by Beth Schellenberg

2018 November – January Research Series

The morning I head to the Young Lungs studio is biting, the cold and sun making my eyes water. I am one of the last to arrive, and after removing a comical number of layers and setting my boots alongside the others, I enter the studio where researchers have already begun warming up. Two dancers in black athletic wear are being coached by a woman wearing lavender wool socks and a pink ponytail holder the same hue as her scarf. Another trio is across the room, squatting, shaking out limbs, humming and groaning. I recognize Alex, a local contemporary dancer, in a brown turtleneck and floral sweatpants, and Davis in black wearing glasses, I don’t recognize the third person, who is wearing royal blue and light grey, and has a head of tousled blond hair hanging around her shoulders. None of them look as sleepy as I feel, despite my early morning consumption of both coffee and green tea.

The last people arrive, introductions are made, and Brittney, the woman in blue and grey, Alex, and Davis begin with an interactive exercise they introduce as “fast sound and gesture”. The three stand in a circle and mimic each others actions, starting with facial expressions that evolve into sound and movement, growing bigger and louder with each passing minute. The result is disconcerting, and their groans, sometimes escalating into howls, are agonized, as though the sound is being pulled from deep within their bodies – with the sound goes their physical strength, leaving behind a quiet crumpled form. This exercise seems to last forever, and for the first of many times that morning I am taken by how willfully exposed these people are. There is often a vulnerability inherent in morning time, a state of being if not unguarded at least less guarded, but there is something about this intentional physical state, barefoot and illuminated by massive east facing windows, that is particularly striking.

After warm up the three set the stage for their improv performance, which involves a bathtub, a makeshift sound booth, and several lightbulbs hanging overhead. Alex and Brittany climb into the tub and face each other, while Davis takes a seat behind the mixer. Alex outstretches her hand to Brittany, who kisses it gently, like a lover or a mother, the gesture unbearably intimate. “I want you to come home” says Alex, plaintively, “I want you to come home” she repeats, while rocking Brittany like a child. Alex speaks of counting stars while waiting at night, and counting flakes of cereal when there are no stars. She ends saying “I am lost without you”, and the three switch places, with Alex doing sound and Davis and Brittany in the bathtub. This sequence verges into more bizarre territory but maintains the theme of loss, and of breakfast cereal. Brittany squats precariously on the edge of the tub, lamenting her compulsive consumption of cornflakes, the awful sensation of her teeth chewing cereal, yelling “it’s fucking disgusting, the cornflakes”. She finishes defeated, clutching her head in her hands and saying “the more I eat the more I hope maybe you’ll come home”. They switch again, and the session ends with Alex and Davis in the tub. Davis plays dentist, informing Alex that if she keeps eating cornflakes she’ll ruin her teeth, grind them down into dust, which he mimes by crushing a white pillow between his hands and the lip of the tub. He grabs the back of her head, shoves one of the hanging lightbulbs in her face and screams “say you’ll stop”, Alex, her neck craned and eyes wide, refuses. Davis says “my partner left me yesterday, that’s why all I have to eat is cornflakes, they always bought the groceries”, and slumps back in the tub. The improv snaps back and forth between hilarity and devastation, and is intimate, perhaps due in part to the domesticity the clawfoot tub elicits, but mostly because of the raw emotion spilling forth. The ways in which the prevalent themes of food, compulsive eating, and the fear of crumbling teeth, a textbook indication of anxiety, interact with each other is fascinating, but ultimately makes sense given how connected food is to home is to love is to loss is to anxiety is to food is to home and so on.

The woman in the pink scarf is Hannah, a dancer and choreographer, and her group is up next. After explaining that her piece is playing with ideas of instinctual movements and animal interactions, her dancers Sasha and Ilse begin. They make slow concentric circles by squatting low to the ground and swinging an extended leg, after several turns starting to move more rapidly, around and around, now faster and nearly frantic, approaching distress with ragged breath. After whirling, trapped in motion, for another few turns they collapse, fatigued. Sasha pulls herself into a seated position beside Ilse, who is lying rigid on the ground, observing her impassively for a moment, before lying down as big spoon, comforting her. In the next sequence they begin standing face to face, bodies nearly touching. Sasha is significantly taller but still they move as a many limbed creature, keeping space while maintaining close proximity, exploring the boundaries of bodies, of bond. After flinging their bodies far from each other as though they are opposing magnets, the piece comes to an end with both dancers curled on the floor. This investigation into interaction is not merely physical, it is also an emotional inquiry, an embodied relation that queries non-conscious impulses of empathetic and possibly abject connection.

