by Krista Gemmell Harris and Cynthia Winton-Henry

“Consider movement stationary
and the stationary in motion,
both movement and rest disappear.
When such dualities cease to exist
Oneness itself cannot exist.
To this ultimate finality
no law or description applies.”

-Seng-tsan, “Verses on the Faith Mind”

Krista Gemmell Harris has an M.F.A. in Dance and is certified in both Laban Movement Analysis and InterPlay. Authentic Movement and Insight Meditation also inform and enrich her life and work. Krista founded InterPlay Seattle in 1993 and developed the Regional Leadership Program. Teacher, mentor, and performer, she has spent over thirty years helping people of all ages discover the joy of being a body. In recent years, Krista has been an advocate for deepening the experience of stillness in InterPlay.

Cynthia Winton-Henry is cofounder with Phil Porter of InterPlay. She has worked as a teacher, performer, keynoter, ordained minister, spiritual guide, and community organizer throughout the United States and abroad. Her doctoral work focused on theology and the arts, and on multicultural education. Her book What the Body Wants is published by Northstone Press in Canada.

Recovering Stillness by Cynthia Winton-Henry

“In stillness dancing still.” TS Eliot

Anthropologist Angeles Arrien says that ancient peoples identify four things as essential to having one’s soul– the presence of our movement, voice, stories, and stillness. The absence of any one of them can signify soul loss. Soul loss applies to the group body, as well. Humans are not content to just dance and speak

If stillness is native to a soul, why is this gift so difficult. My research uncovered four obstacles to my own stillness.

Do I separate stillness off from other activities? Do I treat stillness with reserve and reverential piety? Does it make me irritable to have it treated so? Do I run more than walk or stop in my life? Is it possible to just be……still? Is there a yearning for more stillness?

As a “not naturally still” person and an artist, I’m drawn to stillness and challenged by it. Neither Phil, my InterPlay cofounder, nor I are still people. We are active, happy makers. If we can create, we are content. We can entertain ourselves for hours writing, composing, beading, drawing, and hanging out while making stuff. Long periods of silence tend to put us to sleep. Ahhhh, rest.

It was in improvisational performance that Phil first recognized the need for more stillness. Composition demands it. Phil often asked the company members in Wing It! to increase the amount of stillness in our dances. One day he called for 90 percent stillness. We laughed, joking that “stillness was our friend.” Apparently, none of us were that good at it. In improv performance adrenalin and minds get going. Stillness goes out the window. Physics takes over. Inertia, a physics principle, says that a body in motion remains in motion and a body at rest remains at rest. One dictionary says that inertia means “the lack of art or skill.” The ability to stop and rest as a choice and to get going again is an art.

Stillness is vital to the craftsperson. It sets the stage at the beginning of every improvisation. Stillness allows us to place ourselves in ready, quiet anticipation. Someone said it this way, “You breathe new shapes open. And the music of a desire as widespread as spring begins to move.” Coming from this space no performance need feel forced or urgent. Witnessing others I rest my eye rest on the shape of a still body. I savor the way two bodies in contact deepens when they didn’t rush past the beauty of a moment. I need those visual rest stops.

Re-Initiating Stillness as a Birthright

There are four obstacles I had to navigate in my own journey into stillness.

• I was a thruster.
• Stillness felt vulnerable
• Stillness felt split off from ordinary life
• People take stillness sooooo seriously

Thrusters and Stillness

What a relief when I learned that I was someone with energy that builds up and moves kinesthetically out through muscular and mental activity, No wonder stillness is a challenge.

What if I claimed thrust as a spiritual home? What should my prayer life look like? When I move I find peace, joy, and contemplative presence. In regular practice moving, I can let thoughts, images, and sensations come and go as I travel on the stream of dance. Moving at my own speed for ten to twenty minutes consistently brings me to a centered, relaxed, and open place.

Had I lived in a culture that embraced movement meditation I might be considered an advanced meditator. Instead, I spent a lot of quiet time feeling less than adequate alongside my sitting meditation colleagues. Today I claim that movement is how I meditate

Fear of Stillness

For some of us stillness isn’t safe.

I had to untangle and heal some trauma in order to clear a path for greater ease. The fight- flight responses created in me a “thrust override.” I was a “just do it” gal. To make matters worse, I got kudos for my energy and always being on the go. Whether playful or focused, I wore myself out.

It required courage and prayer to face the demons that lived in stillness. Stillness felt like a booby trap. I needed to go slowly. Thomas Merton’s words fit. “Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual…And for a (wo)man who has let (her)self be drawn completely out of (her)self by activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act (s)he can perform.”

