AM I LEADING? by Holly Adams

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  • January 19, 2025

AM I LEADING? by Holly Adams

FLOCK: Playing with spontaneous synchronicity 

When we move with strangers, sometimes we move together. I’m interested in the power of these moments, in the satisfaction that comes with improvised coincidence, and in circumstances and scores that can create the atmosphere where this can happen. FLOCK is a two-hour workshop where we explore spontaneous synchronicity through various scores. 

Techniques

FLOCK begins with grounding exercises to bring our attention to ourselves and our bodies individually, before we bring our attention to the movement of others. Then, we dive into a series of short games and scores, some as an entire group, and some in groups of two or three. Between rounds we debrief and try to name what we’re feeling.

Flocking is a group improvisational movement practice. The group stands together, facing one direction. The primary score is to follow the movements of the person you see in front of you; as the group rotates and moves through space, the ‘lead’ role shifts from one person to the next. In this FLOCK, we explored the following iterations on the form: 

An experiment in Pauline Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation through physical movement:

  • Sit in a group, eyes closed. Everyone finds a position or gesture to hold. 
  • Someone says “on!” and everyone opens their eyes to see the positions everyone has taken. 
  • Someone says “off!” and we all close our eyes, then each move into a form that we saw another person hold.
  • Repeat, finding ways to alter or emphasize the gestures of others as we embody them ourselves. 

Mirroring

  • Sit in small groups or duos facing the others. Verbally decide who is taking the lead first.
  • The leader moves in any way they would like, and the others mirror the movements at the same time.
  • The leader indicates when they’re passing it to the next person, who then becomes the leader.
  • Eventually we move to not signifying when leadership is passed, and attempting to instead sense the transfer of leadership within the group. 

Walking for coincidence 

  • Everyone walks through the space, looking for moments to “catch the drift” of another person walking. 
  • Experiment with moments of coincidence between your movements and the movements of other people; seeking out those moments and creating them. 
  • Try finding the opposite of someone’s movements. Try tracking another person’s movements from the other side of the room and stepping into their actions. See how it feels to put someone else’s steps into your own body.


Journal

There are two overarching qualities that I’ve begun to understand as part of these practices: unsureness and satisfaction. 

Unsureness: 

Anticipation and unsureness come up both individually and within the entire group atmosphere. Individually, sometimes we’re not sure if we’re the one leading, or what to do with our leadership. As the whole group, things can feel unsteady or incomplete if things fail to collect into a coherent sync. Nancy Stark Smith, dancemaker and artist, proposed the language of the gap [ ] to articulate this feeling of in-between. Moments in improvisation where you’re not sure what’s happening, what to do next, why you’re even here. 

Satisfaction: 

Shared power and satisfaction emerge in sudden moments where everything in the room collects around one idea, like marching in two groups in opposite directions, or everyone’s speed slowing down as one person follows another, who follows another, who follows another, who slowed. When without communicating about it verbally, we all find a shared quality of movement or timing. Things feel like they ‘click’ into place, even just for a moment. 

I’m particularly interested in the overlap of these moments. There was a moment when we were mirroring, and I felt like a kid playing with a ouija board – “Are you moving it? I’m not the one moving it! You must be the one moving it, because I’m not!” – as the group was never quite sure who was leading, but we were moving together in sync regardless. 

In following and leading, and in the ambiguity between these states, there’s almost too much to take in, sometimes. Do I pull my focus into the movements of their feet, and try to feel how they hold the balance of their body? Do I tap into the languidity of their movements and the associated emotions? And what about the people who are following me? How do they influence me and my path through the space? How does the enthusiasm of a following encourage my own exploration and risk taking? If I pay attention to someone’s hands, can I feel how they feel? How can we hold all of it at once? Relaxing attention is equally important as concentrating it.

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This statement marks a shift in our orientation. While the values we describe have been an undercurrent of our work, they’ve drifted in and out of our awareness alongside other, sometimes contradictory, currents. Through writing this statement we attempt to swim in this one more faithfully:

Some strains of Buddhism and psychoanalysis meet in an anti-capitalist critique pushing us to look at the nature of desire as an endless self-perpetuating cycle of attainment and loss. The marketing for a product explicitly or implicitly says something like, “if you buy this product it will relieve your suffering.” These promises fail to disclose the truth about desire, at best, providing bandaids, or temporary resting places along a journey. At worst, their marketing and our participation in the fiction of fulfillment perpetuates even deeper and more prolonged suffering.

