In film I can make the world dance.
I first encountered Maya Deren’s work when I was learning how to make documentary films in New York. I remember discovering one of her films, Meditation on Violence (1948), on display in MoMA and was completely hypnotised by the looping movements of the Chinese dancer, Chao-Li Chi.
It’s unsurprising that I was so drawn to this experimental work as it encapsulates Maya’s main preoccupation as a filmmaker: the human body in motion and the way it could be captured cinematically.
Today I would like to share four Maya quotes that have inspired me:
Movement, or energy is more important, or powerful, than space or matter — that, in fact, it creates matter.
Through my training and experience of teaching The Alexander Technique I have learnt that even during moments of apparent stillness we are all continuously moving! Attuning to our unique frequencies enables a control and clarity of inhibition, direction and action in daily life. Starting from an energetic place within ourselves can transform our physical bodies and circumstances with ease.
Your mistakes will not get you fired.
In her essay, ‘Amateur versus Professional’, Maya celebrates the artistic freedom that being an ‘amateur’ allows. She highlights its etymology from the Latin word for ‘lover’: ‘the amateur should make use of the one great advantage which all professionals envy her, namely freedom - both artist and physical.’
Embracing our inner ‘amateur’ in life can enhance creativity and wonder because it is a state of being that celebrates ‘mistake-making’. This is not only the best way to learn but also leads to discovery.
The most important part of you equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your imaginative mind, and your freedom to use both. Make sure you do use them.
For me, the key word here is ‘freedom’. If I had to distill The Alexander Technique down to one key lesson it would be about learning to be free. When I first started my training I was completely oblivious to the thoughts and conditioned beliefs that were quite literally imprisoning me to make choices that weren’t particularly healthy. Learning how to notice my physical and thinking habits opened up the possibility to choose a new and better way.
When Maya Deren was 5 years old she and her parents fled the anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine for a new life in New York. Her quote above reminds me of another by Victor Frankl and his survival strategy in Auschwitz: ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’
I am free to change my mind, change my direction, explore something new or return to something old. But most importantly I am free in every moment to choose my reactions and how I respond to my life.
The love of life itself… seems to me larger than the loving attention to a life.’
This quote is taken from a letter in which Maya describes a near death experience that left her ‘overwhelmed with the most wondrous gratitude for the marvellous persistence of the life force.’
I coined the phrase ‘for lives that don’t go in straight lines’ as a tagline for The Intuition School. There are definitely projects and pursuits that require ‘straight-line’ thinking and planning. But the idea that I had assumed as a young adult that my life also required a predictable and efficient time-line was not only stifling it was also impossible! My experience is that life unfolds much more similarly to a spiral: reeling, revealing and returning to a kind of fundamental essence that gently emerges as I learn to better yield to my own unique life force.
Wishing you all a good week,
Sophie
Ps. To watch my animations and see some of my collage work click here