Rules of the Dance
By Brendan Campbell
It’s been just about a week since I arrived at Zumwalt Acres. In that short week, I’ve come to experience and learn an astonishing number of things: how to be social again after spending months in isolation, how basalt rock weathering works, how to drive a backhoe, how to observe Shabbat. But one new experience stands out to me as most representative of what life at Zumwalt has been like so far. You guessed it: improvisational dance.
Since I arrived with the rest of the spring cohort, we have begun almost every morning with 45 minutes of movement, guided by our resident dance gurus Remi and Gavi. It starts slowly; you’re barely awake, and the music is mellow. You begin to tune deeper into your body: your blood, your muscles, your bones. But over the course of 45 minutes, the music gets faster and faster, your heart beats harder and harder, until - suddenly - you realize: you’ve totally let go. If you were to drive by on a random weekday morning, you’d witness 8 college-age adults - faces ablaze with smiles - flailing in the morning Illinois sun like some maniacal cult.
It’s ecstatic, this catharsis. It’s as if the music plays your body like an instrument. It’s as if you’re being shaken by a giant, like being a puppet attached to the playful hand of God. But crafting a space where it feels good to dance so freely doesn’t just happen spontaneously; it requires intention. There are rules - five of them in fact - and it’s these five rules that have come to not just guide our morning ritual; they’ve also come to guide how we conduct ourselves as we build this intentional community.
Rule One: Keep Going
When you get tired while dancing, keep going. When you get tired from a day of planting, keep going. When you’re succeeding, when you’re finding your groove, keep going further. Encourage each other to do the same: to keep going, to dream even bigger, to groove harder. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or put together, but the very act of persisting - whether for 45 minutes of continuous dance or in doing meticulous research on the farm - is what makes all the difference.
Rule Two: Listen
Listen to the music. Listen to your body. Listen to that voice inside telling you to go for it. Listen to each other, listen when someone expresses a boundary. Listen to and learn from people who know more than you. True and deep listening - however - is not simply the act of paying attention. It also requires crafting spaces where people feel ready to express things that need to be heard. Whether it’s an intentional 45 minutes of dance or a weekly conversation about our grievances, we’ve come to find that listening requires setting aside time for silence, time to let the important sounds cut through the noise.
Rule Three: Suspend Judgement
Unless you have incredibly thick skin, it’s almost impossible to dance freely in front of a group of people you think might be judging you. But it’s astonishing just how expressive people can become - with their bodies and their ideas - when you as a group choose to suspend judgment. It allows you to ask ‘dumb questions’, questions like how is the soil we’re making different than normal soil? What is Pesach? When should I water the plants? You can’t learn when you’re afraid; it’s like pollution in the soil. Suspending judgment allows others to feel welcome to try new things, make mistakes more freely, and grow.
Rule Four: Remember
It’s easy to lose sight of guiding principles and goals, those things that inspire. Remembering keeps you on track. It keeps you motivated. When you remember that you’re fighting climate change by researching new carbon sequestration methods, you feel a bit less miffed about taking pH samples for hours on end. When you remember your best friends or moments when you did something you’re proud of, you prioritize gratitude. You dance more joyously, you take soil samples with purpose, you stay grounded. Whenever you feel defeated, unsure, or unmotivated, sometimes the most helpful thing someone can do is bring out the homing device of: “remember why we’re here”.
Rule Five: Do it with love!
This one is self-explanatory, but it’s crucial to codify. Do it with love! Love how your body feels as you get possessed by the music. Love that the people around you are joining in on the fun. Love and respect the land you’re working on. Love each other as you face interpersonal and farm-related challenges. It’s a simple rule, but it’s a good one. It’s hard to argue with the logic that doing things with love means doing things better.
I’m astonished by how much I’ve come to adore our morning dance routine. I’m even more astonished by how much I’ve already come to love this work, this place, and this community. As we embark on this chaotic dance that is the multifaceted work of Zumwalt Acres, I have unlimited faith in how we will evolve. We are planting seeds in the most fertile soil, the soil of our own creation. I can’t wait to watch them grow.
The rules of this improvisational dance technique (MoPeD) were created by Remi and Gavi’s former dance teacher and mentor, Ronn Stewart.
