抬着脚尖想要提高自己, 反而站立不稳; 俩步并作一步的走, 反而走不快; 只凭自己的眼睛去看反而看不清; 只凭自己的主观意识去判断反而判不清是非; 自我夸耀的反而没有功劳; 自大自满的反而不能长久。
这些行为都是多余、累赘不堪的东西, 就如同剩饭、赘瘤, 不仅无益, 反而有害。万物都厌恶它, 所以修道人一定要避它。
白话翻译
Dao De Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 24
“He who stands on tiptoe is not steady,
He who holds legs stiffly cannot walk.
He who looks at self does not see clearly.
He who asserts himself does not shine.
He who boasts of himself has no merit.
He who glorifies himself shall not endure.
These things are to the Tao like excreta or a hideous tumour to the body.
Therefore he who has Tao must give them no place.”
– Translated by Isabella Mears, 1916, Chapter 24
This is how I describe the Movement:
Movement is a storyteller and the body is the story, the mind is the one who is giving the color, texture and intention.The spirit is what is behind the story.
THE NEI YI ; 内意
I could easily say it is the one which I am most interested in at this time of my life and this stage of my research.
I am from Persia, the land of storytelling. Land of poetry, proverbs , ceremonies, rituals, colors, taste and smells. My love of movement started from childhood. Like all of us. The time we could surrender to our body for hours and hours.
Slowly slowly other movements draw my attention,I spent a lot of my time doing sports. More professionally basketball, ping pong and climbing.
My encounters with movement language such as dance enter into my life indirectly. Feeling of whispering. Being in a state of sleeping and awake while something in your core is unfolding.
I do remember this state as I find myself sometimes in this magical space.
Where things flow subcounsciously. Like an internal wisdom, which only needs to appear and then the channels of intuition open for unexpected forces, unexpected movements and unexpected insights in stillness which is beyond the familiar limits of our body and mind.
A Dancer!
I was dancing before knowing what dancing is and before knowing that is called dance.
I was turned on by the movement and not by what later on I called it dance.
Stepping into the defined dance world and discovering the double sword taste of this world.
It is so easy to fall love into this beautiful world as much as It is easy to get lost in this world.
As I caught myself there and for the simple reason of us being different, it wasn’t quite right for me to get lost in that pleasurable world. I started looking for the missing part of the puzzle.
My path was not only the path of a dancer, I heared the whispering voice of my inner body, to discover the missing part before it would take me deeper into the adictive pleasure and pain nature of the dance world.
The body gets used to everyday challenges and new patterns of movements which is great pleasure and blessing .It is like learning a language. And day by day adding a new vocabulary to make a new sentence. But at the end of the day, if there is no clarity in the storyteller one ends up tired of talking in vain.
As not only the storyteller but also the listener stays unsatisfied.
Dancer and the one who watches the dance and the stillness and movement of the space around these two matters,
External and internal and learning the middle way
Dance as if your only audience is the ” DAO”.
As my research was not on the stage but the opposite behind the closed doors, I did not taste the appreciation of the audience for the sake of impressing them. Moving someone’s emotions or providing visual pleasure cannot be very hard to provide especially if somebody trains on a daily basis.
Not facing this great part of being a dancer deepens my own research.
I was not having a mirror even to observe myself through the eyes, therefore my entire perception of my movement was internally. And it was not also about how I feel, it was about what is happening when I am moving this or that way inside my body. Certainly movements provoke sensations in us, or sometimes even memories can arise or new observations of self and it was all and still is very exciting each day to confront it. But this was not the whole thing.
As soon as I left my country, I realized that what I was doing people call it contemporary dance! More surprisingly, people are taking classes and there are even dance schools!
I was very shy seeing this academic approach to dance and systematic learning of the techniques.
To make my story short, after my basic study in fine arts, I studied public art firstly at the Bauhaus university in Weimar in Germany and then in Nürnberg art academy.
I wrote my master degree in “useful art”.
Researching performance artists such as Tania Bruguera. And Marina Abramović.
By this time, I did mainly performances and started working as a performer and dancer in a freelance scene.
My love for movement research brought me to physical theater, yoga and slowly I got into Martial arts, Gaga, a movement language, created by Ohad Naharin, choreographer of the Batsheva company in Israel and the stillness of Qigong, which I am going to share posts in my Blog.