We break for a few minutes to shift about on the floor, stretching stiffened limbs, before settling in for Jaz’ performance. In the meantime Jaz has been arranging two vessels about ten feet apart from each other, one a large cut glass punch bowl, the other a hand pinched clay bowl. They have also retrieved half a dozen water glasses and an aquamarine plastic pitcher from the studio kitchen. Jaz says that the piece is about ritual, walks over to the punch bowl, straightens their back, and picks up a glass, taking three careful paces before placing it back on the ground. They do this with the remaining glasses, painstakingly arranging them until a circle, roughly ten feet wide, has been formed. Jaz fills the pitcher, drops of water falling from their hand and catching light, the moment pregnant and over too soon as they take measured steps around the circle with the full pitcher. They fill each glass about two thirds, the sounds of pouring water punctuating silence. When all the glasses have been filled Jaz empties them, in the same measured way, into the clay vessel, which they play like a singing bowl, splashing water onto the ground, before lying prone on the floor. This ritual is mesmerizing, the immersive nature of the performance pointed back to a physical remembering, an inherited motion.

After the performances are done, the spilt water has been mopped up and people rearrange on the floor, we sit in a circle and I am confronted again by the vulnerability of this exercise. Perhaps it is commonplace for those in performance communities to witness such openness, but it strikes me that I am surrounded by people I barely know and they are brave enough to use their bodies to communicate ideas that are still in the process of being formed and articulated. This research series, bringing together people from different disciplines, points to a basic and perhaps incredibly reductionist thought: that everyone is seeking, albeit in different ways, to learn about themselves and each other. This is perhaps why it feels so intimate, so vulnerable. Not simply due to the morning, or the physical abandon, but because it is fragile and special to be able to witness strangers searching.

***

Dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer’s psychotherapist once told her “feelings are facts”, a dictum after which she named her autobiography (Rainer), and one so simple as to be stunning. We are told to exist in a certain way, a way that is often based in someone else’s reality because it is more convenient, for society, for the individual, for both, rather than because it is what we are experiencing. These rules are often enforced based on how society perceives different bodies, and accordingly values, restricts, and/or denigrates them.

***

Sartre, famed father of french thought and misanthrope extraordinaire, is one of many philosophers who privileges control over emotions, and applauds striving to maintain mastery over oneself. In fact he seems to hate moments of vulnerability, speaking at length in Nausea about how repulsive humans are when they eat, and how disgusting he finds other peoples bodies. In a letter to a lover who expressed feeling an overwhelming sadness Sartre wrote “I hate and scorn those who, like you, indulge their brief hours of sadness. What disgusts me is the shameful little comedy rooted in a physical state of torpor” (Boulet 61). Sartre not only condemns this person for recognizing her emotional state, but also deems the physical manifestation of these emotions shameful. His vitriolic refutation of the importance of feeling, both physical and emotional, seems to reflect something of the privilege the patriarchy grants certain kinds of people.

***

I recall at various points in my life having my sadness levelled against me, being made to believe it was my fault rather than a product of how I was being treated. I remember how my body felt when I was sad. Times of pain and grief, fear and stasis can be physical, the body manifesting self-doubt in a stutter, tripping over curbs, allowing a glass tumbler to slip just so from a distracted hand. How to move with intention, let alone grace and fluidity, when the mind is reeling, one half using all of its strength to diminish the other? I spent much of my twenties being alternately weightless, about to slip up and away, and so heavy as to sink into the earth. I think I found my way back into myself by learning to un-believe what I had been told – there is power in unlearning.

During that nearly decade long period of general sadness or angst or depression or what-have-you I was told I needed to fight against and overcome, rather than explore, my feelings and intuitions in order to exist in reality. Whose reality? Certainly not mine, in fact this fight against myself took place in order to maintain relationships with people who were convinced their framework of ideals (or as Helene Cixous succinctly put it, their “conceptual orthopaedics” [10]) was a representation of a grand, overarching truth, when in fact it was a constructed ideology allowing them to act beyond the rules of what they disparaged as restrictive “social norms” while still benefiting from those “norms” and the hierarchy they create. This faux-political, airtight rationalizing allowed them to cause harm without culpability. For the most part these people weren’t intentionally malicious, but they were unwilling to engage with empathy and attempt to unlearn behaviour that served them at the expense of others. The troubling thing about my situation is that it is in no way unique, and that as a white passing, CIS woman who has a supportive family and network of friends it doesn’t begin to speak to the magnitude of repression faced by so many folks with less privilege than I. What is also troubling is that it echoes how our society at large functions.

Why did these people assume that I should live within their conception of the world, particularly when it was one that disenfranchised me? Is the answer simply the patriarchy? I suppose I could chalk it up to a “power” imbalance: the employer was paying my (minimum) wage, which meant I “owed” him and had to take whatever emotional abuse and sexual harassment he chose to inflict, or: the boyfriend said he “loved me more than anything (and more than anyone else ever would)” which somehow negated devastating betrayals, lies, and manipulations, and placed the onus on me to live with his destructive choices rather than on him to be better. Except this doesn’t feel like power to me, it feels like fear, like they were clutching to their conceptual orthopaedics with a death grip, white knuckled, terrified they would be caught out and lose their place in the world, or god forbid have to accept the validity of other people’s perspectives. Can this fear actually be a sign of hope? Can it be attributed to the fact that things are finally changing, albeit slowly, and that different bodies, minds, and ways of being are finally allowed to survive and thrive, that the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy (™ bell hooks) we are so used to is finally being challenged?

