Andrew Sutton Workshop Hilo 2012 - Part 2

Understanding

Instead of making snap judgements about our partners or simply ignoring them when we danced, we were encouraged to try and understand them first. In physical - or dancing terms - this meant looking at their mood, posture, and movement, and adjusting to them as much as possible in the beginning of our dance. Through both visual and physical adjustments, we could enter their world and understand them. Once we had met them on their level, we could then attempt to increasingly invite them into our own world. My aikido teacher describes this type of behaviour as ‘Entering through form.’ It is difficult to communicate with our own or other people’s spirits, but we can grasp the spirit and connect with it through its physical form manifested in the body and its movements and posture, which is more apparent and palpable to us. ‘If somebody wants to dance fast and angry’, Andrew says, ‘and you want to dance slow and mellow, start fast and angry with them and try to gradually convince them to come the other way with you.’ ‘First seek to understand, then to be understood.’ 

He compared this with a conversation. If your field of expertise is mathematics and you talk to somebody who does not know much about mathematics, you first find out the other person’s level of mathematical knowledge, start talking to them on this level, and then possibly invite them further down your path of expertise if they seem willing to go along with it. 

When Andrew demonstrated how he looked at somebody’s posture, body angles, and way of walking and adjusted his own movements accordingly, I felt reminded of a book by Nicholas Boothman called ‘Convince them in 90 Seconds - Make Instant Connections That Pay Off in Business and in Life’, in which Boothman describes the phenomenon of the likeable chameleon: If you imitate people’s posture and movements the first time you meet them, they will instantaneously like and trust you without knowing why. Another essential skill of the dancing ninja: chameleonage. 

Basics

Another component of Andrew’s fusion class that coincided with ancient Japanese martial arts philosophy was ‘Love your basic.’ In the martial arts, we say ‘Keep a beginner’s mind’, which encourages martial artists to always keep working on their basic skills and never let themselves be fooled by the illusion that they have truly mastered their art, or even fully understood its basic building blocks. The more we search, the more sincerely we explore our basics, the closer we will get to the wisdom our discipline has to offer.

In terms of dancing, we were specifically encouraged to make our basic step interesting rather than letting ourselves get bored with it, to put it exactly where the music called for it, and make it match the respective flavor, energy, rhythm, and atmosphere of the music, to experiment with it and use it to full effect. 

Open Mind

In terms of emotions, Andrew suggested developing an open mind that did not give preference to one emotion over another. Anger, sadness, jealousy, all these could be expressed in dance as well as happiness and lead to new interesting discoveries. 

Beauty of Doing Nothing

In another exercise, Andrew encouraged us to discover the beauty of doing nothing by simply ‘listening to’ or ‘feeling’ what our partner was doing rather than superimposing our own opinions and impulses on the dance immediately. This resulted in a better connection and a better understanding of what our partner was doing, as well as a more enjoyable and relaxed dance. 

Find Love in a Hopeless Place

Another point connected with the beauty of doing nothing in a different way was the thrill of the ‘stop’ moment after a build-up of ‘go-go-go’, demonstrated in an exciting solo performance by Andrew to ‘We Found Love’ by Rihanna, a song he had never heard before that tricked him into an extended stretch of jumping spins he committed to early on in a long winding-up crescendo after the first chorus - before the song finally allowed him to come to a much deserved stop and take it easy in his new chill out pose. 

The lyrics in the catchy chorus ‘We found love in a hopeless place...’ serendipitously reinforced the idea that any partner, any music, and any part of a song has the potential to rock. Andrew’s dance sample was also a great lesson about texture and clearly revealed the essence of interesting: nothing is exciting if it just keeps going, and nothing captures the heart if it is stagnant throughout. The idea that dance, mostly understood as physical movement needs stops and moments of doing nothing in order to be interesting was another point that may sound obvious but is often forgotten or neglected.

Leading the Follow, Following the Lead

A recurring theme throughout the weekend were lead and follow roles blending and overlapping. True to his likeable chameleon philosophy, Andrew explained that even as a lead, his dance consisted to about 75% of following, and that the better we got, the more we would start following our partner (even as leads). 

He spent parts of his Saturday class giving followers hints on how they could temporarily take over the lead, and some leads discovered that the way their follows moved gave them fresh inspiration for their next leads. The bottom line was that we should respect and follow our partner, no matter whether we were acting as ‘leads’ or ‘follows’ in the dance. 

