Movement Flow Artist
Movement Flow Artist – One who uses the art of movement in order to achieve the Flow State.
As a Movement Flow Artist, the most important Flow Triggers that you should be paying attention to are: Clear goals, immediate feedback, challenge/skill ratio, freedom from distractions/disturbances, high consequence environment, rich environment, deep embodiment and cross-disciplinary creative studies. If you’re doing movement arts with a partner, or partners, then you’ll also need to focus on always saying yes, blending egos and close listening.
Clear Goals in Movement Arts – This amounts to knowing what you want to do and knowing how to do it. If you’re trying to learn a trick, then you know what you want to do. However, knowing how to do it, requires breaking down the trick into its smallest learnable components and then practicing those. Tutorials can be incredible for this, but teachers are often indispensable at helping you define clear goals! Seek one out on the www.propdanceculture.com website, or other platform of your choosing!
Immediate Feedback in Movement Arts – This is often a result of achieving clear goals and being able to see the results of your attempts to achieve them. Using a mirror, your shadow, a wall, or some other external object, is an excellent and immediate way to figure out if you’re doing things correctly or not. However, one should not lean on these tools as a crutch and should be able to develop ways of collecting immediate feedback without an external object. I said it before, and I’ll say it again, finding a teacher is indispensable as they can often give you better advice than you can give yourself about how to correct yourself!
Challenge/Skill Ratio in Movement Arts – When going out to practice there are three general levels that we must acknowledge. Tricks/movements that we can do cleanly and easily, tricks/movements that we can do consistently, but sloppily, and tricks/movements that we can do inconsistently.
These three general levels correspond to the three main segments of the Challenge/Skill Ratio. What we seek is the Flow Channel.
Credit: http://chickswagewar.blogspot.com/2013/06/skill-challenge-and-flow.html
As you can see there is a border between Anxiety and The Flow Channel as well as a border between Boredom and The Flow Channel, these are the Flow Channel-Anxiety and Flow Channel-Boredom Borders respectively.
Sticking to tricks/movements we can do cleanly and easily may put us in the “Boredom Zone”, but if we add plenty of tricks/movements” that we can only do consistently, but sloppily and perhaps some that we can do inconsistently, then we can move ourselves just past the Flow Channel-Boredom Border and towards the middle of the Flow Channel
Similarly, sticking to tricks/movements we can do consistently, but sloppily and throwing in just enough tricks/movements that we can do inconsistently, then we keep ourselves just below the Flow Channel-Anxiety Boarder and towards the middle of the Flow Channel.
Freedom from distractions/disturbances in Movement Arts – This is quite literally self-explanatory! What I mean is that “freedom from distractions/disturbances” depends solely on YOUR PERCEPTION! We all know folks that can somehow study with the T.V. on, while talking to a friend and eating potato chips, but then again, we know of someone who can’t study unless they’re in the dead silence of outer space.
Most of us live busy lives, but it’s important to take some time for ourselves. So, what you need to do is find out what distracts or disturbs you from focusing on the activity that you want to focus on. Once we’re knocked out of concentration it can take us an average of 23 MINUTES and 15 SECONDS to get back into a fully focused state! If you’re one of those people who normally take a while to get into Flow, then it’s critical you take some time to silence distractions and disturbances beforehand. Put on headphones of your favorite music, go somewhere quiet with nobody around, give yourself enough space to move how you want, try EVERYTHING!
High consequence & Rich environments in Movement Arts – Have you tried all of the above steps, but still can’t get that STER kick that you’re looking for? If you don’t perform, then you should give it a shot! Performing can up the social risk involved in practicing your Movement Arts significantly. You can start with “busking” or street performing and then move up to paid performances! Your goal is to entertain the crowd and this adds more Flow triggers to your practice! These Flow triggers are, social embarrassment, higher perceived challenge, and practicing in places that are new, unpredictable and, especially when busking, complex!
Deep Embodiment in Movement Arts – Deep embodiment is perhaps a tricky one, the goal here is to MOVE more. For object manipulators and jugglers, this means taking a difference stance than just simply “standing”. Try standing on one leg, or jumping, or crouching, now try moving between all of these stances! For all movement artists, the point here is to involve more of yourself into your movement practice! Listen to the sounds your body or prop makes as you manipulate it and play around with it. For movers this is the sound of your body touching the floor or apparatus you’re using. INVOLVE ALL YOUR SENSES!
Cross-Disciplinary Creative Studies in Movement Arts – This is the act of taking ideas, principles and concepts from one art or discipline, and implementing them into another art or discipline. In the world of Movement Arts, this means looking at those who use different props and dance/movement styles than you do. It means looking at performers/entertainers and seeing what characters they are trying to portray and then trying to portray those yourself. This can even mean taking inspiration from cartoon characters, actors, or other non-movement art related crafts. Creative inspiration can come from the strangest places and Cross-Disciplinary Creative Studies gives you a concrete method for how to access that inspiration.
Always saying yes in Movement Arts – This means that interactions are more additive than argumentative, your interactions should always move towards a point instead of into, confusion or stagnation. To do this, you and your partner, or partners, need to both be in the Flow and quite self-aware. You and your partner(s) should first establish a clear goal. If you are a performing artist group choreographing something, then perhaps the clear goal is to tell a story, if so, what type of story? If you are simply trying to build a repertoire for freestyling, then that should be firstly and clearly established as well. In either of these cases, when something is put forward by a member, the other member(s) should say one of the three things: “Okay, let’s do that”, “Okay, how about that and this?” or “Could we do it like this instead? (followed by logical reasoning)”.
Blending egos in Movement Arts – Any member in the group should be able to put forward an idea for the other member(s) to say yes to in one of the ways stated above, and habitually saying yes when in cooperation with another person(s) will cause egos to blend. This is because the product of cooperation is greater than the single ideas of the participants. In other words, what you create together will obviously have been impossible through the imagination of any single person alone. Additionally, always saying yes, will allow the group to develop unspoken understandings. This is especially important in group freestyle movement arts.
Close listening in Movement Arts – When working together, “going with the Flow” is important here. It’s fine to have preplanned things that you want to do, however one should not try to have control over what the other person(s) would like to do. If there is an objection because they’d like to do it a different way, or do something else instead, then one needs to be able to adapt quickly and ideally without much trouble. Remember that one of the key elements in working with other person, or persons, is always saying YES. Do this correctly and both blending egos and close listening will follow.
Hopefully, you now have a good idea of how you can use various Flow triggers to achieve Flow through your Movement Arts. Whether it is Micro or MacroFlow, these Flow triggers should help guide you into Flow individually or with the group you practice with.
Now that we’re finished discussing the most obvious appearances of Micro and MacroFlow, it’s time that we talk about how you can be a “Flow Ninja”. Flow Ninjas are those who appear to be engaging in a task that you would NOT associate with MicroFlow. However, through these tasks, Flow Ninjas are able to tap into MicroFlow on a daily basis. They do what we might consider normal everyday tasks, but still get as much joy out of it as we might when prop spinning, doing yoga, or juggling. These are people who live “The Flow Life”, these are Undercover Flow Artists.