***

Part of the problem: the enlightenment philosophies that inform our “western” conceptions of identity are built on binaries of mind/body, man/woman, human/animal, light/dark and tend to negate or at least ignore emotional and physical realities that exist beyond that of the privileged white male. Donna Haraway identifies such binaries as part of the “informatics of domination” that impede contemporary resistance to injustice (167). Theories of rationality, detachment, and mastery of oneself create a somewhat brutal meritocracy that demands if one has enough will and intellectual acuity they will ascend a mountain and become what they are (263 Nietzsche). Of course if one is born brown, black, female, impoverished, homosexual, etc. then society tells you what you are and how you are supposed to be, and it often isn’t an uber-mensch. Ultimately the doctrines of philosophies from early enlightenment to existentialist lack empathy, creating a very bleak outlook on human relations and difference.

A possible solution, or at least an alternative to the above: “affect theory”, which is defined as the study of “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing that can serve to drive us toward movement, thought, and ever-changing forms of relation” (Affect Theory Reader). These explorations acknowledge that bodies provide motivation, attachment, and desire, and strives toward a knowing that is not grounded in what we are told is real, but rather in dismantling those beliefs and focusing on what we feel could possibly exist. Anna Gibbs says that affect theory “might also take the form of an ‘anti-history’ or ‘counter-memory’ which attempts to detach the present from history as a constraining and defining identity so that it can be moved beyond and something other can be invented. This is an enterprise which, in charting the limits of the present, unsettles the taken for granted and suggests that things could be otherwise, leaving the future open” (6). This way of thinking provides a vital departure from enlightenment humanism and the various philosophies it informed, and engenders empathy, allowing more ways of knowing, conceptualizing and experiencing the world.

One of my favourite theorists at the moment is José Esteban Muñoz, who envisions ideas of a utopian, queer futurity through transgressive moments of aesthetic, performative culture. For Muñoz it is the moments taking place outside of, or between, the interconnected systems of domination that define contemporary reality and contain hope. In Cruel Optimism Lauren Berlant also focuses on themes of liminality with her theory of “the impasse” (21), which she defines as “a crucial place that lies between the old habituated life and something different, something that radically resensualizes the subject” (27). Her idea of a “refutation of the precious normative construction of domesticity and privacy [that] leads to an embodiment of the impasse” (Berlant 27) runs along the same lines as Muñoz’ assertion that we must reject the present social structure in order to “dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (1).

If we understand Sartre’s conception of freedom as a tortured knowledge of nothingness (Being and Nothingness) and Muñoz’ “ideality” of freedom to be a site of un-materialized, potential utopia which is predicated precisely on not-knowing, a stark contrast emerges, and at the risk of being reductionist I would guess that these differentiating ways of viewing the world, the non-verbal articulation of ideas versus the enlightenment definition of knowledge and thought, rather alter the ways people understand and perceive one another.

***

They way movement can elucidate ideas and feelings is remarkable, and illustrates how the body functions as a site of emotional and intellectual knowledge, containing information vital about ourselves but also information that is vital when trying to enact a social shift towards a softer, kinder world. Jaz’ ritual connects to a tradition of embodied articulation, and a turn back into oneself, and to the intrinsic knowledge we carry that can reveal previously unknown information. Brittney’s improv is an explosive example of release, the pent up everyday coming out as words and signs, as well as the intuitive bonds that can be forged by crossing disciplinary lines. Hannah portrays a physicality concerned with touch, and the manifestation of varying boundaries and connections we draw between each other, and perhaps within ourselves. These forms of research lie between what is consciously known and what runs beneath the surface, and are an identification of mutable, fluid ideas that can’t quite be pinned down, but whose contours can be traced. This kind of ephemeral performance is what Munoz envisions can literally save the world, and although I’m not as strident a utopian as he, there is a hope inherent in people striving to reach new spaces within themselves, with others, and with their bodies. Anna Gibbs perhaps says it best when she says that research can be “an experimental and productive forging of connections to new ends, rather than the analytical disassembling of a machine in order to show how it works, as if this (the analytic disassembling) were sufficient to bring about desirable change” (4).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlant, Lauren Gail. Cruel Optimism. Durham : Duke University Press, 2011. Print.

Gibbs, Anna. “Writing as Method.” Affective Methodologies,

Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2011.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in

the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of

Nature, New York; Routledge, 1991,149-181.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Thomas Common. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Gordon Press, 1974.

Rainer, Yvonne. Feelings Are Facts: a Life. MIT Press, 2013.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Routledge, 2007

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Nausea. Penguin Books, 2007.

