A Written Workshop
by Jaz Papadopoulos
Pick something. Something you can do with your body. Something easy.
Something easy you can do with your body.
Something easy you can do with your body every day.
drink a glass of water say hi to yourself in the mirror look out the window and count to
ten do you favourite stretch for five breaths read one page of a book sign a song light a
candle light two candles light three candles light four candles and say your
grandparents’ names say your own name say all your names learn all your names so
that you can say them every day
For the first week (or so),
Your body will learn the thing.
You will remember to breathe while you’re doing it.
You will feel cool air in your nose and warm air on your lip and growing and shrinking
space inside your chest and back and stomach and diaphragm.
You will see your hands move or you will hear your weight pushing out of your feet.
You will learn where your floor creaks and where the dust in your home hides.
For the first week (or so),
Try to do the thing the same way every time.
You will wonder which hand you use
or which way you hold the glass
or which candle you light first.
You will notice patterns:
Where you focus your eyes,
and the rhythm of your breath.
If the floor creaks change, you can’t control it.
After the first week (or so — I’m no expert),
All of those first week noticings will become old hat.
They are easy now, and they just happen that way.
That same way.
Now you will notice new things.
What is the shape of your spine?
When you breathe, your shoulders move too.
You have so many more muscles than you realized.
You can slowly learn where they live and what they answer to.
Something easy you can do with your body every day.
It’s still not always easy.
Tape a piece of paper to the wall
and on the days you don’t want to do the thing,
write on the paper why not.
(Then, you will be free to do the thing.)
After some weeks (or so),
Think about:
- all the other times you did the thing
- all the other people who do the thing
- all the other people who have ever done the thing
Think of the thing like mycelium
All of the enactments of the thing that have ever happened anywhere on this earth over
millennia —
they can communicate.
Your thing secretly knows all those other things.
And,
secretly,
you do too.
A Study in Migratory Bodies
Essay
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.
January 2018
Research Series Nov-Jan 2018
This winter, three teams, each with their own set of questions about movement, are working in the Young Lungs Dance Exchange Studio. Hannah Everest, Brittany Thiessen, and Jaz Papadopoulos lead the movement research this series. Between them, they have wide-ranging approaches to movement – contemporary dance, clown, dance/theatre – providing for a multifarious series of events.
January 26th-30th, the three research teams invite you to take a gander at the colourful linings of their creative processes.
All events take place at 618 Arlington St.
JANUARY 26TH – SHOWING 5:30 doors/ 6PM start/ $10 – All three works-in-progress will be showcased
JANUARY 27TH – ENDNOTE 5:30 doors/ 6PM start/ Free – Presentation of essays in response to research
JANUARY 30th – WORKSHOP 2PM – 5PM / $10 – Researchers will led a movement workshop based on their research
Find their project descriptions and artist bios below

BRITTANY THIESSEN
Brittany Thiessen is obsessed with live performance of all kinds.
Especially taken with acting, music, and dance, she often finds herself caught between the three, setting herself up for what she likes to call an ‘existential art crisis.’ In response to this crisis, she’s decided to investigate how these three mediums can exist together onstage, (specifically in improvisation) throughout this Research Series.
Her recent acting credits include: On Love (Winnipeg Fringe), My Name is Rachel Corrie (May Works), and From the Seat of a Canoe (Long Take Collective). Brittany is a co-founder of Make/Shift Theatre, Company in Residence for Theatre Projects Manitoba, who are in the midst of dramaturgy on their new work, The Party: A Scientific Romance. Also known as ‘B-Rabbit’, she is one half of the musical-comedy duo, BUNNY, who harmonize about everything from time travel to Instagram. Later this spring she’s looking forward to assistant directing TPM’s A Short History of Crazy Bone, another piece which blends the worlds the dance and theatre.
ALEXANDRA ELLIOTT
After performing her own work in New York Alexandra Elliott and Hurricane Sandy came face to face. Physically demanding and emotionally charged, her work made it back to her hometown of Winnipeg and beyond. As a contemporary dancer and choreographer it is Alex’s highest intention to leave you transformed. With over ten original works under her belt, her dances have been produced in New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, and Winnipeg. Alexandra remains humble with a commitment to learn from her seniors and peers. She has studied choreography with award-winning choreographers Tedd Robinson (QC), Susie Burpee (ON), Marie-Josée Chartier (QC), and Susan Rethorst (NY). Fresh after graduating with a BA Honours Degree from the University of Winnipeg and The School of Contemporary Dancers, Alex was a company dancer with the unforgettable Ruth Cansfield Dance. Four years later she joined the Young Lungs Dance Exchange to pursue choreography. After seven years of constant support from this organization she has taken an important step and is now the Artistic Director of Alexandra Elliott Dance. She had the unique opportunity to self-present her own production and will continue to do so with the supportive community she lives in. Alex cycles to her studio every week, year round, to make the creation of dance her daily practice, and not one day is taken for granted. She is thrilled to announce the unveiling of Art Holm, a bi-annual performance series that showcases three artists of different disciplines. Alex shares the role of curator and producer with fellow artist Hilary Anne Crist.