Remaining curious about stillness as my birthright, I gradually prepared to come home to stillness. When my thrust override led to a nervous breakdown, I literally vowed to not go faster than body. Not with thought. Not with spirit. I vowed to honor my energy exactly as it is. As a result, a black hole opens up in my chest. I really felt terror for the first time. It was then that I began to heal from overriding my body’s need for rest all the time. Fear pushed me NOT TO FEEL.

Going slower took a long time, As an artist I had fun playing into it, even though the emotions were a challenge. My intuitive abilities increases as I slowed down. The year I turned fifty, I began doing sitting meditation with John McConville at InterPlayce. Over the course of a year, he led me to sit. Then on my actual birthday he treated me to a day at Spirit Rock Meditation Center led by his Thai teacher. By this time, I could sit with my own joy and ease.

Today I can sit in meditation without resistance. I honor those for whom this is the preferred way to engage soul.

Splitting Off Stillness

Movement and stillness, like work and prayer, get split apart. I need both regularly throughout the day.

I need stillness to be like breathing, not another obligation.

I also need community when I want to nurture a challenging practice. Do I have to leave community to have more stillness? Do I have to find a new community? I can hardly keep up with the communities that I have chosen already.

Taking guidance from mystics like TS Eliot who wrote, “In stillness, moving still” I hear them say, “Look no further, the present is the still point of the turning world. Enter in. Enjoy. Stillness dances. Breath, shifts of weight, images and thoughts dance on. Stillness is not an absence. It is a fullness. Emptiness and spaciousness are life.”

When I embrace stillness in all I do, I sense it at the base of everything. I am planted in it. It is alive, teeming with potential and decay.

Krista Harris challenged me to raise stillness in the InterPlay practice. When InterPlayce opened in 2004 I said to a small group of InterPlay Leadership Program graduates, “I am committed to give myself as much stillness as my body desires during this hour.” After I led the warm-up we began moving slowly and moved without interruption for 20 to 50 minutes. People were free to spend time in stillness on the floor soaking up energy or letting it go. There was a palpable hunger in the shared space to let go of activity. We didn’t hold positions. We listened and responded to our bodyspirits.

Were we meditating or were we making art? Krista Harris says it well.

I step, hesitantly, into the land of stillness.
The ground wraps its fingers around my feet,
pulling me down, down, down
till my belly feels the rising and falling
of the earth’s moist, warm breath.
I swell with possibility and life,
and, just as I am about to harness this gift,
the breath leaves, withering me away.
The breath comes for its own sake,
Flushing me out, hushing me in,
Flushing, hushing, Flushing, hushing,
Could this be art?

Other movers support our common rest. As the free style body meditation proceeds players find more movement, contact, walking, running, dancing and vocalizing. Such willingness to interplay feels relaxed and authentic. Amazingly, none of it is led by me! In this lightly led, unforced space I found what poet Tziporah found,

I am lost and I rejoice in the openness
I cannot decide where to go
So, for now I will dance
Where I am and love. Be.
There is no goal
No destination
Just wilderness
and life and being.
I sing and dance and
live in the wilderness
and I am home.

Overbearing Piety

Practitioners of meditation may know peace, tranquility and harmony. Even so, trying to create conditions for awakening a teacher may “take a position” on how to get there. Positions can get us stuck. Attempts to superimpose reverence, to insure an atmosphere of absolute quiet narrows and hinders real human experience.

Emotions and thoughts are like weather systems. Everyone knows that we cannot predict the weather. The question is how to best enjoy it. Basking in the sun or the rain or sitting on a porch looking out at thunderstorms is enlivening. Stillness can be like enjoying the weather. But you can’t force it. Postures may bring peace, but many teachers say that is not even the point. The point is to be observant.

As a teacher I seek to release pictures and plans regarding the emotions of students. There is always someone ready to crack up while others are lost in reverie. Why not?

Idolatry and fundamentalism creep into the most “liberal” communities. (Not fun). I’ll never forget cracking up the day I took my first communion in the church. Kneeling down next to a bunch of twelve-year-olds, it all struck me. I couldn’t stop giggling. The same thing happened the first time I walked the labyrinth. Everyone began walking slowly with great reverence. I felt like skipping. Maybe because as William James says, “A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”

Can delight, amusement, and stillness coexist? Irreverence, freedom to doubt, resist, see the other side of things, laugh, cry, sigh and hiccup is a signature of spontaneity.

