| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| Body, movement and joy |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Jogi Panghaal |
What I’m going to tell is about images that I’m going to show. Unfortunately I can’t show them the way that I saw them originally. All at once at one large pattern. I’ll try not talk when I show these images, I’ll talk and change the slides then. Play has been understood in the Indian subcontinent as an activity that makes the body move in a certain way which generates joy. Keywords being body, movement and joy. This movement of the body is crucial for the enactment of play. This movement is motivated by the desire of the body to know about its own self better by connecting and exploring with the field around it, with its context. This movement also creates a space and a field for the body, both inside and outside, which then makes the body play with greater assurance. Play creates the field and the space. Play is the agent through which the body learns. It creates unexpected encounters, experiences surprises, connections and discoveries. It develops skills, above all it makes us want to wonder what lies in the fields both in and outside other than it has created. It makes us curious, it helps to stretch limits, exploring risks, breaking rules and conventions and founding new fields. and boundaries. It generates meaningful moments in the field. It helps to locate these moments of actual experiences in the field like cloth in a weave. It is through play that we inform ourselves about our inner fields. We are formed by play. We perform according to the state of our form. Those of you who play games would connect to this notion of being in form. Play is the larger field within which a form performs. Play is a promise of a new threshold, a non-formalised, non-materialised, un-articulated space that one enters with one’s own self or with the other. We use play to form a game or an artifact which when we play, makes us perform that very same game that created it. It is the animated body that creates a toy which when used creates an animated body. In other words, an act of creation is a play upon the side of need. And when one uses this creation one is obliged to recreate that play. This is what the design of a temple attempts. This is what public image is about. The form of the artifact suggests or informs how the artifact may be played. The process of informing ourselves is a process of travelling through our interior fields. And embedding it with all the diverse experiences that we are going through. Using all the senses that constitute our sensibilities. A dancer plays in the field of the language of dance and informs herself or himself through her sensibilities embedding that language in her body. Likewise a potter learns about the pottery while playing with materials, tools and processes, and of what others have done before him. Through a practise of copying, imitating and recreating, he embodies himself with that experience. Play is practice. The body constantly plays to get a greater, larger, more perfect sense of its own self. Its own moment, its own centre. Play is a constant companion in this attempt to stay centred, stay sensible, stay balanced, even as the body’s filled with new experiences. With this sense of centeredness an artisan creates. What is that creation is not an object but a subject. Almost an embodied part of himself. A craft is a product of this centred action full of embodied play. It is not just an object but a desirable object inviting the user to know it. Inviting the user to get into full play with it. Easing and playing with it to help find each others centres. Helping force momentary common centre, a new balance. After all, the purpose of all for play is to find new common centres with other. Getting into play with this embedded, embodied object, a user acknowledges a new sense of himself. In a way a craft object centres its users through the play that it contains. A play which is full of Eros. This embodied nature of culture with its subject, objects and vast, expansive fields shows that play as an enabling energy continues to be present and evoked, both for the purposes of creation and for the purposes of learning. Play does connect and informs the sensitivity of an artisan, who then creates his subjects which then create a user. This field of context forms the language of play or this language of play helps to form the field of context. In this approach, you don’t design play. You design playfully. Your design will then be like a subject, full of fields, inviting the play to happen. At one level play is used to prepare a body to learn. To make, to evolve subjects and then to have users that respond to it. The underlying truth being that the body plays to inform itself better and the context that it is born, in the context that it is to live, meaningfully. At another level play is used to forge links with the unknown. Finding higher levels of centeredness by attempting to centre with that. It is through this play that true knowledge follows, as different from information. The underlying truth being that consciousness plays to know itself better in its own cosmic context. All the world is a vast field where we’re all simultaneously both players and a play. A form and performers. Dancers and the dance. Artisans and an artefact. A series of interconnected fields all involved in a great spectacle of plays, which we would perhaps call Lila: the ultimate play. Attempts to comprehend all this with only a rational mind may not be enough. We’re to be playful. After all this is all like Maya, an illusion or a wash for reality. In this world of multiple realities, the only thing real then is play. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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