Contact Lindy

During Saturday night’s party I made the acquaintance of yet another type of dance I had never heard of: Contact Lindy. Once again, it was love at first sight. Well, maybe not only sight. Love at first touch may be a more appropriate description considering the way people connect in Contact Lindy, a form of Lindy Hop that allows everybody on the dance floor to constantly remain in flux and dance alone, with different partners, or even with multiple partners as the music unfolds. 

Connection, as Andrew aptly said, is a world in itself, a term as elusive and difficult to define, and yet as basic and essential as love. We can connect on a visual level, through touch, sound, smell, and taste - these are all sense connections, of which touch may be the most visceral. We can connect through rules, moods, concepts, ideas, and experience. We can connect over time or within moments. In Contact Lindy, connections are made and dissolved in a large group of people within a short time. This can help us reinforce the sense of importance any connection with any human being holds, and encourage us to respect each connection we make, give it our best, enter and leave with care, commitment, and gratefulness. 

The basic parameters to work with in Contact Lindy are: dance alone, dance with partner(s), and dance to the music. Rules for this enjoyable group activity include respecting, committing to, and using one’s own and other people’s momentum, matching the speed and intensity of the connection people offer, and consistently telling one’s own story throughout the song (which manifests itself in choosing a consistent basic like ‘six-count’ or ‘bouncy’ for the entire song), while adjusting to others in order to connect and dance with them. 

This resulted in a fun fusion of independence and interconnectedness, freedom and commitment, belonging and responsibility. It was my first experience of Contact Lindy, and I got nothing but a mere glimpse of its possibilities, but I was thrilled to discover another game that was fun and at the same time, stimulated the skills and efforts I want to work on in my daily life.

Tell your own story. Only then can you crosspollinate successfully with others and enrich their lives as well as your own. Open your mind and energy flow to other people and, like the Dalai Lama says, make it the focus of your life to connect with as many people as possible. Forget past and future and let music remind you of the unique value of each moment. Open yourself up to spontaneous eruptions of love - hopeless and fearless - like cherry blossoms in spring or autumn leaves in autumn. Go with the flow and stop at the top. See what is new and cherish the view. Roll through the goal and dance out your soul. 

Constantly seeking for new ways to connect and create harmony, I consider myself blessed that in random moments full of sudden purpose I occasionally encounter the touch of love, and that I am healthy and wealthy enough to keep working on this ultimate technique myself. 

Andrew Sutton Workshop Hilo 2012 - Part 1

Disciplines for Life

Thursday night, sitting in the community kitchen with some friends, I heard myself say: ‘No matter what discipline, if you practice it enough, it becomes your life, so then, when you talk about your discipline, you talk about life.’ 

My aikido teacher has been practicing Zen and aikido for over 50 years. These disciplines have become his life, and when he teaches them, he teaches an approach to life. I find this approach useful, so I decided to write down his teachings in simple, short texts reflecting the simplicity and immediacy of his philosophy, and put them together in a book, accompanied by wabi-sabi photographs representing the beauty he finds in everyday life and encourages everybody to constantly appreciate and keep creating. 

I believe wisdom and beauty can be found in any discipline. I remember being a teenager and listening with wide open ears and eyes to my piano teacher, who, as he described to me what mistakes I was making and what aspects I should work on when playing a certain piece, always managed to make me aware of the problems I was experiencing in that particular stretch of my life, and how I could go about fixing them. Piano lessons were like tarot readings to me, like therapy sessions without the gut-wrenching navel-gazing. My teacher could read in the way I played what I was struggling with and what I should work on.

When I made my Thursday night statement about disciplines having the potential to become tools for understanding and informing meaningful lives, I had no idea that I was about to meet another teacher who had polished his discipline into sparkling gems of practical knowledge that were not only a direct road to lots of fun but also offered a helpful universal philosophy for daily life that enabled people to connect with each other and harmonize. On Friday, January 27th 2012 I attended my first class with Andrew Sutton, followed by an entire weekend of fun, connection, and inspiration.

Fusion

The first eye opener of the weekend was ‘fusion’. I had never heard of this approach to dance before and was in for an exciting surprise. Fusion, as described by Andrew, is ‘blending with your partner and with the music’. It may sound like what people (should) do in any kind of partner dance anyway, but this was exactly why learning some basic techniques to truly achieve this ‘fusion’ was so exciting. The more information we got, and the more we moved to put it into practice, the more fascinated I became with the fusion approach. 

My aikido teacher often writes this poem in his calligraphies: 

Harmonize with Others

Harmonize with Heaven and Earth

Dance with Others

Dance with Heaven and Earth.

