Turning While the Dragon Serves Tea: Exercise & Elegance

It really goes without saying at our study group that the Dragon Serves Tea is among everyone's favorite exercises. There's a certain elegance to the movements and also a wonderful feeling in the long and slow moving stretch that the exercise produces. It's a very dynamic exercise--lots turning, shifting and energetic motion, even when done excruciatingly slow.

I remember how our study group leader just told us after learning the exercise on the right side that it was our homework to teach ourselves to do it on the left. This was not easy. But after some back and forth between the learned side and the unlearned side, it all began to make some sense. At any rate, there is just something about the dragon serves tea--it's dynamic quality or it's elegance--that I really enjoy.

One other piece I like about the exercise--it actually that there is a story behind it. That little story about the body guard who began as a waiter. It's such a humble occupation, one of an ordinary person in an ordinary kind of job who has made body movement into an art form of hands and feet. I like the story of how he could move effortlessly though the crowd without spilling a drop, and how this seemingly small humble task was recognized by some emporer or chief, who saw its potential.

Recently in class, we have been working hard on our turns, "ba turns". Getting the footwork and the shifting correct to carry the momentum of movements with the turns. The turns are something that can be worked into daily practice in any small space. Almost the tighter practice space, the better--you have to make more turns. I even begin work turns while talking on the phone. Anyway, I've been doing a lot of these in a lot of different places. So sometimes with and without shoes. With the turns, the piece that made it finally start to go was the realization that I was missing the weight shift to the leg that would make me turn slightly in the opposite direction of the turn. This little, seemingly counter movement, really seems to piece the turn together. So there's been much slow think-about-the-weight-shifting kind of practice.

Anyway, I was putting away dishes the other day and had two saucers in my hands. Without thinking, I just moved right into the serves tea exercise, and the kitchen counter was in the way, so I turned. By coincidence, the backward movement of my right arm moved precisely with my opening foot in the direction I needed to go to avoid the counter, and I moved into the turn. Then I turned again and then opposite, and then again now serving with the other hand in a different direction toward an open space in the kitchen.

It all happened spontaneously. I was just moving, turning, shifting. It was just happening. But it was really delightful to put these two pieces together. It was actually a lot of fun and after several turns, I started laughing because I couldn't believe how "in synch" it was all happening.

It reminded me of when I first learned to play songs on the violin and then later on the guitar. With both instruments, at some point you begin to play a song the way you hum a song. Not one note at a time as you have been drilling it, but with the fluid sound of humming. Plus, with both instruments (since they are both string instruments) at that point, it has always seemed to me that I could "hum" the song instead playing note by note because "my fingers were remembering" the song for me.

I think something like that was happening. Finally at a point in the learning curve that my feet were remembering the turns and my arms and waist were remembering how to serve tea inthe same way that my fingers remember a song.

Of course in science terms, it is the brain controlling all of these motor skills. your finger tips don't really remember "Jesu joy of Man's Desiring" on the left, while your fingers on the right know exactly how to cross slur the bow. But at that point you have put much of it together. Even if it is a little rough yet. At that moment you can play a song the way you hum it, and get a little lost in your own music. So at least for that moment there was something of a genuine song made out of dodging a corner and putting away the dishes.