Some fine guidance: If you give a hungry man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. -- ? Some more: You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. -- Naquib Mahfouz Problems that remain persistently insolvable should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way. -- Alan Watts Yesterday I connected the importance of useful questions with the lesson of the fishing parable, like so:                       Fish <=> Useful answer                  Fishing <=> Useful question    Learning to fish <=> Learning to ask useful questions (<=> Learning to learn?)

[This is a slightly revised version of a posting I made to Facebook on Jan 7, 2021.] Sometimes it's useful to say the obvious. The Trump backers who relented in wake of the Jan 6 insurrection at the Capitol are just rats abandoning a sinking ship, not principled people who were misguided until the incident. The incident – the breach and insurrection at the U.S. Congress – was the logical extension of an opportunistic, unscrupulous force (Trumpism) colliding with the foundation of democratic self-government. The opportunistic dishonesty of Trumpism is not an irresistible force, it is a choice, and self-governing democracy is not immovable, not inevitable – it fails without honesty. (I love this unattributed quote I found on Usenet, an early internet forum: "Affability keeps the boat from rocking, but truth keeps it from sinking.") The only thing surprising about the events is that the rats were able to sustain the absurd pretenses as long and widely as they did. They kne...

This score is designed to foster paying attention to both one's own moving and to that of others. Paying attention to others through a screen adds another level of challenge to an already challenging proposition, inherent in any collaborative improvisation, of paying attention to yourself and to others at the same time. This combination of inwards and outwards attention can be key to collaborative improvisation, and especially useful in the context where online collaboration presents this additional challenge. To prime for that, the score starts with a kind of specific challenge: participants taking turns doing brief solos. It's important to emphasize that there's nothing particular that one needs to accomplish in doing these solos besides "showing up", being willing to be seen and pay attention to how it feels (and also being brief). Conversely, those watching the solos have the opportunity to experience paying attention to someone else, while still noticing thei...

Contact Improvisation offers extraordinary opportunities to explore movement cooperation with others and with oneself. I've been curious a question about how to find in solo moving the kind of inspiration that can come from dancing with others. I had been exploring a practice for a long time before the COVID pandemic. Having to concentrate on solo moving during the pandemic has given me the opportunity to resolve some questions about how to describe the practice and its purpose, enough so that I feel ready to describe it. One of the things I love about doing Contact Improv is a sense of attunement that happens, with others and myself, through just mutually following the points of contact. For many years I've been curious about what helps to cultivate this, and have experimented with ways to do so in solo moving – in my warmups and general solo dancing. During the COVID-19 quarantine I have had more opportunity and heightened focus on this exploration of solo movement (in-person...

We've noticed that comments submitted from Apple Safari (Mac or iPhone) are dropped without any notification if the blog is set with Comment location = Embedded. Having set it to Pop up (I think), it worked. We're going to try some more tests. That's what this post is for! From the comments testing we discovered some useful things: Using Comment location = embedded: Is necessary to enable replying to specific comments. Comments posted from Safari (laptop or iOS) are silently dropped. It looks to the person posting the comment that it went through, but the blog moderator sees no sign of it at all. Using Comment location = Pop up or Full page: Inhibits option to reply to other comments – no comment threads Enables comments from Safari The trade-off is clear. Losing comments from people who think they submitted them successfully is not acceptable. Particularly from a prominent browser (currently estimated to be a bit less than 4% of users). I just hate to lose comment threadin...

I had early experience with the  Underscore  a few times while  Nancy Stark Smith  was developing it, before she found a name for it. Since those early days it has gotten a name and continued to grow, and it has become a practice for many, many groups around the world. I have been leading Underscores for the DC Sunday jam almost every month since the December 2013. I love how the Underscore works, love the sharing situation that it tends to foster. In recent days of the Coronavirus quarantine, a group exploring sharing of movement online has started to explore adapting the Underscore for online sharing. I've had the opportunity to try what others are doing, and an opportunity to adapt it for an online session myself. I wonder, can we arrive online at the often open and receptive shared presence if can foster? I'm not sure, but believe that something is possible. Whatever we discover, I know it will be different from an in-person Underscore. Online meetings are diffe...

Barbara Dilley developed a shared dance/meditation practice called Contemplative Dance Practice – CDP, a "dancer's meditation hall". I've been exploring adaptation of this score for online sharing. The aim is to share meditation and movement across the gap of social distancing. (See below the score description for online meeting logistics and further info about the practices.) (The framing of this score is a work in progress, continuing to change. Revision information is at the bottom.) Score Description The score is divided into sections. At the beginning of each timed section the facilitator says which section it is and arranges for a bell to sound at the beginning and the end of that section. Opening Circle : Time for brief introductions / check-ins and to review the outline of the score (essentially, the bold headers below). Meditation: 15 minutes for stillness . In the original score the participants share sitting meditation. We invite whatever meditat...