September – November 2017 Research Series Visual Essay

by Michelle Panting

Davis Plett with Rachelle Bourget

Alex Winters with Warren McLelland

Kayla Jeanson with Alex Winters and Brianna Ray Ferguson

Self Portraits inspired by research

Michelle Panting is a writer and lens-based artist living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 2013, she
founded FULL, a website dedicated to documenting art, culture, and travel. Through FULL,
Michelle interviews artists and cultural influencers as well as capturing their work through
photographs. In her personal artistic practice, she uses both still and moving images to explore
issues of identity, mental health, and trauma. Michelle has exhibited her work at aceartinc. and
Parlour Coffee. She is currently enrolled in the Cartae Open School at aceartinc.

By Praba Pilar

I dedicate this talk to Glamdrew Andrew Henderson. I am honored to have been a part of his process with Eroca Nicols and collaborators Carly Boyce and Mars Gradiva. I am grateful he took my secret to the grave.

Life, vida, biome, biotic, creation – always a process, never a state. Whether its biopoiesis, abiogenesis, or that great big bang, maybe its terrestrial, extraterrestrial, artificial, augmented, extended, simulated, telepresenced, ectropic or extropic – we don’t REALLY know if it comes from intergalactic primordial gas or just plain subatomic play. Which brings me back down to Earth.

What is life as we enter the 6th extinction? Can we stay with the trouble?

Can we confront the necrosis at the core of our contemporary CULT OF THE TECHNO-LOGIC? Can we crawl away from the cult of necrotic egocentrism oozing over the world in globalized neoliberal capitalist crapdom?

I am a twinned larvae, segmented by distributed intelligence into rejecting the egocentric unitary self-recruitment of the failed human project. Naming the homo sapien as the human ignores our microbiome, our 90% of our DNA that is not human. [LARVAL SCREAM] In the segmented paramythology of LARVAL ROCK STARS, my twin Anuj Vaidya and I find many historical precedents that have led to necrotic civilization, in which severe damage to one essential system leads to secondary damage to other systems, causing a “cascade of effects”. Necrotic civilization is an ugly show. It arises from ossified states of domination of the Anthropocene, it is based on a lack of proper care, and as it spreads, it releases harmful effects that damages everything around it. As larvae of a post-human era, we effect care, to remake ourselves in the biotic ecocentrism of the larvalscene. Death is not the opposite of life. Many deaths have passed, and many are to come, deaths of more of our languages, of some of our identities, ways of life, comforts, hopes and ideals, of our embodied selves, our non-human kin, our planetary world and world-ed planet. But astride this destructive necrosis are other possible deaths, occurring as a disruptive poesis and an infectious refusal – deaths of unitary truth and stasis that deny our perpetual becoming outside of reason and rationality. These are the deaths we can risk to generate a biotic ecocentrism beyond necrosis.

This brings me to the Young Lungs Research Series – a laboratory providing funding, space and support for research and exchange. Research, for artists, is rarely funded, at least in my experience. But research is critical to an artistic practice, it is in expansion, not product, that a practice grows. The four artists groups in this series intermingled challenges to norms of social relations and dynamics – themes interrogated from different positionality by Frantz Fanon, Erving Goffman and Elizabeth Grosz. Fanon focuses, in Black Skin, White Masks on the oppression, forced masking and destructive alienation of Blackness in a white supremacist world designed for the benefit of others. Goffman, in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, focuses on the dramaturgical perspective of social scripting and impression management in everyday life – which in contemporary techno-culture, multiplies exponentially online – Instagram anyone? Or are you too busy photoshopping your feed? In Volatile Bodies, Grosz challenges dualistic binaries by interweaving the internal/external through the model of the Mobius Strip. All of the artists spoke of going beyond technique and training, false authenticity, curated interactions and illusions of control.

Carol-Ann Bohrn’s project was done in collaboration with Madeline Rae, the two met in Ace Art’s Cartae School. The work centered on dichotomies between the subjective inner self and the performance of self in the social sphere. Through this research, Bohrn shared deliberately clumsy articulate and inarticulate embodied and verbal dissonance that demanded: where does the social front negate or support internal subjectivity, where does it mirror, and where does it reshape interiority while risking intolerable alienation?

Sometimes concordant, other times discordant, her movement and speech rode the Mobius Strip inside to outside to inside to outside as a continual loop, because rather than being dichotomous we are pluralities. But it’s painfully hilarious isn’t it – to witness your own shameful accommodations rendered materially visible. We live in sociality, managing varying histories of trauma, and if you thought Bohrn and Rae were going to provide some neatly packaged resolution of the resultant complex conflicts that arise, think again.

Zorya Arrow began with an exploration of intimacy by experimenting with 1 on 1 performances to explore the relationship between performer and audience. But for her this raised antagonisms of expectation that proved to be unproductive. How else to find out, how does who is there, in the how is there, determine the outcome of what is there.

But the difficulties of entering the unknown by not doing the same doing that threatens to become a pattern or a predictable trajectory, led her to instead invite the audience literally behind the curtain to witness her disposition.

Delf Gravert shared WALRUS, I AM, which arose during time he spent in the North. His research raises pressing epistemological questions of what is valorized in ways of knowing – the oral, the textual – and beyond those binaries, the physical, the sonic and other senses? What is a staged work, what is the structure, why do you behave as an audience and who is there to see it – is it the embodied presences in the room, or can we operate multi-dimensionally and recognize we are multitudes of generations of relations that are always, already, in the room.

Delf comes at the questions of affective states and emotive reasoning relentlessly, with uncanny idiosyncratic physicality and humor that at one point explodes in his scream – “I don’t know fuck all!” Well how about that, neither do we.

Andrew Henderson and Eroca Nicols, close friends and co-creators, faced the life altering moment of Glamdrew Andrew’s terminal diagnosis with beautiful courage, bringing Eroca’s study and practice of death rituals to create a Living Funeral as a queer monument to an embracing of that which for most remains shamefully unspeakable.

With collaborators Carly Boyce and Mars Gradiva, they created a joyful and inclusive space challenging cultural denials of death, creating magic in an atmosphere of loving generosity that opened public conversations around death, not only in the performance but broadly through extensive media coverage. It is from our conversations of delusional denial, of how it is ‘A Big Mess,’ that the title of this talk came to be. Andrew Henderson died on Wednesday October 26th.

We are a mess, in a big mess, and current sense-making makes no sense as it forecloses possibility. Creativity unconfined can provide artists the platform to disrupt necrotic sense making, to displace the self and selves, to reinscribe our bodies and then infect others with a refusal, so creation can live aside so much cessation.

I end with the work of Andrew Henderson, Eroca Nicols and collaborators Carly and Mars because they created a performance of consummate generosity – and I think it was covered extensively in the media as it provided a broad and enticing invitation to bring forth a self beyond ordinary sense-making, reaffirming the profound place of love and care, where our shameful secrets and living deaths can go to the grave and we can begin again.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carrington, Damian. “World on Track to Lose Two-Thirds of Wild Animals by 2020, Major Report Warns.” The Guardian, 27 October, 2016.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Larval Rock Stars. Chrysalis. Praba Pilar and Anuj Vaidya. < https://larvalrockstars.wordpress.com/>

Mooney, Chris. “What the ‘sixth extinction’ will look like in the oceans: The largest species die off first.” The Washington Post, 14 September 2016.

Pilar, Praba. Photographs of performers taken in Winnipeg, Canada. 2016.

Sarson, Janet. Photograph of Praba Pilar in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. 2010.

Stanford University. “Sixth mass extinction is here: Humanity’s existence threatened.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 19 June 2015.

Zalasiewizc, Jan. “The Earth Stands on the Brink of its Sixth Mass Extinction and the Fault is Ours.” The Guardian, 21 June, 2015. < https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/21/mass-extinction-science-warning>

by a. charlie peters

2015-2016 Research Series

how do i get my body to let me take a dance class? this sounds like i’m invested in the mind/body split. I’m not, but i slide into it as readily as the next person born after René Descartes started thinking he is because he thinks he is. some believe that Descartes’s famous seventeenth-century statement, “i think, therefore i am,” founded modernity. right up to the present day, many people regard the mind or brain as the boss of the body. dualisms such as mind/body, man/woman, adult/child, good/evil all feature one term that is privileged over the other term. in the mind/body pairing, the mind is usually the one on top. a friend of ours is writing a play about cryonics. in cryonics, they sometimes freeze whole bodies, but you can also get someone to cut off your head and freeze it after you die so it can get reattached to another body when they’ve figured out how to fix what killed you. that’s how much some people value their bodies, apparently. in my case, though, when it comes to taking dance classes, anyway, it feels like it’s my body that’s calling the shots. it feels like i have an anarchic body, one that doesn’t want a leader or a mind thinking that it’s the boss.

anarchy means “no leader”: this is the literal translation from the Greek. i’ve been in a university environment for much of my life, so i’m used to leaders and to having my mind disciplined by them. for many years, i’ve had professors, advisors, employers, and department chairs telling me what to do. i might not like the hierarchical, top-down structure of so many of our school and work environments, but where the life of the mind is concerned, at any rate, being directed is something i can handle, even enjoy. and my body comes along for the ride.

disciplining my body, though, is a bit different. there are limits to what it’ll put up with. for years, i attended yoga classes, but, with yoga class, you don’t have to be all that disciplined: you can go or not go. it’s not like you have to be at a particular class on a regular basis. and because i have this somewhat hypermobile, disorderly body, yoga teachers would tell me to do the opposite of what they were telling everyone else to do or to do what felt right in my body. so i wasn’t exactly getting bossed around in yoga class. plus, half the time yoga instructors are making exactly the same shapes at the same time as everyone else so it feels like you’re all in it together. and moving to music at home or in a club or in free-style dance classes such as the Isadora Duncan workshop that Jolene Bailie arranged are experiences that i really enjoy. (Isadora freed dance from many of its restrictions, and i learned about her contributions when i was really young, so participating in this workshop was really wonderful thing for me!) no, it wasn’t these experiences that tested my limits; it was when i tried to learn a classical Indian style of dance named Kathak with Ian Mozdzen that my body rebelled.