Play’s commitment to un-piety may be why some people don’t like it in a ceremony or practice. Play is a little too wild and silly. But, for players, silence and stillness actually come easier. We like invitations more than expectations.

Recovering Stillness

Today I feel satisfied by sustained stillness in a group. I enjoy long drinks of communal silence. When I teach I lengthen the rests at the end of dances and songs to savor the expansive, open sensations where clutter has evaporated. A breeze blows through the mind.

Still, open space is manna, the bread of heaven. I am mindful to take, eat, and savor it.

Eckhardt Tolle writes in the Power of Now, “To meet everything and everyone through stillness instead of mental noise is the greatest gift you can offer to the universe. I call it stillness, but it is a jewel with many facets: that stillness is also joy, and it is love.”

I am grateful to colleagues Phil, Krista, and all who help bring stillness more deeply and deservedly into the practice of InterPlay. If you need more of it I commend the following practices to deepen and reclaim the wordless song of your soul, the sound of one hand clapping: silence and stillness.

Raising Stillness Practices by Krista Gemmel Harris

Stillness is featured as one of the cornerstones of InterPlay, yet there can be far more emphasis on doing the forms than on experiencing the mystery and aliveness of stillness. One of InterPlay’s many gifts is its ability to help us lead embodied lives. It gives us the tools to conceptualize and experience the integration of body, mind, heart, and spirit. We know from direct experience that the InterPlay forms foster this sense of integration.

Fullness is one of the portals to experiencing embodiment. Stillness is another. For me, fullness and stillness feel like mirror images. When I dance, sing, make funny sounds, and tell my stories, I embody the truth of who I am through fullness. When I slow down, rest, and have stillness, I embody the truth of who I am through silence and space. In fullness, I claim and celebrate the specifics of who I am. In stillness or emptiness, I can experience a less explicit, more universal quality of being. Each way of experiencing aliveness enhances the other.

People who come to InterPlay find great satisfaction in discovering their fullness, sharing their stories, and claiming their physical exuberance. Bodyspirits also find deep satisfaction in being still, in celebrating the miracle of being, and in sharing a quiet spaciousness with others. Given more experiences with stillness, people can discover that stillness is not still at all; it can be a dynamic, alert, restful, aliveness that truly nurtures the bodyspirit. Stillness can also invite deep exformations from one’s tissue. When the body stops moving, the history in our cells can sometimes more easily be heard and brought into awareness.

I have noticed that, over time, InterPlayers develop a deeper capacitance for stillness than they originally had. Having shared many of the details of one’s personal life story through movement, word and singing, an InterPlayer can become less full of his or her “self” and more open to stillness.

Cynthia Winton-Henry feels that InterPlay may not need to add more stillness forms if leaders can incorporate more silent, spacious experiences by simply lengthening the stillness moments that already exist or inviting InterPlayers to choose as much stillness as they desire. InterPlay recognizes that stillness is often easier for people to access through movement and relaxation. It may feel more natural to a body to be still after exerting itself. For example, at the end of a solo witness dance, a leader may ask people to stay with their ending a little longer and simply have the experience of stillness. This stillness moment could last 15 seconds, 30 seconds or as long as is desired. There are ample “stillness moments” like this in InterPlay that we can become conscious of and extend.

I enjoy playing with known InterPlay forms, using them in new ways and creating new forms that help foster a deepening of the experience of stillness. The most common stillness form, Shape and Stillness, can be used in dozens of ways: a solo, duet or group hand dance, a solo witness dance, a small group or entire group dance, an exformation, a dance on behalf of, etc. InterPlay also partners stillness with other forms, giving it a chance to come to life in relationship to something else. When I lead, I also open myself to the possibility that stillness will call a form. I simply listen for the signal.

List of forms. What follows is a list of stillness moments and forms that I have experienced. Many of them happened during workshops with Phil and Cynthia. The remaining ones I learned from other leaders or created myself while leading InterPlay classes.

