Day 347: Trance

I haven’t written for a few days, but not in the least because I haven’t been having a good time. I so very much have. And that’s the thing – writing this blog daily makes the good bits of every day so much more real. If I’m honest, I may be a little bit scared of stopping. I love the formality of this practice. It’s not like at the start though, not quite. Still – try and keep something the same. Try and sit on it so that it doesn’t become something different from when you started, Even the energy you spend trying will affect it and make it into something.

Trance Voice Man

I’m on a course called Generative Trance. It involves, predictably, quite a lot of trance. It involves using the ‘musicality of the voice’ and lots of rhythms to do work with people. Yesterday, we did a delightful double induction (always makes me want to say the words ‘double fisting’, thanks to Loong, who said it with such seeming innocence during her first, shy week at Hasbro as she held one drink in each hand). I did say them. It was always going to happen.

It was great. We did a gibberish induction, so that the inviation to drop into a trance state was all in made-up words, relying entirely on tonality and flow. There was some child-singing and some general words in English too, for that person. The other person did a heartbeat thing, breathed with the person and dropped in words about the thing they wanted. I didn’t have the experience as the receiver, as we only had time for two, but doing it was just outstanding and massive amounts of fun. I got to sing a song in German, which I chided myself would be ‘wrong’ because it wasn’t a proper child-age song, but it did the job in ways none of us could have expected and the other one, which was a nursery rhyme, did the job in part too. It was brilliant. And I’ll ask my partners to do the same for me today. Looking forward to that.

There are so many nice people here. I’ve laughed a lot. Olga, from Spain/Basque country (I know! – it sounds softer in a Spanish accent than in Russian or Polish). She’s very funny. Jonathan. Nigel and Douglas. Annie. I had a delightful conversation with Ulrike, a lady with a clipped German accent about whom I confess I had made assumptions. We laughed a huge amount. She’s a dab hand at making the call of a territorial red deer. She did it well with her hands, but for best effect, she says, blow down the spout of a watering can that has a little water in the bottom, using some voice, and move your mouth around so it’s a bit like talking. They’ll come running, apparently, to check you out to see if you’re worth rutting so they can steal your ‘gaggle of hinds’. Never expected to hear that from her!

Musical Voice Man

I’m learning a lot and I’m getting loads of benefit from the inductions. I’m noticing – of course – all kinds of parallels between this work and improvisation, and I’m noticing ideas popping up about how to combine them for particularly positive experiences. It’s all pretty wonderful and I’m grateful to Sarah Sansom for getting me here, though she hasn’t been able to come. Good move, Sansom. I approve.