the Kathak teachers were awesome, the people at the India School of Dance were super nice, and Kathak is super beautiful and interesting, but however much i thought i wanted to learn Kathak, my body just didn’t want to go to the same place at the same time every week and be taught to move with the kind of precision required by a classical dance form. having to move my arms or legs up or down or in or out several inches so as to mimic these ancient postures—however beautiful and charming these postures are—ended up being the proverbial straw, in terms of my physical training. Ian continued with Kathak lessons; in fact, he will be moving to India at the end of summer to learn more about classical Indian dance. and me? i dropped out. and i really wanted to learn Kathak, too.

the Hunger Games series of books and films features Twelve Districts filled with poor people who supply the citizens in the wealthy Capital with all that the well-to-do citizens need to thrive. it’s a lot like the relationship between the body and the mind of a scholarly type person: the body is like the Twelve Districts: it supplies the food and circulates the blood and the oxygen and then it has to just sit there and keep working at supplying the whole body with stuff while the mind—which resembles the wealthy citizens of the Capital—satiates itself with books and films and lectures. in the Hunger Games, because a Thirteenth District had tried to overthrow this unjust system sometime in the past, each of the twelve remaining districts has two of its young people selected to fight to the death in the annual hunger games while the citizens of the Capital get “entertained” by this blood sport. importantly, in each annual hunger game, there is only one winner. eventually, the people in the Twelve Districts rebel, inspired by the heroine, Katniss Everdeen, who refuses to kill all her opponents and become the sole winner of the games. trying to learn Kathak has taught me what i’d only suspected was true from all those years in yoga classes: that my body has a mind—many minds! entire districts!—of its own. perhaps a more egalitarian relationship among all these body-minds and my mind-mind (which no doubt has its own bodies, too) might make it possible for me to take a Kathak class sometime.

and this is precisely what anarchy is all about: egalitarian relationships. anarchy often gets a bad wrap. it’s frequently compared with chaos or nihilism, concepts which no doubt have their up sides, as well, although we seldom hear about them. in fact, Elise and Jasmine Allard, in their performance on January 16th, demonstrated that chaotic movement can be a safe and welcome expression of intense feeling if someone you love is there to catch you. i’ll talk about two separate moments from this performance: in the first, Jasmine holds Elise around the waist while Elise moves her arms and legs intensely; in this first instance, intense movement is enabled by Jasmine’s grasp. in the second of these two moments, Jasmine dances around like crazy until Elise can’t stand it any more and stops her. each sister is the ground that supports the other’s wildness. love both enables and disables chaotic movement.

researching this paper, i learned that contemporary theorists of anarchy embrace wildness and that they are concerned about oppression and the abuses of authority. authority tries to convince us that the few are more forceful than the many. no one in their right mind,—or maybe i should say “in their right body”! or, “in their right body-mind”!—would believe this for long, would they? Isabell Lorey is one of the scholars who is currently theorizing anarchy. Lorey writes about the 2011 Occupy Movement, the writings of philosopher Jacques Ranciére, and the idea that real democracy—by which Lorey means direct democracy, as opposed to representative democracy—is anarchic. what Lorey wants us to do is to practice democracy, real, anarchic democracy, all the time. she calls this “presentist democracy” (59). fill all of our presents, all of our nows, with real, egalitarian democracy, that’s what Lorey advises. And, if democracy is what we actually want, this recommendation makes a lot of sense, for, as literary theorist Jon Clay puts it, “the equality of beings is not imposed … [on us] from ‘above’ … but is rather … [our] own”; it “is assumed among … [ourselves]” (15).

image: Sasha Amaya

Lorey’s recommendation about being present involves having a different kind of relationship with the past and the future, a relationship that is perhaps more distanced, or more occasional. instead of thinking about the past or the future a lot, might we choose, instead, to think about them only when we really need to. rather than “intending” to do a given thing, might we “carry” an idea “with us,” instead? would this be a substantially different way of doing things? how do we “get out of” dwelling in our pasts or in our futures? i think that Brenda McLean and Brittany Thiessen demonstrated a way to do this in a sequence of movements accompanying an apology. during their rehearsal of “Dinner,” a vignette from Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information, Brenda flippantly, insincerely apologizes to Brittany before following this up with a sincere, heartfelt apology. during the flippant apology, Brenda turns her back on Brittany and moves away from her. but during the sincere apology, Brenda wraps her entire body around Brittany, who is seated on the floor. apologizing addresses feelings of guilt, grief, or regret about an event that happened in the past. an insincere apology will keep this past event in play and maintain the distancing effects of estrangement. in contrast, a sincere apology can collapse this distance, assuage troubling emotions, and bring people together in the intimacy of a present moment of reconciliation. and Brenda’s and Brittany’s movements demonstrate how collapsing space collapses time, too. the direction and orientation of their bodies in space encode the temporal dynamics of the sincere and the insincere apology and bring to life the presentist politics recommended by Lorey .

