Why Standing?
Steve Paxton talks about how the Stand relates to stage fright and entrainment in Contact Improvisation
edited by Karen Nelson
Originally published on Contact Quarterly, this Chinese version was translated by Yin Haolong
“I think that we are doomed to have to look at what we do. And we’re less [doomed] if we can look at it long enough to be able to derive interesting material out of it. So, stand around.” [S.P. from raw transcript] Photo of Steve Paxton during the first talk at Breitenbush Jam, Oregon, 2014.
“我认为我们都被诅咒了，注定要注视我们自己在干什么。如果我们可以注视足够长的时间而从中生成出一些有趣的元素的话，或许那个（诅咒）会变小一点。那么，就站久一点吧。” 【节录自史蒂夫·帕克斯顿的口述】照片里的是史蒂夫·帕克斯顿在2014 年在俄勒冈州的 Breitenbush 舞酱中给的第一个讲座。
我认为如果我们不得不去观看我们在做的事情，我们注定是进入一个走头无路的死胡同。但如果我们能够看久一些，并从中找到一些有意思的材料，这条路可能会带我们去到什么地方。所以，我建议大家多多练习站立。
第一讲
而它需要我们在一系列学习的铺垫下才能理解它是什么。它需要我们懂得怎么跌倒和拥有良好的反射动作。我觉知到我的身体会在空中以各种方式拧转，而且动作可能很高速。我之前练习过的合气道让我有不同的方法跌倒和滾动，而我也会教授這一些。还有关于反射动作的研究和它们的训练方法。反射动作就如同其他行为一样可以成为习惯，而且它们可以被训练成在不同环境下都能切合我们需要的模样。
There was a time when Contact Improvisation was not even really imaginable.
在过去的某一时候，接触即兴这一想法是难以想象的。
And there were a number of things that it needed to learn before we knew what it was. It needed the ability to fall and good reflexes. I recognized that the body was going to be twisting in space in various ways, maybe pretty fast. I had done Aikido, so I had a lot of information about falling and rolling, which I taught. Also about reflexes and how they could be trained, the idea that a reflex is as habitual as other things are, and you can find a way to bend them to the needs that you have.
在我们知道接触即兴是什么之前，我们需要学习很多的东西作为铺垫。它需要我们跌落的技巧，以及运作良好的反射机制。我认识到身体将以不同的方式在空间中扭转。我有合气道的练习经验，我通过合气道学会了很多关于跌落和翻滚的技巧，我在接触即兴教学中使用了这些我学到的东西。同时我也谈论身体的条件反射，我们可以如何训练它，条件反射其实和其他事物一样，充满了习惯性，但你可以找到一个方法去根据你的需要来改变这个习惯。
I was a performing dancer, so it never occurred to me that we wouldn’t perform, and that brought up the idea of stage fright. You can have a couple of people who are dynamite dancers together and put them onstage in front of an audience and it all falls apart. Everything that makes them excellent to watch turns drab and self-conscious. They try too hard; they do predictable things. In other words, the improvisation slowly but surely turns into a kind of make-believe of improvisation. I felt one thing that might possibly go wrong would be if something became unsafe because of how they changed in front of an audience.
我是一名从事表演的舞者，所以我一直认为我们会上台演出，这让我想到了怯场这个话题。 你可以把几个很棒的舞者放在一起，把他们放在观众面前的舞台上，突然一切都分崩离析。 一切让他们看起来很棒的东西都突然变得单调，并充满自我意识。 他们太努力了； 他们做可以预见的事情。 换句话说，即兴缓慢但确定地变成了一种即兴的假象。 我觉得可能会出错的一件事是，如果某些事情因为它们在观众面前的变化而变得不安全。
The worst of stage fright is a kind of paralysis. If they were going to perform, how could we prepare? And if this form got as active as it seemed possible it was going to get, the reflexes had to be there to deal with twisting and turning in space. And so, standing seemed to be the answer.
