Choreographed and performed by Feng Feng Wang, Music by Gus Macmillan. This piece was devised in prototype as a 15-minute showing for the Terrain08 Festival, curated by Kath Pappas of Ausdance as a co-production with Jill Morgan of Multicultural Arts Victoria. It was performed at Dancehouse in November 2008.

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A magic moment in Beijing - a flock of homing pigeons circled above us at twilight on Boxing Day 2008. Listen carefully - to their tails have been added tiny and very light whistles, that make a soft drone as they fly. Each has a slightly different pitch, making beautiful, eerie invisible chord that follows their path.

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XING consists of five dancers, and explores the circulation between the five traditional Chinese "Taoism" elements of wood, fire, earth, water, and metal. The five elements, also called "Wu Xing" represent the processes that are fundamental to the cycles of nature. The term "xing" means the process of one thing acting upon another. In relation to the five elements, the cycle of processes as "Yin" and "Yang" can be represented as: wood feeding into fire; fire creating ashes which form earth; from within the earth, metal is heated, liquefies and produces water vapor; water generated from this vapor then nourishes the trees, or wood.
Each dancer embodies through the performance subtle detailed shifts - temporary moments of balance, harmonization of occurrence, growth, development, symmetry and change. The original music for the piece also reflects the interchangeable nature of these themes, with new sounds or instrumentation introduced as each performer's journey commences, developing thematically in parallel to the structure as the performance plays out. The score was composed by Gus Macmillan, and the process of composing and developing the music was strongly inter-linked to the choreographer's rehearsal processes and practices.

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http://dharmicjourney.blogspot .com
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When the great universal teacher Shakyamuni Buddha first spoke about the Dharma in the noble land of India, he taught the four noble truths: the truths of suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering and the path to the cessation of suffering.

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For more information about this video, please visit www.lamayeshe.com
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Practitioners of the mother class of Highest Yoga Tantra must offer tsok to the guru-deity twice a month. Most perform the Guru Puja in fulfillment of this requirement, but in 1982 Lama Yeshe wrote the Heruka Vajrasattva tsok offering "in case students were getting bored with the older pujas. It's shorter, too, and therefore suits our busy Western lifestyles!"

Lama also said, "Highest Yoga Tantra contains methods by which you can attain enlightenment in a single lifetime, but before you can actualize these you must purify yourself. Practicing Heruka Vajrasattva is one of the most powerful ways of doing so."

In the three teachings presented here, recorded at Vajrapani Institute, Boulder Creek, California, in July and August, 1983--a mere eight months before he passed away--Lama Yeshe explains what the Heruka Vajrasattva tsok offering is and how to do it.

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Shaun Micallef and Kat Stewart in a satirical news report about Japanese whale research.
From NEWStopiä S03E09.

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