DAVIS PLETT
Davis Plett is an intermedia artist working with audio, text, and performance. His praxis attempts a resistance against reductive ontological formulations of bodies, minds, and the economics of meaning under capitalism, recontextualizing the rituals, spectacles, and material detritus of consumption/production to reveal their/our infinite horror, beauty, and mystery. Davis holds degrees in performance and literature from the University of Winnipeg and has studied clowning with John Turner, intermedia performance with 2boys.tv, and composition/sound design with Greg Lowe. As a composer/sound artist he has worked with Theatre Projects Manitoba, Mia van Leeuwen, 2boys.tv, Frances Koncan, and Gislina Patterson. Upcoming projects include THIS IS GOING TO BE A SILENT POEM, a text-based performance for overhead projector, audience, and projectionist, and Fanta, an intermedia creation/performance that just completed its first stage of development through a fall 2017 Young Lungs residency.

HANNAH EVEREST
An independent contemporary dance artist originally from the west coast of BC, Hannah Everest is a graduate of the School of Contemporary Dancers and the University of Winnipeg (BA Honours degree). Thrilled to be embarking on her first choreographic research project through Young Lungs, she has had the pleasure to have worked professionally with Jennifer Mascall of Vancouver BC, Odette Heyn and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Danielle Sturk in her 2013 film A Good Madness, and be part of WCD’s VERGE under the direction of Brent Lott. Most recently, Hannah is excited to be collaborating as a dancer and creator in a choreographic mentorship with Johanna Riley, to be completed in February 2017.
SASHA WILDE
Sasha holds a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in dance from the School of Contemporary Dancers in
affiliation with the University of Winnipeg. While in school Sasha had the opportunity to work
with many esteemed teachers and choreographers. With the School of Contemporary Dancers
she performed in the 50 Dancer Project at the 2016 Canada Dance Festival. Post graduation
Sasha traveled to Mexico to perform in the show “Creando Lazos a Través de la Danza”
(Creating Bonds Through Dance) with GPS Dance Collective, of which she is a founding member.
She has also participated in projects with Stephanie Ballard and Dancers: Landscape Dancing,
Odette Heyn Projects with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Dancers’ Studio West: Dance
Action Lab, a Choreographic Mentorship with Johanna Riley and NAfro Dance Productions,
including the 2017 Moving Inspirations Dance Festival. Along with performing Sasha teaches
modern and
ILSE TORRES OROZCO
Ilse Torres Orozco is a recent graduate of the Professional Program of the School of
Contemporary Dancers and Co- Director from GPS Dance Collective. She has had the honour of
working professionally with Stephanie Ballard and Dancers, Odette Heyn- Projects with the
Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Gearshifting Perfomance Works and with the Mexican dance
collective Colectivo 1.618. She was the artistic coordinator from the project “Creando Lazos a
Través de la Danza” that was presented in León, Mexico as part of Canada’s 150 th anniversary.

JAZ PAPADOPOULOS
Jaz Papadopoulos is an interdisciplinary artist who works in experimental poetry, installation, video and performance. They are interested in diaspora, gender, bodies, place, memory, grief, and ritual. They are a current recipient of the New Artist in Media Art Production Fund at Video Pool. Jaz lives in Treaty 1 territory.
ESSAYISTS
GRAHAM WIEBE
Graham Wiebe, born in Winnipeg, Manitoba completed his B.F.A. (Hons) Degree at the University of Manitoba. Employing the snapshot as material toward a visual memoir, Wiebe’s photographs become a record of impulse and engagement. These fragmentary and still documents weave together to highlight the intersection of the urban and suburban landscapes, creating an intimate portrait of youth culture rooted in time, place and personal experience. His photographs have been exhibited and published internationally. Wiebe recently won the AGO AIMIA Photography Scholarship Prize Program, exhibiting his series Summerland at the Art Gallery Of Ontario.

