Invisible Tag (Patreon)

• LMA Curriculum

Adaptive movement skills are about variability and perception. This game builds off the previous adaptive games, but this time you are facing your invisible opponent. Don't worry about maintaining a fighting stance.

You can do this in an open space, or for added difficulty, in an enclosed space, or as I'm showing, an enclosed space with obstacles.

You want to maintain social distance from your invisible opponent. They are still slow-moving, but this time rather than only evading, try to consistently keep social distance. So when they back up, follow them. When they come to you, move away. Imagine there's a chord binding you, don't let the chord snap or go slack.

Before you begin, walk around your space to take the space in. Build a mental map. Even use acoustics to orient. Then start the game. The more you play, the more you'll develop your perception and movement skills.

The conditions of social distance and facing your opponent will automatically develop your footwork. You already have the scaffolding from the previous footwork units. Now you can adapt them.

One tip, avoid crossing your feet, or you can fall. It's one lesson you don't want to learn from trial and error.

The condition of moving within an enclosed space will develop your dormant perception skills. You don't need to look at an object to know it's nearby. There are other markers you can use. For instance, seeing the rest of the room and other landmarks will help you deduce where you are. Not unlike a sailor or pathfinder, you're using your surroundings to orient yourself. You don't need to see the thing to know where it is, you can look at everything else to know where the thing is. You already do this whenever you go home.

Something else you'll learn from this game is how you must go twice as fast to move backward. You have a speed advantage advancing. Going lateral helps you avoid retreating while reorienting yourself.

The skills you develop from this game cannot be taught. Physical knowledge can only come from dwelling in your practice space. The more you dwell, the better your wayfinding. The skills you develop can't all be explained or transmitted, only experienced and embodied. That unexplainable knowledge is called trust. Much of this game is developing that trust in yourself because there's ancient wisdom in you. Embodiment is not just self-knowledge but trust, confidence, and intuition. Capitalist alienation has made us lose faith in ourselves.

This is how our practice is both Taoistic and Marxist. The conditions create the results. So rather than top-down control of the participant, we adjust the conditions, and the participant adapts. You can't learn without adapting; learning itself is an adaptation. Instruction has no physical context and requires memorization rather than adaptation. Memorizing is not learning, memory is not knowledge. Knowledge is transformation. Embodied knowledge becomes the scaffolding (conditions) for the next transformation.

There is no real thing as teaching; you dwell in conditions and embody knowledge. This is LMA pedagogy in a nutshell.

– Sam