For the title of the book about him I used the line ‘Dance with Heaven and Earth.’ It did not take much to re-adjust this concept I had immersed myself in for the past eight months and turn it into ‘Dance with partner and music.’ 

While I had done both many times before, the pointers Andrew offered in his class gave my concept of partner dancing a thorough overhaul. 

Positivity

For realizing fusion, Andrew points out, it is helpful to get rid of ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, and ‘can’t’. While many dance teachers have clear ideas about things that are ‘wrong’ within the boundaries of their dance, he suggests to look at what they call ‘wrong’, find out what this actually means (eg. ‘bouncier than I want’ or ‘slower than I want’ etc.) and store it in our minds as alternative possibilities that might be right and appropriate in a different context. 

Another frequent case of thinking ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, and ‘can’t’ concerns our approach to different partners. Who has never had thoughts along the lines of ‘O my God, this guy has no rhythm’ or ‘Geez, this girl has no connection’, ‘Does he have to the same thing a hundred times?’ or ‘What’s that bitchy face about?’ Filtered through Andrew’s thinking, this type of thought was exposed as a simple lack of cooperative spirit, which prevented us from harmonizing with our partner. 

Pirates & Ninjas

To eliminate thinking ‘wrong’, ‘bad’, and ‘can’t’ type thoughts concerning our partner, we played a game in which one person was the pirate and tried to epitomize ‘bad dancing’ while the other was the ninja whose mission it was to make the dance rock nonetheless. 

Once again I felt strongly reminded of aikido. Every time we practice, we face the same challenge: somebody attacks us full force, but instead of letting this faze us, we try to maintain ‘shizentai’, our ‘natural posture’. My teacher describes shizentai as a combination of the following factors:

• Eyes: look at everything equally, not just at one thing
• Back: straight - shoulder blades together and down
• Shoulders: always relaxed
• Breathing: always calm, in coordination with your movements
• Ki (energy): emanating freely from your body, flowing in whatever direction you decide
• Knees: always relaxed, ready to move in any direction
• Mind: always calm and open for whatever may happen (mizu no kokoro - mind of water)

The challenge is that while we respect our partner and try to blend with him or her, we try just as hard to maintain our own center, and provide an axis stable enough for others to revolve around. 

What made the dancing exercise much more relaxed than an actual attack-and-defense situation, however, was that even when we realized that blending with our partner was a challenge in this particular case, we still had music we could blend with, so that even if we reduced the points of connection with our partner, we still had a common denominator that informed our dance. All we had to do was respect our partner, and respect the music. In this way, we could find points of connection with both and enjoy a much more harmonious dance than any dance based on premises like ‘O my God, he has no rhythm,’ or ‘I hate techno music.’

Instead of getting angry about our partner or a particular song or type of music potentially putting us in a bad place, it sounds like a better idea to remember that it is our own responsibility to put ourselves in a good place, create harmony, and tell our story as well as listening to our partner’s story.

Opening the Mirror

As human beings, we have a conscious grasp of time. We lose our ability to experience each moment without thinking about the past or the future early on in life. After that, the way we handle our perception of time defines our personalities. Some tend to preoccupy themselves with the past, and fill the present with it, carving it into warped sculptures of guilt, nostalgia, fear, anger, longing, or hope that populate their world. Others tend to forget the past immediately and look to the future for new loves, riches, adventures, experiences, missions, and achievements. 

Where we find ourselves on this spectrum plays an important part in how we perceive life, and in how others perceive us. One of our most important tasks is to take responsibility for achieving a good balance between past and future, to open our eyes to the past - not to sink into its swamps or be dazzled by its brightness - but to cast its substance into a useful shape and forge its lessons into a sharp, precise carving knife for the future. 

When we look to the future, we should sketch it in the likeness of our wildest dreams and move towards it with determination and steadfast actions, but at the same time retain the discipline not to let dreams of the future hinder our ability to taste the present and accept its gifts and opportunities. 

Another fact of life - alias mortality - is that the past is already lost, and the future may never come, which puts the art of relishing, respecting, and utilizing each moment on a special pedestal in our time perception priorities. 

New Year’s celebrations are a symbol of our constant quest to manage our complicated yet unavoidable relationship as mortals with time. In Japan, O-Shōgatsu, the New Year, is the most important celebration of the year, and one of the traditions associated with it is the ‘kagami-biraki’ ceremony celebrated by martial arts dojos on the first or second weekend of January, marking the first training session of the year. Literally, ‘kagami-biraki’ means ‘opening the mirror’.