BETH SCHELLENBERG
Beth Schellenberg is an arts administrator, curator, writer, and MA student living on Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, MB. Her academic research is focused on how creative works and popular movements illuminate dominant social ideologies, and on the transformative nature of communications technology on cultural production. Her work has been featured in Dear Journal and PaperWait: Contemporary Art Writing, and she has upcoming pieces in Briarpatch Magazine and De Gruyter’s Open Cultural Studies journal.
Photo by Public Parking and Laina Brown
Visual Essay
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.
Water, Rocks and Phones
Healing as Performative Practice: How Gesture Leads To Shared Sisterhood
Healing as Performative Practice: How Gesture Leads To Shared Sisterhood
or
Soil
There are many ways to break
to crumble.
eroding like damp sand
water pushing the grains further and further apart.
a gaping mouth opening to expose the muck beneath the beach,
wanting to be fed
to grow larger
to expand
gobbling up taking in
consuming the land
with a voracious
appetite.
there are many ways to fall to bits.
There is a creek running through the land where my partner grew up
splitting right down the middle of what would otherwise be a perfectly good field.
It acts as a division of ground between his dad’s land and their neighbours.
I say his dad’s land
(as though land can be owned as such)
because it is dad’s land
not his mother’s
after his dad passes on it will become his brother’s responsibility
not his sister’s.
my dad often farmed the land of a woman who lived in Germany
she was older
and owned lots of land.
I always imagined we would have gotten along
that older woman and I.
The earth where my partner grew up is finicky
it is light and gritty and requires frequent irrigation.
It’s good for planting juniper bushes
and potatoes
and that’s about it.
Roots have difficulty taking hold in this kind of earth
as they have to reach very far down
in order to sip the water.
The fields here have poor fertility as nutrients are easily washed away
slipping
through the particles of earth.
This is a far cry from the soil that I have gathered beneath my fingernails
where the mud is thick like clay and the land floods frequently.
Every spring
murky
frigid
water
washing away the tiny stick tombstones you made for dead kittens
and crushed butterflies,
rusting your swing set
scattering white plastic fertilizer pails across the prairies
like some absurd flower girl
begrudgingly walking down the aisle at her babysitter’s wedding
plunking the remnants of
toxic
artificial growth
on the driveways of farmers
who just need their crops to grow.
When my partner was young, this creek was thin
a sliver
that he and his friends could hop across
in order to get to the beach by the reserve.
Every year
the creek grew from dainty scar
to wide gash
to engorged pit
swallowing the spindly sandy soil trees
and eating up land
the father’s land
not the mother’s.
Last summer
(or was it two summers ago)
my partner and I went camping on the land,
pitched a tent where he used to do his chores
mow the lawn
feed the chickens.
We brought along my sister and her partner
for more voices around the bonfire
and to keep away the eerie country silence
creeping down the road
hiding by the gate.
In the morning we went to go find the beach by the reserve.
we started walking
sweating
itching
wearing denim and rubber boots to avoid the ticks
waving on the tall blades of grass
waiting to hitch a ride.
We crawled
slipped
tumbled
into the crevasse
where the creek was
the cavity that used to be so small.
My sister and her partner started to bicker.
We were all victims of a gnawing hangover,
the one that starts right behind your eyes and sits at the very top of your belly
makes you want to vomit at the very thought of eating
or opening your eyelids
to the sun.
We trudged through the crater in the earth
grabbing onto the gnarled roots
of trees that had fallen sideways
the rug pulled out from under them.
With each step we took
dry earth fell deeper into the chasm
sprinkling down the sides
dusting our shoulders
and finding its way into our socks.
Our legs became heavy
after the water bottles were polished off
the bickering lulled
to the hum of cicadas
and pissed off silence.
My partner clambered through the wreckage
of turned over shrubs and beaver dams
hurrying
wide-eyed
disbelief
at how the earth was changing
how the erosion had eaten the land
had chewed at the memory of his childhood
was devouring us.
The following winter
(or was it last winter)
my sister and her partner broke up
the caustic
pissed off silence
had swelled
had disintegrated
had melted the desire
to help with dishes
to come home early from the bar
to forgive.
I guess what I am trying to say is that we all break
we fall to pieces
like the grains pouring
from what should have been a field
basking in sun
the sun that was too hot
too dry
instead
keeling over into the ravine
in search of water
of cool
of healing.
We break because of a weight
a weight that we all carry.
