NJ Blog - Anna Bambridge

New Jammer participant blog


Entry 3 - 21st June 2015

Improvise! Make it up as you go along. A simple premise. It sounds like a simple process. But a contact improvisation jam is not simply this. There is an emphasis delivered at the beginning, a route into the shared space in which the improvisation takes place. And something within this casts a spell, there is alchemy, transcendence. I can move in ways I never expected, I know what the music needs next and add it, creativity expressed freely and joyfully. As co-facilitator of the final jam of the New Jammers programme 2015 I feel like I jumped more fully into the experience than ever before and for that I am grateful.

I'm scared to analyse it because I do not want to break the spell but there were some moments that I went through that I'd like to share to highlight how my experience with New Jammers has changed me.

At the start of the jam I was nervous and not fully present with a lot of internal back chat and insecurities playing themselves round in circles. Somewhere, through the movement this slowly dissolved, I'm not sure when or how, just a gradual shift of state. Two other ideas I think helped me through the jam. One was that to facilitate is just to stay open to the space. This I believe really helped me to stay upright (and upside down) and alert in an unforced way. Also, whilst being involved in my own dance do I need to be keeping an eye out for how the others are doing? In a practical sense yes but what I felt I gave myself permission to do was to go as deeply as I could into my dance which was open and alive and participating in the room. Facilitation felt like a two way process when viewed like this. The more present I am to the jam the more aware I am and the more I get from being there. This may well be a bit different on my own rather than with the shared facilitation but I had a real shift in what it is about for me.

At the beginning of the New Jammers programme I had an idea of what it is to be a participant and what it is to be a workshop leader and teacher but the idea of some sort of role that falls between these I had a real anxiety about and couldn't see how to fulfil. This process exposed to me how much I perceived my persona as changing in the different roles. That has really changed and the space that New Jammers has given me to explore and develop and experiment with this has really opened up a whole new way of being with a group for me. And out of this my confidence has grown too.

It is as simple as this. Before the New Jammers programme I did not feel like I could have led a jam. And now I do.

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Spider diagram exercise: 20th May 2015

Following a mentoring session with Tom, all New Jammers were asked to complete the exercise below as a way to focus and articulate their interests and enquiries.

Entry 2 - 12/4/15

The underscore jam last week and the reading I've been doing and spring and everything else have been having a huge impact on me. Memories and things coming together, and moments, but more than just moments, huge expanses of shared experiences deeply felt. I'm not doing this justice, I feel sad not to have the space to articulate this, sad to tears. Why so important, why is this so important? Because it is. Trying to move away from ill-health or dysfunction would not be questioned. This is the opposite. Moving towards the trusting, creative space to genuinely just be is so life-affirming, so health giving so precious. Am I sounding clichéd? Phrases repeated?

So many phrases, thoughts, lines of enquiry, mini-analyses, ways of describing this have run through me in this last week.

In my first new jammers post, I questioned if I was asking too much of the New Jammers programme for myself. The answer to that this week is absolutely not. New Jammers can give everything I am asking for and a whole lot more and I am inspired to raise my head and lift my arms and look for a whole lot more.

Because there is always more, and a new dance emerges and emerges and emerges and it is still hard to trust that and let go (echo Laura) of this one to let that one in again and again til it all merges.

Practicalities, structure, warm up, place them with clear intent and love and watch the unfolding. My sense growing that facilitation could be fun, playful, an opportunity to plant seeds in the form of invitations.

This is something that we do together. Awareness. I appreciate reading all the blog posts. Feel like all of your words are in my body too adding to the learning.

And still I don't feel that I am doing this justice. There is more. A jam is a special place. There is more.

I drew for the first time in a jam this week. I found it difficult to stay connected. I find it difficult that there is something left after for people to see rather than the anonymous dissolution of dance. I am shy of making sounds and music, find it exposing but thrilling, am drawn to it as a new challenge.

While typing this up I have also been arranging to pass on my children's push-chair. I mourn. They've moved on. Can I? Allow the passing through, the letting go and the trust that there is more...the words sound so easy so, sunny but this is hard. Deep breath, leap of faith.

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Entry 1 - 19/3/15

Impressions from our first four hours together: 

+ How I can look at a person and say hello but it's not until we start jamming that I feel we have met? 

+ How I am needing and welcoming this program but maybe asking too much of it for myself? 

What kept appearing during the session was a tightening and clenching of panic whenever the prospect of participating and facilitating at the same time came up. I understand what it is to participate and I know the space of leading a workshop. Initiating a warm up and then being a part of jam falls somewhere in between, and it feels for me that I am two such different people in those roles that the concept of blending them leaves me unsure of where to be. 

As a participant, I frequently step back from the space and let loose to the introspective vulnerability within it. As a workshop leader I am aware of everyone in the space and constantly adjusting accordingly, supporting and teaching. 

Finding a balance between these states feels challenging.

It has been a long time since I have been in such a group of supportive enquiry and I am grateful for that. I am grateful for this space for all the questions, the feeling, and yet keenly aware of the structure that Penny brought in terms of how to lead a warm up. The skeleton for us to flesh out and it feels like if I just keep coming back to this it will all fall into place. 

I don't yet know how this will blend with my own practice, I know it can't fail to but I don't want to force it, just let the contact be what it is and then feel my way through. On one level I have a clutch of techniques I am itching to share but as this rolls forward the warm up might not be the place. 

I feel that trusting that all of my learning is implicit in who I am and will be there no matter how I proceed will open things up and this feels softer, looser and more creative.

How extremely different individual dancers are and how different that feels can be overwhelming. The exercise where we had to dance with everyone in turn was really great for the group and I felt that connection but it also meant that I had dances that were challenging for me that I would have avoided (not necessarily consciously) in a jam.