Our consciousness is like a body interacting with the exterior world.
Because our nerves cannot extend beyond our skin, we only really sense ourselves in contact with a larger world, but separate from it.
In the same way, we only "know" what is present within our consciousness,
yet by touching it, by dancing with it,
we can sense the contours and textures of an infinite world that exists beyond the boundaries of knowledge.
By the "cutting of the edges of awareness" cleaves deeper than that.
Improvisation, as I understand it, is an attentional practice:
the more you attend to movement and memory and sensing and intention,
the more you play (improvise) with all of the elements of what we call living;
and the more you come to understand that reality itself
is based on the relationship between our attention is both selecting and forming your experience in real time,
but that what is being selected and formed is not completely of your choosing,
because the world is improvising too;
and that dance, your interaction with the world, forms you as you form the world.
Kent de Spain
in "Taken by Surprise"
a dance improvisation reader
I just finished a sequence of events where I became aware of the edge, of the border,
of the line of play between movement that's erupting, billowing forth,
and a sense of experience, craft, body knowing, that (is) there from previous times;
how these two mesh, and melt, and interact, and encounter each other, and converse...
There's a feeling in dancing that something is singing through me.
There's a question of allowing my-self to be a conduit for that;
and at the same time, I'm noticing that I can responsive to that song in some way.
Our consciousness is like a body interacting with the exterior world.
Because our nerves cannot extend beyond our skin, we only really sense ourselves in contact with a larger world, but separate from it.
In the same way, we only "know" what is present within our consciousness,
yet by touching it, by dancing with it,
we can sense the contours and textures of an infinite world that exists beyond the boundaries of knowledge.
By the "cutting of the edges of awareness" cleaves deeper than that.
Improvisation, as I understand it, is an attentional practice:
the more you attend to movement and memory and sensing and intention,
the more you play (improvise) with all of the elements of what we call living;
and the more you come to understand that reality itself
is based on the relationship between our attention is both selecting and forming your experience in real time,
but that what is being selected and formed is not completely of your choosing,
because the world is improvising too;
and that dance, your interaction with the world, forms you as you form the world.
Kent de Spain
in "Taken by Surprise"
a dance improvisation reader