On awakening imagination with the biological awareness practice of Continuum from Continuum teacher, dancer & visual artist Mary Abrams.

Mary Abrams on Continuum & Creativity from Watermark Arts from Watermark Arts on Vimeo.

Continuum & Creativity interview with Mary Abrams (video transcript):

I feel that Continuum has really enlivened me in a sense as a living art of being human. Just the activity of the human body, doing whatever the life process does, the human body is an incredibly creative and complex event. [There are] things going on that we really only have a minor understanding of. And so a lot of our creative capacity is untapped, mostly because we start doing the same familiar things over and over again for, you know, good reasons often. And yet the more we stay with the familiar, the more we limit ourselves.

I’ve said this a number of times when teaching classes, that one of the things that surprised me about Continuum is that I feel like it changed my imagination. Things that I could not imagine in the past are now available to me, as far as actual images. [This] to me means that there’s things in the potent space of my imagination that I don’t see yet but which are even that much more available. So I feel like my imagination has grown a lot.

One of the key moments for me was when I took my first workshop in Continuum. I’ll never forget Emilie demonstrating the primordial breath. This was probably the first thing I saw her demonstrate, and everything about her transformed in the moment of one exhale, or the moments of one exhale. And as a dancer/performer, and what I had been focusing on in my life at that time, everything inside of me said, that’s it. This is exactly what I am interested in, what I’m all about , and what I’ve been wondering: how is this possible to just be instantly transformed in the moment of the creative process? And she demonstrated that in one breath with the primordial breath. I have never forgotten that moment and it still continues to inspire me. I feel like that’s one of the clearest examples of the potency of Continuum and creativity.