Last night, there were two highlights at the Waterfront Blues Festival in Portland, OR. One was dancing with Julie from San Francisco in the grass just after sundown to Taj Mahal. The other occurred at a tiny, packed stage starring Cedric Burnside and Lightnin' Malcolm. This is raw, Delta blues. It's an inspiration to watch Burnside's dark, moistened skin, pulsing with the movement of his muscles - all of this accentuated by his drenched white sleeveless shirt. Malcolm is defined by his Cheshire Cat-like grin. These two surge - it's the only word I can think of to describe it. I crept up to the front of the crowd and danced. After a while I realized that I was dancing to some idea of the music in my head. I was playing the beats in my head, dancing to my own sense of the music. So I slowed down, found my grounding, and tried to dance to what they were playing.
When I really tried to dance to their music, I found that I was starting to apply some of the concepts of grounding and body integration that I have been so intensely exploring in the past year. I found it perplexing that these physical mechanics so naturally arose from "dancing" to the music. Some way of thinking about dance caused my mind to shift. In this process, I also directly experienced the problems of keeping tension in your body. Holding tension in your body is, as I have described before, like creating a dam for the energy flowing through you. This causes un-rhythmic movement, being ahead of the beat, and a general feeling of... what's the word? Stress. Decay. Death. Maybe my train of thought takes me too far in that.
