We started doing The Movements back as far as our small group, about 35 of us, who met in the carpeted living room in the back of the Glendale Avenue antique shop where we held our meetings, back in 1966 and ’67.
There are no photos of the actual movements classes, but I do have this photo along with a few others, of my friend Diane doing some body movements in the black-painted glass panes at the front of the shop — like I said, an antique shop that had been there for decades, now turned into a bookstore with incenses, candles, yoga gear — that sort of thing.
I also have some shots of another friend, also named Dyan — with a different spelling, same pronunciation — posing at the front of our house on Edgecliffe, where we also practiced movements on a hardwood floor.
The Movements at that time were largely body rhythm patterns concentrating on the hands and arms — a real upper-body workout, it was!
Then we started to incorporate staging, lighting and some choreography into the mix, and in 1968, we began performing the ancient rituals in Fiesta Hall, an 899 seat theater in the middle of Plummer Park.
The whole deal, including lighting, sound tech and all the equipment we could possibly want, came to about $20 per week.
Here’s Group One sewing and fitting the costumes for the performances at Plummer Park. The small office space was literally filled with heaps of costumes and fabrics that had been donated by the Home Silk Shop and other fabric outlets in Los Angeles.
We got full capacity audiences now and then, generally about 300 people showed up without any more advertising than a small notice in the classified section of my friend Art Kunkin’s “Los Angeles Free Press”, for whom I often wrote articles and submitted photos.
As far as the audience we got at Plummer Park — none of us realized then how good those numbers were.
Here’s a vintage shot of Lin Larsen teaching a class at Bluebell in 1972. The Movements were performed outside the building on the 5 acre lawn, and attendance ran at about 75 to 100 people going through that center per hour during the daylight hours and sometimes into the evening.
Processions? Of course we had processions, ranging from Sumerian to Tudor, as you see being performed here.
Here’s a group practicing on the lawn at Plummer Park, right outside the main building, which was “Fiesta Hall”. This activity was filmed by a local television station for broadcast later that day.
Here’s an actual performance in Fiesta Hall at Plummer Park sometime in 1972.
This is another group, in Duncan, British Columbia, on the island. We worked upstairs in the Big Barn above the sauna — yes, sauna. We were really New Age back in the day.
Well, I’ll hunt up some more photos for you next session. Meanwhile, see if you can get to our zoom meetings — I think you can benefit greatly from them.
This past Ishtar Weekend, we started work on The Carve-Out Process, in which you determine your daily routine, then look for loopholes, where you can buy 5 minutes of “Me Time”, meaning Essential Self Work.
It’s not something you can do for yourself — you definitely need help doing it.
There are some tricks to how to go about this, and we’ll be sharing them in the next few workshops.
You can start on any level, and we go over the previous material before moving ahead, so you can’t and won’t be left out.
Be sure to register for ALL the upcoming ZOOM workshops, which will deal with this process in a very practical day-to-day way.
It starts simple — one practice, five minutes per session, once in early morning, and once again in early evening.
If you follow the very simple and easily mastered step-by-step instructions, you will soon have a practical and dependable set of practices that will take you amazingly far.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby