Rumi's poem makes me want to consider my final submission being in the form of a poem. He is able to express both through his words and through the structure of his poem; concise and repeating, it is this art form alone that can exist so beautifully in quite a raw form.
Rumi's first line shows that he feels dancing is the soul's cry for the body to join in worship - I love this image, and it would mean that the movement of a dancer reflects the state of their soul, and that the internal is externalised by means of dance. That the state of the mind, heart and soul constrain the dancing, but perhaps also the other way around, serves as encouragement to me to experiment with how the body's movement is governed by its thinking.
Certainly a person in everyday life who is feeling shy does not venture into space as much as the extrovert next to them, with their hand gestures and their roving gaze; a shy person physically and subconsciously makes themselves as small as possible, and their movement patterns are contained: their eyes are lowered and their shoulders a little hunched, as if to minimise the space they are occupying.
In studio we have done work with dance dynamics, and a key one is the expansion of the body in space contrasted with the folding in of the body on itself, as though the initiation practice is occurring from somewhere inside the body, until every movement comes to centralise around that point. My own duet's starting position contrasted my folding outward into my partner's space, with her tucking inwardly, head ducked. Our total use of space was not changed in amount, but as I occupied more of her space, she relinquished more and constrained her body.
"Wine makes drunk the mind and body,"; Rumi's line unites ideas from both the mind and the body, the internal and the external, which made me sit up and take notice. The drunkenness of a person; is it their state of mind that affects the way they move? Their impaired sight, balance and sense that can be attributed to the intoxicated brain? Drunk people move in a way foreign to those sober, and it could almost be seen as a state of movement that occurs from a particular mentality.
Somatic practitioners, after all, aim to move with as free a mind as possible, to access the parts of thinking that are not pre-meditating, reflecting or assessing, or choreographing.
My dog's movements are constrained and small, when on his leash and attached to a chair leg, (by force, by sanction) but remain so once he has been freed - but before he has realised his leash is not anchored! The remaining attachment of the leash to his collar is enough to make him think he is still tied up, and so he moves (or doesn't move much!) according to his thinking that he is still secured. His inability to move is purely mental, and such a mental block is an obvious hindrance to his physical movement. This mentality could also be seen as such that impairs a state of moving!
A free man will walk (dance) with his head held high and open body posture, but a freed slave, I imagine, will behave differently and move differently. The difference would have to be in one's belief of their own freedom, and I think there is something to be said about the effect of our internal status upon our bodily movement.
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