Jesuit In Mubai On Breathing And Dancing

Let your inner child have a free run
24 Nov 2008,
By Joeanna Rebello, TNN

MUMBAI: You walk into this workshop with your eyes closed. Figuratively, you don't know what to expect; literally, the opening injunction directs you to "Join the circle and close your eyes''. And you do so. "Now walk''. This, you try to do. You're on the rim of a human circle, all spaced evenly at first, until the participants start to circumambulate "slowly, co-ordinating each breath with the forward motion of each foot''. Easy? You think? Tight-walking the road divider, eyes wide shut, would've been easier.

If you don't cheat, prepare either to collide lightly with the person ahead, trip the person behind, or stray out of the circle entirely and embrace the furniture or a wall. Apparently, you can't duplicate blindsight.

But you can trust the wisdom of your body to show you the way to InterPlay. Conceptualised in 1989 by two Americans, Cynthia Winton-Henry and Phil Porter, in Oakland California,

InterPlay is a movement of body and thought that unhinges the being from its learnt history of quotidian convention, and returns it to its original skin through play to resurrect instinct and intuition and let the body decide, and narrate.

The founders write that InterPlay is the ability to hold life both deeply and lightly. Without amusement we lose perspective, buoyancy and flexibility. In short: Yank out that inner child and give her broad latitude to express herself. How long do you think it took the group of adults to doff their inhibitions and do before each other what they wouldn't dare do before a mirror? To simulate, on command, the actions of a bird or a fish; to walk backward, forward, then in a wholly original way; to dance in abandon to music? No time at all.

Well, to have a middle-age priest run you through the motions really helps thaw that intransigent exterior.

Fr. Prashant Olalekar of the Jesuits wasn't himself so pliant at his first InterPlay experience in America in 2004. The gnawing question then, `How can a priest dance?' was superseded by the more troublesome `How can a priest dance with a woman?'

One of the techniques of InterPlay, an areligious concept, requires you to join your palms with another InterPlayer's and dance in synchrony and Fr. Prashant's partner happened to be Winton-Henry. Reservations thwarted, he danced and danced the concept all the way home.

"Dance is a medium for peace,'' Fr. Prashant explains, paying out the corollary that communing with other people somatically helps dissolve isolationism. "We restrict our communication to our intellect, and disparities and conflict can arise from there, but when you interact at the level of the body, you interact as equals.'' And so,

the methods of InterPlay have been recruited across five continents for the edification of industry, education, the arts, healthcare, peace activism and religion. In India, Fr. Prashant plugged the compatible programme of his self-devised `Movement Meditation' (alchemy of mindfulness and yoga) into the mainframe of InterPlay.

The result: Instant relaxation. This could explain the participants' readiness to dance like free radicals.

It has therapeautic virtues as well. "In America, my workshop was frequented by a 90-year-old woman who invariably fell asleep and started snoring when we got into guided relaxation (where the participant reclines on the ground in shavasana),'' Fr. Prashant recounts. "I gently suggested she rest at home if she was so tired, and she replied, `I suffer from insomnia and no treatment has worked so far. The sound of your voice puts me to sleep, and so I come to your workshops for the much-needed rest.' I didn't know whether to be offended or ple- ased,'' says the priest, laughing.

Fr. Prashant has taken Interplay to a slum settlement in Dahisar, the catacombs of Kamathipura, the clergy house of Vasai, a tribal village in south Gujarat, and everywhere the naturalness of this method, its ability to peel off the social straitjacket, and the peace it is capable of brokering among I-Players have won many to this `game'.

He hopes to win more through an intensive 3-day workshop in concert with American InterPlayers, from January 9 to 11, at Atma Darshan, Andheri. And so, the ones who've explored the hitherto undiscovered contours of body wisdom emerge from these sessions and continue to play privately, making animal shapes in the seclusion of their bathrooms or free-dancing before the telly. After all, why should kids have all the fun?

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