Reverse Shadowboxing (Patreon)

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In shadowboxing, you are pretending to beat up an imaginary opponent—the shadow. In this improv game, you are the shadow!

You live in a parallel shadow universe, minding your business, when an invisible force begins attacking you. Whenever someone shadowboxes in our universe, it affects a shadow in the shadow universe. Who knew?!

Since this is meant to be fun and funny, use your imagination and exaggerate your reactions. Maybe you get knocked back like a pro wrestler, flail like a cartoon, or collapse dramatically like a tragic actor. The sillier, the better. You keep falling down, but like a determined underdog, you keep getting back up!

What you're developing in this game is comfort with your body and with new and improvised movements. Being silly is a great way to build comfort, coordination, and physical resilience. Being silly builds safety. Play builds pathways. Comfort is the condition for skill to emerge.

In LMA, we say movement is 90% comfort and 10% skill, and skill grows from that comfort like plants grow from soil. If you're comfortable, dynamically coordinating on the feet and falling on the ground doesn't feel all that unnatural because you're developing the skills to do so naturally. In a matter of minutes, you'll learn to move and take better bumps than someone who's done months of judo. This isn't because of magic; it's because our approach centers your comfort, responsiveness, and environment from the start.

It's unscripted and unrehearsed. You aren't memorizing movements, you're adapting without instruction and making lightning-quick decisions on the fly based on your imagination and the environment. Safe movement always factors in the environment because safety is about fluidly adapting to real conditions. Unsafe and unhealthy movements and decisions are individualistic and do not consider the environment. It assumes you exist and move in a vacuum.

Unscripted movement and improvisational games like this one teach you how to make quick decisions with your environment, not in spite of it. That's LMA's Wayfinding: learning through your environment and game conditions.

How to play:

• If you're solo, your job is to respond to an invisible attacker's strikes. Make it ridiculous. Wrestler? Toddler? Boxer? Surprise yourself.

• If you're with someone, one person can be the shadowboxer, and the other the shadow. The shadowboxer acts, and the shadow responds. The shadowboxer should move slow enough to give the shadow enough time to attune and respond. Make it theatrical. It's not about "correctness." It's about discovery. Either of you can also request moves. It makes it more fun.

When reverse shadowboxing is done with a partner, it becomes a co-regulated, two-person Wayfinding exercise. Your quick decisions and movements are no longer just tied to your imagination and environment, but also to your partner. Attuning to a partner means listening with your body. Your movements are shaped by someone else's movements, pacing, and intention.

Safe movement and decision-making with another requires you to be other-centered rather than self-centered. It's not about guarding your own space. It's about mutual responsiveness and making space for each other. Learning how to move starts with learning how to notice.

Hopefully, this activity, along with others, is a step toward reclaiming your body, your environment, your community, and your joy. Because if oppression teaches us to flinch and freeze, then activities like this can teach us how to fall, laugh, and rise again.

Theory

Reclaiming isn't automatic; it's a choice—an action, not a reward. The problem is, so much of what we do is automatic. Self-determination means determining an alternative to the automatic. First is noticing the alternative, but even if you notice a different way to do things, it doesn't mean you can determine that option for yourself or actualize it.

We can't assume autonomy, especially as movers, because we've already been robbed of it. So much so, our bodies and movements feel distant and foreign. Thinking about political concepts of autonomy and how they apply to movement feels alien and unknown. That's our current state.

In movement, comfort and autonomy are synonymous. We must foster both so people can self-determine and take control (have bodily autonomy) over their movements. The more we can self-determine precision, the more we recognize this as skill. Skill is not an absolute but contextual to each person, environment, community, and culture.

– Sam