Although it's a performance art MOTION THEATER can be integrated into any solo practice.
I came into MOTION THEATER as a retired physical therapist seeking trauma recovery.
My solo practice derives from qi gong, martial, yogic, prayer & movement healing practices.
Those are formalized practices. My solo practice goes into & follows specific sensations that arise within my body; especially pain, which ironically leads to greater pleasure.
MOTION THEATER is similar: One follows what arises within oneself.
For me, the challenging part of MOTION THEATER is to express myself in language. As a movement artist, I've always felt free if I could move. Conversely, I'm most afraid to reveal myself by talking out loud. MOTION THEATER takes me to places where I've shut down language connections in my brain.
How is this different from talk therapy?
In MOTION THEATER a movement or physical shape takes you to a particular time and place that occurred in your real life. It's unexpected how you land in a memory. But then the landscape becomes alive -- sounds, colors, names, geography or perhaps the time of year.
In trauma, a person's biological processes shut down the various ways of feeling and receiving sensations / information. It does this to survive - all available energy goes to transporting oxygen to the bio-being. In our psychologically led-along culture this physiological process is called dissociation. You dissociate from the non-essential details of your circumstance.
But later, when out of danger, how does one reorganize oneself? How does one dis-allow that zombie-like state from becoming chronic?
One way is Remembrance.
You remember:
the sky is blue & clear a warm fall day...i'm at NYC's City Hall bus stop on Broadway joking with a friendly brown skinned stranger in a tweed English style jacket ...on the sidewalk....there is a weird sound that grows rapidly louder....i'm running... through thick thick grey heavy is it dust?
You punctuate the details of your story with the movement of your still alive body. Or your body may vibrate with the sensations -- and the words emerge. Either way, you connect back to the experience: the taste, the sound, the texture, the size of it. Recreating details you previously could not receive, you go there and back again - knowing that you survived.
Thus the present becomes more vivid, too.
Besides artists, I'd recommend MOTION THEATER to everyone who wants to be alive. read more