Movement Research: Tension & Flow

Movement: Matt Mulligan and Tom Weksler
Camera and artistic advisory: Roser Tutusaus
Graphics: Tom Kariv
Filmed at: Penpynfarch Studio, Carmarthenshire, Wales
Music: Feathered Sun - Welcome Woodi

The space between Tension and Flow,
Our definitions:

Tension:
The quality of anticipation towards an impact, meeting or an event
A focused move towards a specific point or objective
Flow:
Putting trust in forces greater than ourselves
Allowing the interaction between movement and space in which it occurs

Tom: What kind of sensation and quality can emerge from keeping an aim while letting go and allow gravity and momentum to do their own thing?
Is it possible to accept that once we know where are we going any way will do?
How do you even drill and practice this quality?
Funny enough, it seems that all of those questions stayed unresolved and that any attempt to describe an answer is limiting the experience we went through to the intellectuall level and taking away the emotional and the sensual.
And after trying to put order in these ideas and fields of information, we actually realozed that what we enjoyed the most, is the feeling of emptiness, which followed all the intensity of drilling and training without a standard of result.

Matt: The relationship between tension and flow is a dynamic conversation between 'letting happen' and 'making happen'.
Drills and practice create a familiarity which ultimately allows a sense of space to emerge. Through work, we allow emptiness.
The practice becomes meditative as the line between tension and flow, effort and effortlessness, becomes increasingly blurred. Not because the polarities lose their definition, but because we paradoxically become more familiar with each at the same time. Each polarity of tension and flow becomes more defined, and we capitalise on the interplay between them.
It becomes possible to sense that it is the tension between these polarities that is the space in which all action, all movement takes place.
This is not a new insight, and there is no single cover-all answer to the question 'what is the right way to practice', but the asking of this question each time on a case-by-case basis allows a useful sense of attention.