these days politics has been largely reduced to policing people who are barely able to eke out a living (91). this perspective about contemporary politics is associated with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault and it is a perspective that is also shared by a theorist named Mick Smith. while writing about how we might stop dominating what he calls “the more-than-human world,” Smith celebrates wildness. he calls wildness innocent, “ethically anarchic” (92), and “synonymous with creative freedom from social restraint” (94). Smith’s “more-than-human world” played a significant role in classes offered during the Young Lungs Research Series. on January 24th, facilitators Ali Robson, Janelle Hacault, and Sasha Amaya asked those who attended the classes to become sand, water, gulls, and trees! French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari see all earthlings as interconnected, as assemblages that are always becoming with the things that they—we!—come into contact with. this is true in the most basic and fundamental way. when we eat mushrooms, melons, or mango, we become these plants and they, in turn, become human beings. our interactions makes us assemblages of human and non-human parts. we breathe in what trees exhale—and vice versa! other kinds of becomings took place during these classes, as well. Sasha asked class participants to move around the dance floor with different body parts doing the leading—first the pelvis, then the ribs and the feet—people were even asked to let their bodies be led by more than one body part at once! in becoming-led by pelvis-minds, rib-minds, and feet-minds the leadership of the thinking head was disrupted, although it, too, was given its chance to take the lead! on another occasion, in a rehearsal exercise featuring one person mimicking another person’s everyday gestures, dancers Freya Olafson and Lise McMillan were asked by creator Treasure Waddell to become one another!

these types of exercise ask us to engage in a certain wildness, or in what Mick Smith calls “creative freedom from social restraint.” in this phrase, Smith celebrates freedom along with wildness. i would sure love to celebrate both of these ideas, too. but while celebrating wildness has many fans among anarchists, there are some thinkers, though, who argue, and very convincingly, too, that the concept of freedom is just another tool in the massive toolbox of those who police us. in fact, a theorist by the name of Nikolas Rose argues that governments invented freedom! as Rose explains it, governments convince us that certain behaviours are reasonable and normal. then governments convince us that we freely choose these very behaviours that they have conditioned us to adopt! Rose suggests that we think the way our governments want us to think, including and perhaps especially when we think that we are free. and thinking that we are free when, in fact, we are being highly disciplined and rigidly policed by those who govern us may be one of the biggest problems, in Rose’s point of view, that we moderns face.

Seeing Rachelle Bourget in rehearsal really brought home to me the visual dominance of the thinking head and its companion, the expressive face. for the first part of the rehearsal, i’m sure i spent as much time looking at Rachelle’s face and head as i did observing her dancing body. and even as i write this i realize: there i go, participating in the mind/body split again! i’ll start over. at first, i spent as much time watching the top eighth of Rachelle’s physical form in rehearsal as i did watching the other seven-eighths. then Rachelle wrapped a red scarf over her head and almost everything about my viewing of her movement changed. Rachelle’s head became another part of her moving body, an eighth of her body as opposed to the head of a body. lots of other interesting things became apparent, too: many of her movements were directed sideways; in other words, they were oriented towards the horizontal plane. (poststructural theorists, much like anarchists, are very interested in collapsing hierarchies, and they talk a lot about collapsing them by putting things side-by-side. poststructuralists are all about the horizontal, the lateral, the sideways.) to return to Rachelle’s dance: with her head covered, Rachelle’s limbs—pale in contrast with her black clothing and red scarf—came more into focus and the way she moved one arm as if to fit her elbow into the curve of her waist came to seem like an exercise in self-construction, something i might not have noticed had Rachelle not donned the mask. at the same time, Rachelle’s other arm was angled such that the space between this second arm and her core became a hole that drew my attention to the air within which she moved, air that was shared by everyone else in the place. also, Rachelle’s body made curves where one would not expect them and straight lines where i would never have thought them possible; for instance, at one time, Rachelle’s arm and shoulder were angled in such a way as to point straight down at the floor while the rest of her figure remained erect. i’ve put a slide of the “Russian feminist punk rock protest” (wiki) group Pussy Riot up on the screen because the effect of Rachelle’s dance, on me, anyway, was very political in a horizontal, egalitarian way. the other seven-eighths of our bodies offers so much!

in the introduction to his book Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, André Lepecki explains that, “Rethinking … [what it means to be human] in terms of the body is precisely the task of [dance] choreography” (5). Lepecki has his criticisms of choreography, however, due to the “commanding voices” of its masters and the extensive discipline it requires of dancers who must nonetheless maintain a posture—and the imposture—of spontaneity (9). Lepecki goes on to talk about how dance is supposed to be all about movement. movement is the ontology or beingness of dance, as, since the Renaissance, at any rate, dance has been understood to be the art form that is all about uninterrupted, unceasing, rhythmic, flowing, movement. modernity, itself—that is to say, the period that stretches from the time of Descartes’s famous statement, “i think therefore i am,” all the way up to the present day—, is said to be all about movement, too, by some theorists; and Lepecki agrees.

but Lepecki is something of a rebel, as well. while he agrees with those who argue that modernity is all about movement and that dance, since the Renaissance, has been all about movement, he rebels against the idea that dance needs to be defined this way, preferring, instead, an expanded definition. Lepecki would have dance appreciated as a dynamic political force that embraces the body’s movement and its stillness, as well as the contributions of the philosophical, theorizing mind. now, what Lepecki says about dance being an art form that is predominantly about movement makes a lot of sense. i wonder, though, about his suggestion that movement is, as he puts it, “the kinetic project of modernity” (my emphasis 3). another way to look at it would be to think of modernity as being about people coming to terms with the fact that everything is always already in motion as well as the fact that the earth isn’t some still point at the centre of the universe, the way many Europeans apparently thought it was before Copernicus. dance, making use of both movement (and relative stillness), may be the art form that can help us the most as we come to terms with the fact that movement and change are the only constants, the only things that don’t change.

Mark Franko is another theorist who is interested in dance’s political contributions. for Franko, dance need not be the traditional, choreographic product of a student who mimics a teacher; it can also be the incorporation or becoming-embodied of the gift of dance. he makes this claim in “Given Moment: Dance and the Event,”a meditation about how dance, post 9/11, can help us come to term with events, especially traumatic events. Franko foregrounds the teaching methods of a Balinese dancer and teacher named Mario who transmits dance moves with his own body by “position[ing] himself behind his pupil whose arms and torso he manipulates into positions” (119). as one pupil puts it, the person being taught is like a tree whose branches are being arranged. Since the dance moves are not being “transmitted across a mediating space of observation and interpretation” (120), Franko characterizes this kind of teaching as a gift. this teaching is the giving of “self-force”; it is “the communication of dance as gift” (120).

The Young Lungs Dance Exchange Research Series has foregrounded the gift of dance and genuine spontaneity, too, particularly in the form of improvisation and collaboration. during her show, Treasure Waddell used improvisation to include the audience in the collaboration. the Research Series was itself an extensive network of collaboration. in fact, i wonder if the degree of collaboration during this Young Lungs Research Series might even address a criticism that some theorists make about gift economies. some theorists suggest gift-giving necessarily creates debt. if you give, there is the expectation that the person you give to will give something back, which is the debt part. in the Young Lungs Series, the creator of one show was a dancer in another and a dancer was also an administrator and on and on! so, in a situation with this degree of collaboration, where people are giving and getting all the time, finding someone who could be experiencing a lack of a reciprocity that could be called debt might actually be quite difficult! there is no doubt in my mind-body district that there were masters of dance involved in the processes of these past months, but the degree of reciprocity among the participants has made hierarchy virtually indiscernible.

collaboration may be another way to think about anarchy. if we (and our body parts) are always taking turns leading the way, are there still people whom we might characterize, in total, as leaders?

theorists of anarchy are frequently theorists of utopia, as well. and, like the word anarchy, the word utopia uses negation to make meaning. whereas anarchy means “no leader,” utopia means “no place.” put another way, the word utopia suggests that there is, in actuality, no fabulously wonderful place, no place in which we all might want to be and become together. but maybe, if we were to practice the kind of presentist democracy that Lorey recommends and if we were to have a revolving leadership such as the one demonstrated in this Research Series, we could have anarchy in both senses—in the dual sense of direct democracy and in the sense that there is no one person who is “the leader”—and maybe we could have utopia, too, here, in this place where we live. which would mean we’d need to coin a new word, a word for utopia achieved. how about the Cree word “ōmatowihk,” which means “in this place”? we could say—here’s a sample sentence—the Young Lungs style of dancing and dance-making is “ōmatowihk,” or the state-formerly-known-as-utopia achieved “in this place.”

oh, and i think i’ve learned a way to get my body to let me take a dance class! maybe i need to stop disciplining my mind quite so much; maybe this way my body can handle a little more discipline!

Co-founder Natasha Torres-Garner introduces a. charlie peters.

Works Cited and Referenced

Franko, Mark. “Given Movement: Dance and the Event.” Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Ed. André Lepecki. Middeltown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2004. Print.

Lepecki, André. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Rutledge, 2006. University of Winnipeg eBook. 21 Nov. 2014.

Lorey, Isabell. “The 2011 Occupy Movements: Ranciére and the Crisis of Democracy.” Trans. Aileen

Derieg. Theory Culture and Society 31.7/8 (2014): 43-65. SAGE. Web. 22 December 2015, Rose, Nikolas. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.

Smith, Mick. “Primitivism: Anarchy, Politics, and the State of Nature.” Against Ecological Soveriegnty: Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving the Natural World.