Letter to a Teacher

The book arrived!!

I thought I’d just write you a letter for all the public to read.

I haven’t done near enough practice these past few years but I can provide my personal testimony that training in Emotional Effector Patterns provided an access to an emotional range I didn’t think I had. I subsequently realised that restriction of emotional expression is a survival and identity development mechanism for the psychic impositions, even trauma, put on many boys and youth.

The training has wonderfully supported other training I have done in leadership and I am finding, now in my 60s, I am able to bring a better contribution to the world than ever.

I can give more straightforward expression to my upset. I can hold my ground for love and care and fairness all at once, without capitulating to upset. I can make strong requests. I can be generous and then hold a line against exploitation by others. And I can feel at ease with have multiple feelings at once, which I once held as ‘out of control’. The work comes with me into the many arenas of my life and even when I feel I have dropped the ball, it assists me in cleaning up the mess with others and in my return to confidence – a set of real tools that I can call on, that give me reassurance I can get back on the field and make my next engagement count.

Dr Laura, I count you and your trainer team as among my true teachers and I haven’t told you enough how impactful the course I attended with has been in my life. I can vouch that you and the Emotional Body trainers are very safe hands in the theatre (can’t help the pun) of the fully expressed human being.

Back to the readers. Of course, Dr Laura is only one of 15 of the world’s best in dramatherapy workers and researchers who contributed to this book, so it is packed with the extraordinariness of this work.

I Am A Dancer I

(MY MOTHER DIED Aug 29 2018)

friends
(most are women)
have told me,”you think
too much”, “you ask
to many deep questions”,
“You’re a bit weird”
“not like most men”
I’ve always felt
that was up for discussion,
obvious.

I’m a dancer

my mother died in August.
we had an awkward relationship

I like science fiction.
I’ve always wanted to understand
quantum physics.
I heard that Albert Einstein’s
theory was proven
in the trenches of WWI.
and before that you needed
a graduate degree to understand
the physics of the universe.
and since that E=MC2
is understood by highschool students.

I’ve wanted to translate
my knowledge
into simpler formulas
for easier relationships.

I’m a dancer.

When I was 16
I watched my mother storm in
pick up a length of wood
and head my way.
A quiet voice
stood me up
and commanded
unflinching resolve
I held her eyes
she brought it down
on my shoulder.
‘Maybe it broke’
My father quiet
to my resolve.
“Don’t hit your mother.”

I walked 20 miles
through the night
to see a nun
in a convent
avoiding car lights
on country roads
I arrived at dawn
I waited until 7
I was hungry
She made me tea.
I told her my story.
She asked me if
there was anything
else.
I was 16
I was devastated
I was steel
I was the wolf
scouring forest trails
I said “No”
I got up to go.
She said, “Goodbye”.

I went to university
and studied physiotherapy
and asked deep questions
and joined the Baha’i Faith
and the new earth order
and that was a bit weird
and even there,
still not like most men
and not like most women.
and married
and begot 3 sons
and spent some hours
each week helping
on my father’s farm
and burning out at work
and getting fired up
and for fifteen years
taking holidays
to have conversations
with politicians
about rural health

I saw a signpost
Performance Community
and something glimmer
in the distance
like a bright new
city of the future
and took that track

I’m a dancer

These past 14 years
I’ve had lunch with my mother
and father, or coffee
every week
helping around the farm,
being frustrated with them
finding a way to accept
no apology
finding a way to say,
“I love you.”
finding a way to tear them
away from their farm
his workshops,
her orchards.

In his dementia
in a house in town
my father remembered
“that bloke came around again”.
he fell and broke his hip
I sat with him in emergency.
He said, “It’s time”
I glibly, “Time for a cuppa?”
He gave me a sour look,
a ‘fuck off’
I felt I’d disappointed him.
He died.

There’s not much for a wolf
in a modern society
– pickings at the edges

I don’t know whether
my mother knew
I am a dancer.

My mother died in August.
We buried her in September.
Her friends noted to me
how lovely she was
to be with.

Sadness tinges
I didn’t forget
not to go around for lunch
or coffee.

 

Dance Salad – BeBe Theatre, Asheville 2018

It was the ugliest thing.

Women choked and punched each other.
A brawny man with tattooed arms,
in full female ballet regalia,
stalked across the stage with demented menace.

Cancer.

Soldiers in samurai skirts and shrapnel proof helm
fought, died, loved,
in that order.

Not in order,
the women turned and lifted and fell,
heads cosseted on laps.

Something tried to burst out of my chest.

It was beautiful.

A BOLD Presentation

March 8 – 12 2017 saw the inaugural BOLD Festival in Canberra, Australia. The BOLD Festival, celebrating the legacy of Dance in Australia, is the brain-child of Liz Lea, dancer, choreographer and event organiser.