舞台上怯场最糟糕的一种情况是完全不知所措。如果我们要上台演出接触即兴，我们可以如何准备？如果接触即兴如同其展示出的可能性一样充满动态，那我们的反射机制需要时刻准备好，来应对身体在空间中的扭曲和旋转。站立似乎是对这个问题的回应。
Standing because it’s at the opposite extreme of the high activity; it’s unique instead of duet; it’s an incredibly human thing to do. It’s one of our basic archetypical events. Standing because it’s a chance to observe systems in the body.
我们站立，因为这是高度活跃的运动相反的对立面，相比双人舞这是一个人进行，而且是一个人类非常常见的行为。站立是我们最基本的日常行动之一。我们在站立中可以观察身体内的系统。
What is happening in standing is that you are looking at your reflexes hold you up. The standing is meant to be done in a very relaxed way, with the knees a little bit bent. You are not holding tight anywhere. Letting gravity take the limbs down, you are letting the spine rise against gravity. And then you just hang out there and you start to feel the event that is holding you upright, that is keeping you from falling.
在站立中所发生的事情是，你在观看你身体的调价反射机制如何在保持你直立的体态。站立应该是非常放松的，膝盖稍微弯曲。身体中没有任何地方出现僵硬和紧张。我们让重力带领我们的四肢向下，同时让脊柱对抗重力往上伸长。你只是待在这个状态中，你开始感受到所有保持你身体直立所发生的一切，这些东西让你没有跌落。
And it seems to be going at quite a rate. The speed of thinking for and in the body could be trained to that speed, which is the speed of the body supporting itself. As one
of the fastest events that we can watch in ourselves, it’s not very fast. In terms of our movement making, there are events happening a couple of milliseconds long, so incredibly fast that thousands of them can happen before we get around to making the movement. But that’s not anything the consciousness can really find access to.
What we have is the senses and the really ordinary stuff— breath, the heartbeat and pulse. In the standing, we have the reflexes as easily observable events that the consciousness is not causing and can take a moment to wonder at.
所有一切都发生得很快，对身体产生思考的速度可以被训练，以便能跟上这个速度，这是身体支持自我的反应速度。这是我们可以在我们自身身体上观察到的速度最快的活动之一，它其实没有那么快。我们的运动由一系列耗时只有几毫秒长的事件所组成，这些事件发生得如此之快，以至于我们开始执行我们的运动之前，数以千计的事件已经发生了。但对于这些事件，我们的意识没有办法捕捉到。我们的意识可以观察到的是感受，以及很普通的东西，呼吸，心跳，以及脉搏。在站立中，条件反射事件的发生变得更容易被意识所观察，并有时间可以去探索。
The standing is happening all over the body, so you get a full body event that you are watching, and one that you are not seeking; it is just happening. You have a thing to focus the mind on.
站立是一个全身参与的活动，你所观察的是一个整个身体都包括在内的活动，这个活动不是你找寻的，而是自然而然发生的。你的意识有一个可以关注的点。
I saw some dancing this morning that was really more complex than anything I could have imagined in ’72.
我上午看到一些舞蹈，这比我在1972年开始接触即兴的时候可以想象的要复杂得多。
I was seeing moments that looked as though the senses can’t possibly be in charge of what’s happening, and the consciousness seems not to be in charge. It’s very amazing. It’s not surprising when I see work like that to know that in its viral way it has kind of spread around the world.
我观看到某些时刻，好像感官不可能在领导当下发生的事件，意识似乎也没有在起作用。一切都很神奇，当我看到这个场景的时候，我对于接触即兴如何在全世界广泛传播的方式并不感到太多的吃惊。
I think if anything of it would get lost, it’s the stand.
如果我们忘了什么练习的话，那可能是站立。
The seeking for the tiniest unit of time the consciousness can follow would stop. In the duet form, when you attune together, not with any ambition to get the dance started but really taking a moment to just connect—20 minutes has always seemed to me a decent amount of time—there could be a dance of such feathery lightness and such absolute security, absolutely beautiful.
