Pattern Monster
We join hands
share nervous smiles, but warm.
We start to move to the music, and immediately, he asks me
"are you comfortable with lifts and dips?"
The question, timed this way, zaps through me, an alarm.
"No, thank you."
In fact, I am quite comfortable with lifts and dips, unless my partner demonstrates this eagerness to "get there."
It's subtle, so subtle, the signalling that tells me the circumstance is more important to him than the experience, and thus that I must guard myself and gird my own experience in order to enjoy any circumstance he might offer.
In improv social dance, we call leaders who attach to circumstance "pattern monsters." The most important factor in what they're leading is what they decided to lead. Pattern after pattern, they know how it should go.
I like to think we have a name for this because it's overall outside the true nature of improv social partner dance.
The lifts and dips of a man who values doing tricks are sloppy and showy, tossing my body around, trying to make something happen.
The lifts and dips of a man who values the collaboration between our bodies are precise and comfortable, like being tucked into bed in an expert fashion. That man doesn't ask, he trusts himself to feel the ever-expanding zone of comfort I have in his unique leadership.
The nature of improv is curiosity for what may unfold. There is a way of planning which roots in curiosity, and a way of planning which fears the unknown and therefore cannot be curious.
There is the control of laying out how it should go, and there is the confidence of showing up to the moment, competent in a range of movements and responses.
Being in intimacy means holding a vast awareness of the unknown.