As a new comer to the dance theatre scene, a ‘mature mover’ (over 50), and facilitator of dance and performance, I was honoured to present and perform at the BOLD Festival.

The invitation came about through the successful project, “The Forging of Men”, designed and performed with 6 rural men, under the directorship of career theatre-maker, Sue Hayes.

The presentation to The Bold Festival was in the form of a short Pecha Kucha (powerpoint slides presented within 5 minutes). Below is the text to go with the slides. To enjoy the presentation, please open the slides and arrange them beside the text below

Slide 1	Cover slide: This presentation is about my recent journey into dance.
Slide 2	From my years of health work I recognised that a healthy community requires robust empathetic leaders who are the enzymes for bringing that community into integrity and discourse.
Slide 3	ACTUALLY being fully alive, being fully human, is a function of wonder, inquiry, creativity, and performance / action. Novelty, the surprised recognition of a distinction, is the source of wonder and a vital ingredient for brain development and learning.
Slide 4	Performance is that we are in action in the world and there are witnesses. Performance is where we get to become adults, leaders, and dancers. Performance is the wonderful, human thing about life.
Slide 5	The performing arts can be a fantastic access for ethics and leadership training by: ·      supporting the empathetic imagination of the live of others and; ·      the possibilities of self as leader through the conditions for wonder, inquiry, creativity, and performance.
Slide 6	Over the past 7 years I have designed human sized board games, as a fun approach to movement training, and a way of seeing the world through the body.
Slide 7	2011 – My first dance project with Jess Jones on the Atherton Tablelands. The project was an awakening for me to the possibilities for facilitating dance theatre work with untrained people. DANscienCE 2013 was an inspiration – a motivation to develop my own skills as a mature aged dancer, and find that breakthrough into establishing a community dance group.
Slide 8	Mastery – the ability to recognise and perform as by the finest distinctions as a function of performance before increasingly discriminatory witnesses. Taking any age you were and any skill (technical or creative), plotting novel and masterful experience over time might give some indication of your actual neural and physical ageing robustness.
Slide 9	I have been creating small dance programs for the middle to older aged person for a few years. From that came a vision and a model for an inclusive dance training program that I call rEvolve with connotations for dance as transformative in life.
Slide 10	In my rEvolve program I work with several characteristics of training and design to allow the most embodied expression of an idea. The team works by building through exercises by collaborative feedback until eventually, there’s the performance.
Slide 11	I recently began to feel it is time for me to take a stand for a male culture that is authentic and embodied. At stake is the flourishing of our communities and nations.
Slide 12	In 2015, I found three men who were interested in attending work in dance / physical theatre . We called ourselves ‘Men in Motion’ We won a grant to bring theatre-maker Sue Hayes weekly from Cairns to Atherton to building a performance about our male identity After we had commenced the development of the work, a further two men turned up, and so a performance was developed, “The Forging of Men”.
Slide 13	The men were, mostly, inexperienced in theatre, dance or any type of performance which gave us a perfect conditions to trial a ‘proof of method’ of the rEvolve model.
Slide 14	There was a moment in the project when Sue Hayes turned to the men and said, “Okay men, tonight you are going to touch each other.” The contact exercises essential to physical theatre is another potential boon to a transformed male culture.
Slide 15	As the project progressed, one of the men told me, “You’ve been a bit bossy lately. I’m not enjoying myself.” The group conversation that resolved that tension showed up in the performance in what the audience saw about the team work.
Slide 16	I’m now facilitating two groups of about 12 dancers in total: ·      the all-men group for the contribution to male culture that could continue to make; and ·      there’s now an all-in group. FINE

 

The Big Me Dances

The universe, the world, is how it all occurs to me as a happening, an event, a contingency.

Recalling the words of Baha’u’llah as I would apply them to myself, “… the world is my unawareness of the Godhead and my absorption in aught else…” and that truth is founded in the primary spiritual attitude of the unfettered search: detachment from tradition; avoiding backbiting, boastful people, and evil-doers; cleansing the heart from love, hate, and pride; and living in prayer, patience, resignation, and forgiveness.

My experience gives me the sense that the Godhead operates for me through my declaration (to myself or others) in abandonment of all untrue considerations, for an enthusiasm, passion and joy.

I believe that I am living in the world, a universe of elementary materials, from which has derived my organic construction as a capability for the flourishing of a metaphysical being. I am the root growing through the soil of human life, drawing sustenance for that budding fractal splicing and looping through all the dimensions beyond time and space, all the dimensions of eternity. I believe I am both contingent and eternal, always to be “unaware” and “absorbed by”, yet also to be a sense of Godhead through how I am in truth.

And so , I dance.