意识可以追踪的最小的时间单位，我们对此的探寻可能会停止。在双人舞中，当两个舞者彼此协调配合，他们没有野心在找寻舞蹈开始的动机，而只是花时间来找到连接——对我来说20分钟是这个过程大概需要的时间——舞蹈可以呈现出如此的羽毛般轻盈的质感，如此的完美的交托与信任，以及如此的美丽。
Talk 2
Maybe one reason Contact Improvisation wasn’t imaginable is because it’s hard to imagine what an improvisation might be before you do it.
我所说的接触即兴很难去想象的一个原因是，如果我们从来没有尝试过，我们很难想象即兴可能是什么。
I had passed through it with some of my improvising friends. I could just feel through the skin, This is something that I don’t do in my life.
我和一些喜欢即兴的朋友们一起探索和教学。我能够通过我的皮肤感受到这些东西。这是我在生活中并不会做的事情。
I felt that the exercises had to somehow present to the students the final form that we would have before we knew what the form was. The dancing head-to-head exercise is a kind of conceptual version of it. You stand there until you feel the other person’s small dance. You are trying to entrain with his or her reflexes.
在教学中，我感到我需要找到一些练习，在即使我们并不知道这个形式是什么的情况下，让学生能够感受到我们在找寻的最终形式是什么。头对头的舞蹈练习是其中的一个版本。你只需要站在那里感受对方的小舞蹈。你试图顺应他或她的条件反射。
Tom Giebink: You talked about the third thing...
Tom Giebink：你谈论到了第三个主体
Steve: If you’re following each other’s small dance, the third thing will arise.
当你追随彼此的小舞蹈时，第三个主体会出现。
Does that make sense? In those days, nobody had ever been hurt by Contact Improvisation at all, and I was really worried about how far we could trust ourselves. At dinner, Linda [Hunnicutt] said something about the prey and the predator. That struck me as an incredible thing to say about performance because predators stare at their prey. The gaze of the cheetah at the antelope is an incredible fixation, or the cat for the mouse. And the gaze of the audience at the dancer is also a similar situation. I think it’s really important for the dancer not to act like prey when performing, because I think it will draw out the predator in the human being.
你能明白其中的含义吗？ 在那些日子里，没有人在接触即兴中受伤，我真的很担心我们能相信自己到什么程度。 晚餐时，Linda [Hunnicutt] 谈到了猎物和捕食者。这个关于表演的说法我很喜欢，因为掠食者盯着他们的猎物。 猎豹对羚羊的凝视是一种令人难以置信的凝视，或者是猫对老鼠的凝视。 而观众对舞者的注视也是类似的情况。 我认为舞者在表演时不要表现得像猎物真的很重要，因为我认为这会引出人类的捕食者一面。
The thing about the falsification when you perform did strike me as potentially dangerous—striving for effect, not going with the flow in the way that you do in warming up, where you are really going for the sensation. You don’t even consider that somebody is watching or not. I think it’s a chemical change when you go onstage. You can’t avoid it, and so I think it must be acknowledged. If I call this a performance instead of a talk, I think it might change my state.
你在表演中的伪造确实让我觉得有潜在的危险——追求效果，而不是像热身时那样跟随自然的流动，你真正地跟随你自己的感觉，你甚至不去考虑是否有人在观看。我认为当你上台时，身体发生了某些化学变化。你无法避免它，所以我认为必须承认它。 如果我称之为表演，而不是演讲，我认为它可能会改变我的状态。
Ping-Pong is a good example. As the skill increases, it turns into this very fast, skillful game, in which every detail of the paddle and its movement is critical. You’ve entrained the potential and the physics of the situation so that the whole thing could go at a blinding speed. In standing, you are there, and however fast your mind can go is what you will perceive of yourself standing, of the reflexes.