We aspire to consciously uncouple from the logic of commodity in what we offer at DPI. We attempt to disclose the truth regarding desire itself: that it endlessly perpetuates, and that no material or immaterial substance given to our psyche will ever truly nourish us; we are hungry and insatiable.

Through this orientation, where commodity acquisition offers transcendence, we attempt to offer immanence. Like monotheism’s vision of the afterlife as a relief from the present, capitalist consumption dangles a more pleasant future just ahead. We design structures and rituals to sanctify the mess of the now.

Even as we attempt rigor in this regard, we constantly fall into traps of desire. It is endlessly tempting to read salvation into our offer to sanctify the messes of the present. As facilitators we too want to be saved from suffering, and we unknowingly bake that longing into our offerings and affects. The same unfortunate situation occurs within both Buddhist and psychoanalytic traditions, where students encounter the truth of each system as a salvific balm.

Our task then is to keep insisting that we will not heal you. That you are always broken. And that playing with your brokenness, our primary task, will ultimately fail as well. And that, as Pema Chödrön insists, real bravery is not about holding on to hope, but about allowing ourselves to touch hopelessness directly. That when we lean into our groundlessness, rather than scrambling to escape it, we discover a deeper kind of courage — the willingness to rest in the unknown. Can we hold that immeasurable loss? Can we at least touch this loss together? Can we play with it not by only offering lightness and buoyancy to it, but also by merely sitting with each other with our shrunken, bated breaths, as we encounter aloneness together? That is the kind of deep play we aspire to offer.

We, the leadership and facilitators of The Deep Play Institute, want to speak to what it means for us to hold authority in our programs. We want to acknowledge the lineages of what we are offering, as well as our ignorance of many of the branches of those influences. In this acknowledgment, we borrow heavily from the language of Hana Van Der Kolk in their facilitation of somatic practices. The methods we offer are only in small part influenced by our own creativity—they derive from a complex interweaving of teachings and teachers, who themselves are complex interweavings of teachings and teachers. We will name these teachers, lineages, and influences wherever we are aware of them. However, as Hana writes: “We recognize that colonization, white supremacy, and globalization have erased some of the clarity of influence. We will do our best to unforget in the context of a culture that actively produces ignorance.”

At DPI we see it as our responsibility to explore barriers to play—to explore the question of: “What makes play hard?” We work this question into the structure of our play so that we don’t miss out on the wisdom that’s offered by participants of various social identities, legacies, and landscapes of ability. People of different races, classes, ethnicities, ages, neurodivergences, sexual orientations, abilities, and genders may find particular play with particular people and leaders challenging in ways that reflect the impacts of their intersecting identities. Rather than orient toward these hardnesses as obstructions, we work to see them as opportunities to play more deeply and reverentially with one another’s perceptual gifts. The play becomes magical, political, and deeply experimental as it continually welcomes friction as an impetus for creativity.

We recognize that people from marginalized groups—whether due to visible or invisible identities such as race, age, ability, or disability—often carry a heavier burden in shared spaces, including our play spaces. For someone with relative privilege, it might feel brave to say something like, “I feel shy” or “I’m struggling to speak up.” For someone from a marginalized identity, however, speaking a simple truth—such as acknowledging the discomfort of being the only visibly disabled person in the room—might feel profoundly vulnerable—in large part because they might reasonably expect the dominant group to struggle to gracefully receive this. The challenges and tensions in these spaces are not evenly distributed, and there can be an illusion of equality when everyone is invited to “speak hard truths.” At DPI we are committed to exploring ways to reduce and cope with this inequity. We also believe profound creativity and resilience can emerge when people play with these tensions, and discomfort can be redistributed in ways that are meaningful and liberatory for all involved.

When friction arises during our workshops, we observe it through the lens of the inequities and dynamics we’ve described. In these moments, we improvise to understand the unfolding group process and learn from the experience rather than rigidly follow our original plans. This is much easier said than done, however, and we recognize that as facilitators, our various privileges and limitations can impair our skillfulness in navigating how to responsibly and reverentially hold authority. Sometimes, our own shame, resistance, and avoidance prevent us from seeing, let alone playfully encountering, these frictions. We see these moments as some of our most profound opportunities for growth and seek feedback throughout our programs to that end. We hope for your grace and patience as we continue to refine our practice.​