Alphabet charts the process of the “Words and Waves” Continuum and creative writing workshops led by Rebecca Mark and Emma Destrubé. It is a window into their unique, expressive worlds, and into their devoted exploration of how Continuum can cue the creative process.

Words and Waves is an extraordinary generative and expressive process.  Cued by specific Continuum breaths, sounds, and movements, the imagination travels through the tissues of the body to show itself on the page in lines, symbols, drawings, words, themes, and stories.  The tone of the sound and movement etches into you and shapes what comes forward.  The landscape is vast and free: sharply changing perspectives, characters, references, or frames of time. Entering these landscapes is much like the somatic practices of entering ourselves. As we follow the movements of the pen in hand, a poetic coherence emerges from a place somewhere between the heart and the imagination, between a deep knowing and not knowing.

Hanna Heiting’s docu-poem, Alphabet, follows Words and Waves co-founder Rebecca Mark and instructor Emma Destrubé as they mine mysterious, imaginary realms from their own breath and movement explorations, offer commentary on each other’s work and articulate the processes of their own creations. The results are poetic, self-revealing, and often humorous. Both Rebecca and Emma are original creative artists and together, they provide meaningful and compassionate guidance for others. It is clear as you watch the film that Heiting’s own participation in documenting and shaping the film creates layering and involution of another creative process on top of and with what is happening in the room.

Words and Waves is truly a unique art form that holds great appeal and enhancement for writers, visual artists, Continuum lovers, and somatic practitioners, as well as for explorers of realms of consciousness and self-discovery. Personally, as a writer, I thrill in the open creativity. As a Continuum teacher and practitioner, it’s sheer joy to revel in the artistic expression of somatic movement that often remains in the movement realm, and is savored for its own sake. This is a playful process by which language, itself, is allowed the freedom to explore all the ways it wants to express, leading to some surprising depths and delights.

Sharon Weil, Continuum teacher, author, speaker