Speaking to the screen space
For the ongoing now in which we improvise, the screen is our means for teaching, learning, connecting and working. Our voices move through surfaces and satellites instead of through the room in which we breathe and move.
Vision and attention are drawn to the screen and the people in the screen in a very different manner than how we sense others in actual space. Wherever our attention goes, our entire co-ordination follows. If we are in the screen with our attention, we are not in the room. Our entire instrument has likely narrowed, shortened and pulled up.
A ha, another crisis-tunity! (They seem to come in multiples lately)
During early days of seeing students online, decades of Alexander dynamic non-interference evaporated as my attention pulled to the screen in a longing for normalcy and connection. I had narrowed, shortened, strained to achieve an outcome. The internal emotional stimuli and the external visual stimuli clearly required a new and more elastic response.
I began reminding myself that the force field of gravity sends me elastically upward, that the space all around breathes me. and that the airwaves move through me from behind me to and through the screen. The ground enlivens my elastic response so I can bring my attention cheerfully, curiously, creatively outward. My senses receive so I can express.
It’s incredibly complex and sophisticated to speak. Now we are speaking on screens, instead of on stages, in rooms, on the street, at the coffee place we love and miss so much. We’ve gone from air waves to ear buds in the blink of an eye.
And yet, the ground still supports me and sends me up, waves of air move through me and out again, the person on the screen may be far away in space but close in connection.
I let my voice come from the room, not from my urgency