It lives in how we sit on the bus
how we walk down the street at night
alone
keys in our hand
ready
our muscles prepared to cross the street
shift over
run.
This weight casts purple shadows
over the words leaving our mouths
pinching the syllables between the bones of our teeth
until we feel we have said our part
done what we can do
but it remains
a dust cloud
looming over our rickety house frame
of exposed nerves and hair and guts.
It straddles our shoulders
presses on our bra straps
discomfort is a bitch.
This weight
(this bitch of a weight)
propels our hands
to speak when sound can’t
won’t
escape out throats.
It informs us how to purse our lips and shift our weight from foot to foot.
Sometimes
we hate these mannerisms
we resent the fact that it reminds us of someone else
someone we are not.
Sometimes
we relish in the memory
the fleeting glimpses of past selves
past friends
past loves
ghosts that live on
in subconscious movement
we can wrap our arms around these memories
that come out to say hello
in the most mundane of moments.
Regardless
these memories exist because we want them there.
We have plucked them from our history
and tended to them
perhaps with care
rolling the details around in our mouths
like a jawbreaker
trying to keep them alive.
Sometimes these memories bleed onto others
melding into a crusty
congealed
mass.
Things we’d rather forget
throw laundry over
these wisps of recall live within us.
We are the container.
A vessel filled with our history
the history of our mothers
our grandmothers
generations of bodies that have lived and breathed and now take up space
in the soft skin behind our knees
in the tension between jaw and earlobe.
The weight is memory
and the memory helps us move
it is the support
or impetus
that precedes movement.
We develop learned habits with this memory
recollect steps
actions
from watching those before us.
In dance
this muscle memory is used to remember choreography
develop technique.
Without allowing for time
saturation
movement can appear shallow
superficial
skimming across the surface of the stage with the blissed-out grace of ignorance.
It is mid-translation
stuck frozen in the air
words you wish you could retract
swallow back into your throat
Muscle memory allows you to become a character
a different you
past selves/present selves
transform into another being
time and distance
allowing the lines between the authentic and the instructed to blur.
Muscle memory is something we grapple with
we tuck our pelvis
push out our sternum
hyper extend our elbows
yada yada yada
Memory
Muscle
Weight
The weight can become unbearable
pushing down harder when we are asked to smile
when our words are manipulated
chewed up
or completely disregarded
when our experiences are discounted
shoved under the bed
when we are silenced.
We are good at dealing with these setbacks
we have done it before and we will do it again
we will clear our throats
and roll up our sleeves.
Sometimes
the weight clogs our brain
makes it difficult to fathom aspects of our own reality
solutions
we paddle through it’s thickness
attempt to navigate the reeds and the muck.
As much as we push against it
swim against it’s current
the memory propels us forward
upward
outward
wraps its fingers around our wrists and lifts.
The weight is accumulated history
that we drag our bodies through
but it also supports
it’s palms secured under our warm armpits.
Our flesh is a palimpsest
layers of the past
swimming liquid beneath our skin
layers of soil
roots reaching down
grasping.
This history slips out of us sometimes
like how a shell on your windowsill
spills out grains of white sand
years after it has left the water
the curtain lifts in a dark theatre and a beam of golden light breaks through
we open our mouth
press our palms
and out it spills.
We hold it tightly
and yet it leaves us.
No matter what study you read
all researchers agree that physical cues make up the majority of communication
raising our eyebrows
flailing our arms
how we speak with others has more to do with our physical bodies than our words.
Brenda McLean
together with Ali Robson
has been working towards developing a system
with which to analyze
and teach gesture.
Gestures are something that we use every
damn day
yet
when asked to generate on the spot
or to abstract
or interpret
our impulses get marred
and we struggle to find clear pathways.
Their research has opened up a dialogue to discuss these everyday motions
to put into words that which we inherently do
and try not to overanalyze
lest we turn into numb
still
signalling
robots
similar to how Labanotation
took movement patterns
and expressed them through abstract forms
line drawings of figures in space
to articulate movement qualities
sustained
bound
direct
light
so as to teach his students
and archive his work
Brenda and Ali
break down what it means to express
using Michael Chekhov’s list of archetypal gestures
gathering
pushing
throwing
and make it possible to discuss
to have shared language
to teach
they are drawing a roadmap
to assist others with the intention and interpretation of movement.
Watching Ali move from literal motion
to abstract
to interpretive
one could witness the drift
from external
to internal focus
the molten flow of communication
speckled
with moments of literal action
halting
highlighted
feeding the observer with just enough
information to understand and explore Ali’s journey.
