Back in around 2000 it happened that I worked a lot with (theatre and puppet) actors on movement and dance. Researching on how I would introduce them to movement and dance, I devised a simple exercise/game/proposition that basically engaged a person on the level of imagination (more then visualisation).
The proposition was and is to imagine a ball in what you think, feel, imagine your pelvis is. This ball then starts to move in the pelvis and you pick any of its impulses to move the body. This helped actors move holistically, ie even if they were moving one part of the body more actively, the rest of the body aligned to support the movement of that part of the body.
Once the people had a clear relation between the movement of the imaginary ball in the pelvis to the movement of their body, I proposed to extend the limits of the ball’s movement to the whole physical body. When the relation between the movement of the ball and the movement of the body was clear, I would then propose to change ball’s properties: texture, size, consistency, speed…
Eventually I would suggest to take the ball out of the physical body and hold it in the hands (yes, taiji- or qigong-like) and move along with movement of the ball in the space. As we already altered the properties of the ball, I suggested to start to treat the ball as what we call in Slovenian “gmota”, a bulk of matter, a lump, or as it it has amoeba like behaviour. Still holding gmota in the hands.
Then there would come proposition to treat gmota as a matter that has properties of dough or/and chewing gum. So, if you would make distance bigger between the two hands, the gmota would dough-like span from one hand to the other.
And then this chewy gmota would start to loop, wobble, shapeshift while spanning between two hands and make all sorts of paths between the two hands.
Of course one of the next propositions was to take any two surfaces in your body and open plasma flow between then and see how the movement of this plasma flow between two surfacs of the body, would move the whole of the body.
This turned out to be very efficient at pinpointing the pain and what pain is caused by and how it wants/can be healed. But it also made possible to explore the movement and my understanding of the movement.
Today is the day that I remembered this while dancing and practicing The Nape Score (http://nucanucanuca.tumblr.com).