Easy Focus
Both as a leader and participant I practice the simplicity of easy focus. Honoring my body’s need for rest, I relax my focused worker. I enjoy the blessing of not rushing. At its best this allows what Krista calls “unteaching” or leading lightly. I’m in no rush to do the next thing. I do not need to use so many words, explain, or take the focus away from participants. (CWH)

Noticing
The easy focus practice of noticing after an InterPlay process can be done in stillness and rest. It can be done in reflective writing. Or it can be incorporated into sharing notcings with a partner. We often encourage participants to remember that in InterPlay “You are not required to articulate your experience in order to have it.” Verbal noticing may not be what the body wants. Allowing people to sit quietly together side by side or in contact can be satisfying. (CWH)

Do Nothing
In workshops where people are highly engaged, allowing two or three minutes of rest with some recorded or live music can make you the savior of the day. In an Untensive for graduate students in Creation Spirituality, I realized that the adults were so exhausted I invited them to lie down after lunch or draw. They found this to be one of the most extraordinary learnings of the workshop. We actually practiced what we preached. And yes, we needed to do it together. It was a blessing not to have to go away to rest. (CWH)

Warm-up
• Tuning In. At the very beginning of class, invite people to close their eyes, breathe, feel their feet on the floor, and just notice their body data.
• Take a deep breath…and let it out, paying particular attention to the space at the end of the exhale.
• Community Stillness. Before warming up, begin with a two-minute community stillness.
• Warm-up without talking. When a group is familiar with the basic InterPlay warm-up, ask people to follow along as you lead without talking. This can give people a chance to drop more deeply into the body and/or to experience the warm-up as a dance.
• Three Breaths in Stillness. After checking in with your own skin, get in a circle (or with a partner) and give the person in front of you a back/neck rub. Then rest your hands on the person’s shoulders in front of you and share 2 or 3 breaths in stillness.

Walk/Stop/Run
• Have at least 25% stillness.
• Have at least 50% stillness.
• Have 90% stillness.
• Share a moment of stillness with the whole group.
• Walk/Stop/Run/Rest. From time to time, lower yourself to the floor to “rest” in a fetal-like shape on the floor. Observe the action from there. Participate while resting.
• Shape Museum. (Anne Green Gilbert, Creative Dance Center, Seattle) Half the group enters the space and makes individual shapes. The other half of the group then walk, run and dance around the shapes. When a moving person feels particularly drawn to a shape, she copies the shape and becomes still, releasing the original shaper from stillness. The new shaper is free to transform the shape she copied to a different one. The mover is free to walk, run, or dance around the shapes until drawn to a particular one. Continue with moving and shaping until the music ends. This works very well with large groups of people new to InterPlay. Great for kids.

Walk and Stop
• (Warm-up sequence, in silence, Trish Watts, Australia) Begin in your own space. Take a deep breath. Feel your feet connected to the earth. Do some gentle side to side rocking. Continue to feel your connection to the earth. Let the rocking get a little bigger so you are swaying and gently swinging through your center. Gradually let the swaying get smaller and smaller until you are standing in a grounded stillness. Feel the soles of your feet magnetically drawn to the center of the earth. Let yourself feel connection with people on the other side of the earth (InterPlayers in Australia!) whose feet are also magnetically drawn toward the center of the earth. Now take a step and come to stillness. Take another and come to stillness. Feel your connection to the earth. Feel the connection to the other people in the room, to the other bodyspirits walking on the earth. Be aware of the group body space and continue taking steps and coming to stillness. Listen to your body. Be aware of your breathing. Play around with the number of steps you are taking, the speed of your steps, and the length of your stillness.
• Connect with a partner. Walk and stop together, continuing in silence.
• Continue as a quartet, an octet, a whole group.

Shape and Stillness Forms
• Shape and Stillness Hand Dances. Solos and duets.
• Shape and Stillness Dance with the whole group, half the group, small groups, or partners.
• Group Body Shape and Stillness. Start with a shape of your own. Notice other shapes that are being made. When you move to new shapes, incorporate ones you see others making. Be aware of the group dance you are creating.
• Shape and Stillness Sculpture. (Tom and Ginny North Carolina) Have people practice making shapes and having stillness in groups of three. Then get everyone in a big circle and describe the shape and stillness sculpture as a form where you can both participate in creating the sculpture and be a witness. You can come in and out of the center. Depending on the size of the circle, invite 3 to 5 people to come into the circle, one by one, and take a shape, have stillness, and move to a different shape at their own pace. Different people will shift shapes at different times and exit the sculpture when they choose to go back to the circle to witness. Tom and Ginny have used this form with new groups – easy to learn and very satisfying to do and watch.

