Some key ideas that help you understand the work – Look at ParaTheatrical ReSearch – Antero Alli’s website for way more stuff, he did this for 42 years.
Body-Mind
Often, we are doing something with our bodies, while our mind is somewhere else. When we speak of working with the Body-Mind, its about having a two way connection, so your body expresses the content of your mind, or your mind is focused on the sensations and physical experience of your body. We write Body first, because holding our awareness in the body through an active process of anchoring and drawing downwards leads to an experience of life without the barrier created by constant thinking. Rest assured, your smartest and most creative thoughts will arise from this state, not from going round in circles as the default.
Horizontal – Vertical:
In this type of practice, the energy that inspires movement and ideas is important to capture, when you are in your social mind, looking outwards for guidance or judgement, and being aware of others perceptions of you, movement is coming from a ‘horizontal’ source, and while you might still find interesting moments, the quality of attention and energy that allows creative action remains in the ‘daily’. When feeling sensations and listening to thoughts with more presence, and when movement comes from an honest exploration of inner experience, we access a ‘vertical’ source that presents far more possibility to interact with your unconscious, and connect the body-mind. Even when working in a pair or with the group, we don’t want to be horizontally sourcing, conscious of what they think of us, since in a workshop, everyone will be responding to their own experience, and any perceived judgement or masking is a projection, and something for the judger/masker to assess and make use of vertically
Free movement:
A big part of Fae is unlocking a greater sense of embodiment, and putting that to use by exploring different human abilities, such as ways of moving, thinking, and their combinations. Even if you live an active life, it’s still likely that you have a small pool of regular movements, depending on your hobbies and jobs, and often we get stuck into mechanised ways of moving, such as keeping our arms close to the body or holding tensions. People restrict their breath, expressions, flow of energy, and approach to life with misuse of the body, learned over a lifetime of moving to achieve a goal and never moving for movements sake. With the supportive environment of a workshop, we can begin using our bodies with conscious awareness, exploring new movements, or just gently feeling what we normally ignore; which is often all that’s necessary to feel a release of tension and renewed vigor. By engaging vertically, you can discover a flow of impulses, associations, emotions and components of the physical and mental bodies that, when given our awareness, drive non daily actions and inspire the exploration of free movement.
Free association:
When moving, alone or with others, associations appear in open minds. These can be memories of a time, place, relation etc, that are made more real through the body’s involvement, perhaps you are walking through the memory, acting out the interaction or depicting the emotional tone. An association can also come from the imagination, which is just memory of things that we haven’t experienced. People often feel their mind becoming superimposed over the empty studio, flashes of different scenes, in dialogue with our movement, sometimes caused by the position of your body reminding you, sometimes your body responds to the mind, which gives the mind another point of association. We flow like this, in what Carl Jung would call active imagination.
Archetypal material:
A kind of boiling down to the essential essence of an idea- Triggered by a movement in your body or relationship to another, you may embody an archetype, the hero, or lover, the sage, or rouge. inhabiting these roles, even for brief flashes, can loosen the tight grip that ego holds which limits our identity and prevents growth. Seeing yourself as a ruler for a moment won’t push you permanently into that role, but confront parts of you which feel inferior, the goal is to balance many archetypes within us so we meet life directly, instead of behind a hard shell.
Score:
A sequence of actions and thoughts which is rehearsed and then repeated.
after the spontaneity of Fae, we play with structuring our thoughts and movements in the Possessed.
Mantra:
A sequence of thoughts, actions, words, song, repeated . Normally with an important message of affirmation or confirmation – an affirmation is words you need to hear, a confirmation is words you need to say/acknowledgement of truth.
Ritual action:
When I’m in a bad funk, feeling uncreative and immobile, I like to put on Nights by Frank Ocean, if you don’t know, its got the most incredible beat switch that feels like being catapulted into a new song. I use this to propel me and dispel the bad aura. I do this by making myself feel the build up, focusing on relaxing the tensions in my body, and mentally readying myself to begin fresh. This works for me, you might have to find your own method. But the heart of ritual actions is this, imbuing an experience with meaning, allowing it to act as a symbol, which are far better at getting through to our subconscious mind than our mental words. Doing something physical, like tapping or washing your face, or stepping over a threshold (literal or imagined), can be done with added layers of meaning,ending a cycle of emotions or behaviour, starting something new, making an affirmation hit deeper, whatever you need. This is the hermetic magick of thought control. Esoteric practice operates on a mechanism in the brain like the placebo effect, which I think is way underappreciated, and if you look into the studies which demonstrate how effective the power of belief is, you’d want to start taking advantage of this brain hack too.