The fourth Tokugawa Shogun is said to have started this tradition and continued it because he emerged victorious from a battle soon after. The kagami-biraki ceremony involves sharing some form of rice alias energy with fellow human beings and thus facilitating a fresh, energetic start to the New Year.

The central Japanese New Year decoration involved in this event consists of two sticky rice balls stacked on top of each other like a snowman, topped with a fruit resembling a tangerine called daidai. The word ‘daidai’ sounds like ‘generations’ and symbolizes the success of past and future generations and the continuation of the family. The two balls of mochi are said to contain the spirit of the rice plant and symbolize the going and coming years, the human heart, or yin and yang. The decoration is called kagami-mochi, or ‘mirror rice balls’ because it resembles an ancient copper mirror with religious connotations.

At the kagami-biraki, either the kagami-mochi, or a barrel of sake is broken to share the spirit of the rice plant, the essence of energy with everybody present. As the Japanese are extremely touchy about their use of language, however, and avoid using unpropitious words, especially at ceremonies, ‘break’ is a no-no, and was replaced with ‘open’, which led from ‘breaking the rice ball’ to ‘opening the mirror’. The simple need to eat combined with a desire to party and a love of propitious words became a mysterious yet clear symbol of everything the New Year invites us and enables us to do.

Our kagami-biraki ceremony at Aikido of Hilo was held on Sunday, January 14th. Sensei Robert Klein showed us the kagami-mochi placed in front of the dojo and gave us his idea of how the opening of the mirror could be interpreted in connection with aikido:

The way your partner moves is a reflection of the way you move. If your partner gets hurt, correct your movements in order not to hurt him. If you feel your partner is hurting you, look at what you can improve in your actions and attitude to prevent getting hurt. If your partner moves gracefully, attempt to discover what exactly you are doing that may be contributing to the beauty you see, and save its memory in your body and mind so you can extract it from others, too. 

With these concepts fresh in our minds we proceed to start the first practice of the year and continue our efforts to polish the mirror, and work on what we present to its clean surface with the help of our discipline and our fellow students. 

After training, we open a bottle of sake and drink to the birth of a fellow practitioner’s son and to another good aikido year. Generations continue, and people keep sharing the energy of the rice plant and the divine spark, I think looking at the daidai resting on the two rice balls in front of the dojo. I will honor the rice plant and the divine spark. I will dance more and practice harder. I will take a good hard look at myself and what I’m doing and improve what I see. As I begin to ravel in glorious New Year’s resolutions sculpting a perfect new self, I catch somebody giving me a piercing look and am startled to meet the eye of my own reflection in the sake cup I am holding. 

With this piercing look, my reflection reminds me of a question Brendan, a visiting film maker asked everybody at our New Year’s Eve community campfire. ‘So what is the most important lesson you have learned this year?’ At the time I was on my way to the kitchen to help chop up the Italian sausages that had been barbecued to perfection on a smokey grill for every one to share, which prevented me from staring into the flames and combing my mind for an answer. But now the question was back, reminding me that learning from the past was an essential part of time management, the ticket to the right destination.

The New Year had consumed all my attention chatting me up from the right, seducing me with the razzle dazzle of imagined future perfection. Now I looked over to my left and saw the outgoing year. Its eyes were deep and drank in my own. Until a conspiratorial spark in them brought me back to my own body and allowed me to share a precious moment with the past year. ‘Ichidaiji’, we said simultaneously and held each other’s hands appreciating the sparkling layer of understanding between us. 

Of course. Shimamoto Shihan had taught me this year’s most important lesson after his battle with stomach cancer - in teamwork with my friend and mentor  P. I was fortunate enough to meet one last time before the sharp claws of his advanced pancreatic cancer whisked him away forever. It was nothing other than ‘Ichidaiji’ - ‘the most important thing’. Which was the here and now. It was this very moment, this very life, this very self aware of itself and able to give its best to everybody in its vicinity. 

Stunned back into the present I emerged from the mysterious mirror-shaped time machine I had temporarily traveled in, and went straight for the sake bottle to pay my respects to another Japanese custom: never let your friends’ glass get empty. Refill glasses as soon as their liquid level nears the bottom. I filled my friend’s glass and listened to the ringing sound of our toast. Its music became a cloud, on which our smiles floated in a dance filled with the energy of the rice plant, and imbued with the divine spark, here and now, suspended in mid-moment, forever moving on, opening the mirror.