Solo Witness Dances
• Intentional Beginning: Before you begin take a deep breath, let it out and enter a place of stillness within.
• Incorporate some stillness into your dance. Either begin with extended stillness or incorporate a period of stillness somewhere in your solo.
• 90% stillness. Let your bodyspirit embody stillness as 90% of your dance.
• Dance/Stillness/Dance/Stillness/Dance Stillness
• No Music. (KGH) Listen to the impulses of your own body to move or to be still and accompany these with stillness, your breath, or vocalizations that arise from your body.
• Contemplative Solo Witness. (KGH) Preparation: Begin walking very slowly, so slowly that you can experience and discover anew the subtle body mechanics of simply taking a step. Let your meditative walking become meditative dancing, continuing to move ever so slowly and mindfully. Gradually let yourself move more quickly and continue to invite that sense of mindfulness. During the next solo witness dance (with or without music), let yourself focus on the experience of moving itself. You may want to begin moving slowly and then gradually include faster tempos, continuing to focus on the experience of moving kinesthetically rather than on its emotional content per se. How does it feel to move an elbow, rotate a wrist, have a moment of stillness, or undulate your spine? Simply pay attention to the experience of moving itself and see what that is like. Then notice with your partner.
• Rest with a witness. (KGH) Find a comfortable place to relax or rest and let yourself continue to rest during the (gentle) piece of music that is played (or during the next few minutes of silence). Your witness will simply watch over you as you rest, noticing her own experience. Check in with partner. The resting one shares first, the witness second.

Dancing with a Partner
• Interactive dance with a partner. Another couple witnesses throughout.
• Do another partner dance with 50% stillness.
• Do another with 70% stillness.
• And another with 90% stillness.

Group Stillness and Resting Forms
• Seaweed Dance: A group of four or five lies down with heads together. Raising one arm, invite them to move their arms around each other like seaweed, Include stillness and shapes. This is a deeply meditative and can go on for up to ten minutes.
• Puppy Pile. Ask people to lie down and find a way to make contact with one another whether with just a hand, a foot or much closer. Give people permission to shift, make adjustments and take care of themselves. Especially after a lot of playing this is a great form for people to relax.
• Schmurring. Plays with four elements: getting no higher than a sitting position, leaning, letting gravity pull you down, and laying together. Done in duets and trios. Creates great relaxation and bonding. A thrust shumrr allows the use of pushing, pulling and resting.

Connecting with the Inner Body
If people have interest in exploring the kinesthetic experience of stillness more fully or developing more ease with stillness, some of Eckhart Tolle’s forms for connecting with the inner body can be very helpful. (The Power of Now, Chapter Six.)
• Find a comfortable place to rest. “Close your eyes. Direct your attention into the body. Feel it from within. Is it alive? Is there life in your hands, arms, legs, and feet – in your abdomen, your chest? Can you feel the subtle energy field that pervades the entire body and gives vibrant life to every organ and every cell? If you cannot feel very much at this stage, pay attention to whatever you can feel. Perhaps there is just a slight tingling in your hands or feet. That’s good enough for the moment. Just focus on the feeling. Do not start to think about it. Feel it. The more attention you give it, the clearer and stronger this feeing will become. Eventually it will feel as if every cell is becoming more alive. (Stillness……….) Open your eyes now but keep some attention in the inner energy field of the body.” – Power of Now
• Try doing any of the InterPlay forms with this inner-body awareness.
• Try living with inner-body awareness!

Stillness in Contact Dances
• Shape and Stillness Contact Duets
• Moving Contact Dance with 25%, 50%, or 90% stillness.
• Do a group contact improv with four or five people with 90% stillness.
• Contact Duet Based on Breath. (Peggy Hackney, Making Connections) Preparation: spend some time with a partner tuning in to breath. First become aware of your own breathing and then, without changing it, notice your partner’s breathing. Let some part of your body come into contact with your partner’s body. Notice the area of contact and breathe into it. Gradually let the contact flow to another part of both bodies. Then another. If you wish, let your breathing merge into a similar breath pattern and see what wants to happen. Continue moving with your partner, but not necessarily in contact. See what kind of duet emerges. (Accompany with music or breath.)
• BodySpirit Combing (Leah Mann). With soothing music. One partner stands in stillness and receives while the other gently combs her hands down the space around her partner’s body. Light contact can be included. This can be used as a blessing and often fosters a sense of releasing stuff.

