Ketchup

Lesson of the Day from Circle in the Square, Movement Class with Ken Schatz:

We were doing an exercise where we had to do quick turns from pose to pose to pose to pose, never the same twice, always quickly and impulsively without thinking. Letting our instrument act without the brain getting in the way. For every turn we made we had to let out sound, again, without thinking, just letting the instrument work, separating the body from the brain.

He changed the sound to words - one word for a quarter turn, two words for a half turn, three words for a full turn, but it still had to be instantaneous and without thinking. It felt nearly impossible, and there was a block in my brain and nothing but panicked sounds would come out as I tried to think of three things to say that weren't related and were just words. But we as a society have been taught to think before we speak, to say things only when we've addressed the consequences in our head, so letting that go and just letting words out was so difficult. Ken described it as "adding words to this turns you all into drunken retarded people," because we didn't know how to just "do" and not think.

Then, when we couldn't manage any more non-repeated words or we were babbling hopelessly, he told us to only say profane, vulgar and unacceptable things, and all of a sudden we were spewing the crudest things imaginable without thinking. It was easier, for whatever reason, and I didn't understand why I kept spitting "fuck," "shit," "piss," "asshole," and many other words to rude to write, but they were the first things my mouth was forming.

I truly understood what it was to let the body go without thinking when I made a full turn and didn't even realize what had come out of my mouth until I heard the shocked gasps and murmurings of my classmates, and I was horrified to realize that I had unconsciously spewed some very foul racial epithets, none of which I meant, of course, but I was just frozen with shock. Ken nodded, said I could relax, then started telling us the metaphor that explained what was happening.

The Ketchup Analogy.

You get a bottle of ketchup on a diner table. You go to use it. It hasn't been used in a long time, so there's crusty, unused, gross ketchup clogging the opening. The ketchup that never quite got out.
That bottle equates to us - before beautiful, good, clean ketchup (words, actions, etc. ) can come out, we need to clear away the crusty ugliness first. The things that never get said, the stuff just clogging our subconscious. It has to be removed and cleaned out, allowed to be released, so we can move forward.

I love Circle.