Post 3: Stray thoughts from Ambient Jam

photos: Rebecca Swift

Ambient

1 : an encompassing atmosphere 

2.:an aspect of the environment that completely surrounds you

Jam: something that feeds all the senses.

My first taste of Ambient Jam. The session set up in 1990 for people with profound and complex disabilities.  A place to come and dance, move, and be moved.  12 participants, up to 7 facilitators and 2 musicians in the room. 90 minutes of jam.

Stiff and sore from a virus, my injuries accompanying me from a thousand miles away, I wonder if my body can move. I know that is beside the point and head in anyway. 

The Red Room is a smallish wedge in the building’s corner. Charles, the musician,  is set up against one long wall. Over the next 90 minutes, he and Jai establish a net of sound that stretches, illuminates, and bounces back and through eh relationships between and amongst participants.

Several participants are in wheelchairs, or wooden chairs; several more on the mat on the floor.  Charles plays his drum; he and Jai are already humming and clipping and calling sounds into the space. Others are hovering.  I spin into soft-time.

The room seems full of compositions working to come together. J. is rocking, chewing her knuckles, sometimes squawking;  from his chair, P. seems to be watching the space with his ears. Charlene and L.'s  feet  pair together. Gill and Ch. sit back to back, meeting spine to spine. I move to P; he subtly withdraws. On the floor, I connect with C, palm to palm. We remain in dialogue, or perhaps a cheiro-logue, for the next hour.

C., on the floor, listens intently to the music of the room. When its rhythms shift, her wrists bend differently. She hears the room-music through her hands;  her node of connection from this place is extremely complex. She sways from side to side, and every 9^th-12^th beat of a 4-phrase unit, she spins a complete clockwise turn on the floor.  I whistle her spins. Every fourth stanza her spine becomes a rocking chair.

And then she wants me to help her stand, to lift her from the floor. No break in contact between our hands. Still attached, she charges to each wall of the room, squaring the circuit, like Renaissance (wo)man. It seems that whenever she has fallen into a deepest well of experience, she charges out to find her anchor in the room. One, two, three walls. Then she returns to the centre, and we begin again.

There is a freshness here, throughout this hour. Although rhythmic, it is a timeless hour. Initially, I wondered if I was being led, being subservient, but once I allow my own throat to open, to sing, crack, thrum and roam, I decide that this has not been so.

Only during the facilitators’ debriefing afterwards, do I learn that C. is both profoundly deaf and blind. I truly had no idea—nor had any idea how old she is. I experienced her as articulate, vibrant, sensate, responsive, directing, and well able to receive. I particularly note that when she wanted to climb, then roll down the mat ‘hill’, my strength was too limited to help her achieve this. After expressing her strong desire to climb and roll, I noticed that she accepted my limitations, and we moved on, embracing another aspect of the room’s ambience. 

Other days are more complex, when participants' moods or experiences--the heat of the day, some event, some other agitation---renders things more difficult. We can never know exactly what is tripped or triggered, what is remembered.  So we can't hide behind their stories; compensations and dispensations don't work here.  

Keep listening.

Zsuzsi, June 9 2015.

c. Z Soboslay 2015.