Stillness in Witnessing
As witnesses, we have choices about how we attend to our partner. Sometimes it’s great fun to lean in, connect energetically, and focus on all the details. At other times, our bodyspirits need to be released from that intensity; that’s what easy focus is all about! For thrusters and shapers, remembering to inhabit the back half of the body can help one feel more centered. You are still connected to the mover, but in an easier, more restful way. Developing more options and flexibility around witnessing can be of great value to a leader. What is your style? Would you benefit at times by witnessing from a still place within?
• Practice witnessing while centering your attention in your spine.
• Silently observe your partner. Sitting with a partner, take two minutes to silently observe each other. Just look at each other. You might view this as a form of contemplative prayer. Then share your noticings.
• Witness and check in with internal stillness. Nothing to figure out, nothing to remember to say, nothing to do but simply be there watching. Then, after your partner moves, connect with each other in stillness without using words.
• Using three words and phrases. After the mover has danced, she checks in with her partner by using only three words or phrases. The witness, in turn, witnesses the mover with three words or phrases. This helps keep the aliveness of the movement, continuing the dance through the check-in process.
• Instead of sharing noticings with a partner, notice silently with yourself.

Stillness in Babbling/Word Play
• Give babble words that capture the spirit of stillness or lack thereof: busy, achievement test, time out, sabbatical, hush, high density, sunset, etc.
• Ask babble questions that elicit life information about stillness: Where do you experience rest in your life? Share a time when it felt good to your body to be still; when it felt uncomfortable to be still, etc.
• 30-second Stillness. (KGH) When calling 30-second babbling forms where one partner speaks and then the other, call a 30-second stillness where Partner A embodies stillness and Partner B listens. Then pick right up with more babbling.
• I could talk about…. (KGH) In this form, when your partner says, “I could talk about….” actually listen instead of jumping to your own ideas of association before your partner is through speaking. Hear your partner’s sentence. Repeat it silently in your head. Then carry on with your own, “I could talk about…” with your partner actually listening to you.
• Space out your words. Natural poetry flows from babbling that allows spaces between the words. Take your time with a theme like rock, tree, stream, hearth. Lay down to babble. Enjoy the silence as well as the words.

Vocal Community
• Still Small Voice. Placing your hands like a little tent over your voice and throat, lightly engage your voice, as though you are barely using your vocal chords. Instead of “using” your voice, let it be only for you. Taking one breath at a time, lightly vocalize into the shelter of your hands. Listen to your still, small voice.
• Toning. As you play with the three elements, Match it, Change it or go to Stillness, notice your willingness to go to stillness.
• Increase stillness 50 percent.
• Sing/Stillness/Sing/Stillness/Sing/Stillness. The DT3 form can be adapted for many things including stillness. If partners are not ready to sing, they could do a hum/stillness 3
or chanting a word/stillness 3.

Invite Stillness
When players are comfortable with the forms, invite them into a warmup that extends into a period of movement and stillness. This could last ten to thirty minutes. Gather the group at the end for noticings or a reading and further play. Here is a good one by InterPlay poet Beverly Voss

Going the Speed of the Body

My body–slow as growing grass.
And cool.
It breathes the ghost breath of wind
that rustles the top of the sycamore.
And is gone.

Can it match your heartbeat?
It’s faster… a silver fish darting
Behind the water hyacinth.
Suspended there…perhaps forever.

Perhaps there is no matching.
Only the dance of slow and quick
Gold and black flickers between
Dark and the morning star
Ancient wheelings of touch and go

My body is restless as the dance
when the music is captive still
inside the wooden box.
When the musicians delay
fiddling with their strings,
their bows.

Stretch out a leg, an arm
Let out the sound, the song,
the groan. Fall into the moan
of movement. Be the song.
The dance.
Wait no more
for the musicians.
They could tune
themselves all night.

Beverly Voss
09-01-03

Write Us!
As you incorporate more stillness into your interplay practice, we would love to include them, Please let kristaharris@comcast.net and Cynthia@interplay,org know what stillness forms you develop or stumble upon!

Acknowledgements

KGH– Krista Gemmel Harris compiled Raising Stillness for the First International InterPlay Conference Nashville, TN, 2004
Anne Green Gilbert Founder of the Creative Dance Center and BrainDance, 2577 Densmore Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98133 (206) 363-7281. Krista taught at CDC.
Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now, Namaste Publishing and New World Library, 2004
Peggy Hackney, Making Connections: Total Body Integration Through Bartenieff Fundamentals, (Routledge). Available from Taylor and Francis Publishing:
800-634-7064.
Betsy Wetzig and Ginny Whitelaw, Move to Greatness: Four Essential Energies for Whole and Balanced Leadership 2007. Wetzig Coordination Pattern Training (Hang, Swing Thrust Shape).
Cynthia Winton-Henry, What the Body Wants, Woodlake/Northstone Press, 2004