Whirlpool (Patreon)

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

This game will stretch your imagination and your body. Imagine you're at the bottom of the ocean, pulled into a whirlpool, sucked down toward the sea floor.

Swirling, sinking, collapsing

You're not falling—you're being spun and drawn downward. You're being sucked straight down onto your back. There's no crash landing here. Water is buoyant and delays your descent. Feel yourself pulled into spirals, tipped off balance, softening into the ground.

Extend the fall. Tumble, fold, stumble, topple, collapse—but quietly. Try to land without a sound.

Bubbles

Now, imagine bubbles. They emerge around you and interfere with your balance. A bubble lifts your foot. Another binds your knees.

Let these bubbles shape your movement and fall. Yield to them. See what they make possible or impossible.

Complex bubbles

Now, the bubbles are splitting and merging. One lifts your leg up, only to come back down to merge with another bubble to seal your knees together.

Now imagine the inverse, your knees are bound together, and then the bubble splits, lifting one leg up as you drift down onto the sea floor.

You're suspended in a fluid world of change. Move through it. Respond. Drift.

Note for organizers

Practitioners with a background in martial arts may default to loud slap-outs and hard landings. It's been drilled into them. Invite them to explore other, softer ground contacts and to develop more than one way to be safe.

Diversity is redundancy, and redundancy is safety. Buildings have multiple exits, which is redundant but safer. One exit becomes a dangerous bottleneck. If it fails, the whole system fails.

What has been conditioned into martial artists is often rigid, aggressive, non-contextual, and one-size-fits-all. Whirlpool invites context-driven falls that match the material. If you fell inside of water, you wouldn't slam to the ground.

Suddenly stopping is dangerous. This is why cars are built with crumple zones and have airbags—to slow you down before you come to a complete stop. That's literally what water does; when you fall into the water, it slows you down.

What's being explored is falling like you're in water. Don't just be like water, be in water. Develop soft falls and collapses where you're extending the contact time and duration.

Try this: ask practitioners to explore ways of landing that extend time before stopping. What if not stopping was part of the fall? What if movement didn't end when they hit the ground?

The way people have been taught to engage with movement is as a copy machine. That's easiest for the teacher but the worst for the learner. The easiest way to get people to memorize things is to reduce the number of things to memorize. How do you reduce the number of things to memorize? By making things absolute for all contexts.

Memorizing something is not learning something. People can memorize a slap-out by spending months drilling it, but they often have little to no understanding of concepts such as gravity, momentum, falling, the context of surfaces, whether they are falling alone or in tandem, and various other considerations. They memorized slap-outs but didn't learn falling—as a concept and an art. This colonial and Western approach reduces safety and treats the learner as incapable. Therefore, their method is about putting something into you. LMA, instead, draws something out of you since practitioners are capable learners.

LMA practitioners are movement explorers, not copy machines.

– Sam