乒乓球是一个很好的例子。 随着技能的提高，它变成了这种非常快速、熟练的游戏，其中球板的每一个细节及其动作都是至关重要的。 你已经掌握了当下情景的潜力和物理特性，因此整个事情可以以令人眼花缭乱的速度进行。 在站立时，你就在那里，无论你的心智能运转多快，你都会感知到自己的站立和反射。
Your mind starts to pick up faster and faster aspects of it, because there is a lot of sensation going at a very high speed to hold you up. There are a lot of tiny little corrections so that you don’t go off balance. You start to pick up the subtleties and it becomes more nuanced and you get faster at perceiving and understanding what’s going on.
你的心智开始越来越快地意识到它的各个方面，因为有很多感觉以非常快的速度在支撑你。有很多微小的修正，这样你就不会失去平衡。你开始发现细微之处，它变得更加细微，你可以更快地感知和理解正在发生的事情。
Looking at something so fast and yet so safe, training your brain to look for that level of your movement. The big movements of Contact are far slower than the movements of standing.
观察如此快速又如此安全的运动，训练你的大脑找寻这样水平的运动。接触即兴中的大动作远慢于站立的动作。
Alito Alessi: Dorothee [Daester] and Mark [Young] yesterday got dancing so fast that she took off like a helicopter from his shoulders. And then he dove under her, to save her from crashing on the floor.
Alito Alessi：Dorothee [Daester] 和 Mark [Young] 昨天跳舞跳得太快了，她像直升机一样从他的肩膀上起飞。 然后他俯冲到她身下，以避免让她直接摔倒在地板上。
Steve: Ahhh, wish I’d seen that. Were you aware?
史蒂夫：啊，真希望我能看到那个。 Dorothee和Mark你们对此知晓吗？
Dorothee: I remember I was aware that we kind of went the normal speed but then it just went faster, and I was like, okay let’s go, and then it went fast and then I went on the floor.
Dorothee：我记得我的意识在维持一个正常速度，但后来这个速度变快了，我想，好吧，我们试一试，然后速度变得更快，然后我就倒在了地板上。
Mark: I was aware of losing control when she left, but then what to do, like slow down the fall...but neither of us got a bruise.
马克：当她离开我的肩膀时，我意识到一切有些失去控制，但接下来该怎么办，比如放慢下落的速度……但我们俩都没有瘀伤。
Steve: Tom talked about leaning into the fall in skiing, and into the Aikido roll, where you are arcing into gravity; if you can stay with the energy as it evolves into whatever happens between you two, then amazing things happen. You don’t get a bruise.
史蒂夫：汤姆谈到了滑雪时跌倒时的顺势，以及运用合气道翻滚，在那里你在一个顺应重力的弧形中；当能量演变成你们两个之间发生的任何事情时，如果你能够保持觉知这个能量，那么就会发生惊人的事情。你并没有瘀伤。
Tom: It was really quite extraordinarily beautiful to watch from where I saw it.
Dorothee: Yah, I never felt uncontrolled or unsafe. I was not conscious of the down into the floor.
汤姆：这真是一件奇妙的事情，从我的观看角度，这非常的美。
多萝西：是的，我从来没有感到不受控制或不安全。 我没有意识到掉到地板上。
Steve: Well, thank you for surviving
Anyway, that’s why standing—because of staying, riding those tiny little moments. And I don’t know if it works or not. I mean, I am not saying that this is a one-to-one relationship with Dorothee and Mark surviving what happened. But that’s what it was intended for. That’s what I hoped would happen. It’s almost like, why do we meditate? There is so much to do, how dare we take time to just sit. It’s about the extremes of experience.
谢谢你自己存活了下来，无论如何，这就是为什么要练习站立——因为站立，在那些微小的时刻上感受。 而且我不知道这个练习是否有效果。 我的意思是，我并不是说这是与 Dorothee 和 Mark 幸存发生的事情的一对一关系。但这就是它的目的。这就是我希望发生的事情。 这几乎就像，我们为什么要冥想？ 有很多事情要做，我们怎么敢花时间只是坐着。 这是关于体验的极端。