Striving to put sand in the pockets
of a fleeting movement
to weigh it down with meaning and intention
calibrating it on a shifting scale
Brenda and Ali boil down what it means to communicate physically
finding ways to capture the flutter of a finger
the jut of an elbow
to trace it and label it and pin it to the page
“like nailing jello to the wall”
the stuttering
familiar movements
the push of an open palm
the gathering of air
combing the manipulations
abstractions
interpretations
of these simple
pedestrian movements
allowed for
“a portal into the universe of the performer”
as mentor Grant Guy expressed.
The viewer is allowed in to this world by these familiar anchors
small weights dropped down into the bottom of the well
presenting an opportunity for the audience to grasp the rope
pull them up
reveal a sliver of light
lead them.
The study of gesture summoned learned behaviour patterns
analyzing what we are born knowing versus what has been taught
or passed down through observation
diaper-bottomed infants do not need to be told how to walk
or reach
or shrug
we take those precarious first steps knowing
despite the shakiness and the weakness
how to put one foot in front of the other.
This is different than the gesture
of bearing weight.
When asked to illustrate this action
Ali
who is pregnant
instinctively brought her hands to her hips
in a motion that implied
domestic exhaustion
women’s work
the female experience
ask a man to interpret this same instruction
bearing weight
and he will most likely bring his hands to his head
expressing frustration
a hurting brain
over a hurting body.
Gesture also implies a sense of memory
each gesture is something we have seen before
taken in
worked through our body
added our own comforts or flairs
we inherit gestures from our parents
our friends
soaking in this bubbling
silent
conversation between bodies
before acting out a gesture we feel it
we internalize it
we allow our memory to support the movement
the memory is the impulse for the movement
we feel it
and our bones follow.
Gesture is an imprint of our memories
an expression of our memories
communication between our past and present selves.
For Kristy Janvier
gesture and intention
run parallel to commonalities among individuals
to connectedness
and wholeness
to the body holding memory
and memory travelling down the bloodline.
Working with Emily Barker
Lise McMillan
and Rayanna Seymour
Kristy seemed to find herself drawn to the fact that even though the group of artists came from
various backgrounds
they all had shared experiences
as Kristy puts it
even though they all came from different side of the mountain
they had arrived at the summit together.
Water is of interest to Kristy
how we can exert energy onto water
how water can conduct energy
bodily fluids
the water within our shell
the water that is moved by our bones
by our memory
water pathways
rivers as roads
leading people home
guiding those who are lost
the life force that enables communities to grow
the blood veins beneath the earth’s surface.
Harkening back to a certain Dr. Masaru Emoto
the Japanese researcher
who administered various energies
happy
sad
confident
beautiful
ugly
onto collections of water.
He would write these affirmations onto the jars of water
and when frozen
the water would form crystals.
Dr. Emoto found the shape of these crystals
to be a reflection of the affirmations written on the jars.
Water with positive affirmations froze into intricate
stunning
symmetrical shapes
while the water burdened by negativity clustered
into asymmetrical
jagged
tumour-like forms
with this study in mind
Kristy collected water samples from the red river
a river that at one time had been the highway
for people in the community
where families would swim and paddle their canoes
build homes near
had turned into the source of news tragedies
bodies discovered on the muddy shores
bodies of women
bodies of indigenous women
wishing to heal this water
heal the past
heal communities
and those in pain
kristy
emily
lise
and rayanna
speak to the water.
During one of the first brutally cold days of winter
the group of us
kristy
emily
lise
rayanna
and i
were tucked away in a studio in the exchange
the room was being warmed by heat fans
scattered around the space.
Every once in a while the power of the fans
would cause the breaker to blow
cloaking us in cold
reminding us of the city we were in.
As the energy
the light
returned
Rayanna came down the hallway in her traditional jingle dress.
The jingles glowed rose gold
in the warm light of the heater.
She began to dance.
Her moccassin-clad feet
hitting the hard wood floor
with each down beat
the jingles moved to their own rhythm
a call and response
they were the light
dizzying
rain
in contrast to the steady rumbling of a thunderstorm.
Rayanna had constructed the dress herself
stitching on each jingle
going back with a needle and thread to fix any mistakes
she might make
the dress
the dance
has become an emblem of dancing for those who cannot
the response of the jingles a far away call
an echoing catalyst.
Memory lives in each step
each movement in the dance
even how the dress is made is passed down
through families
through communities
through generations
the dress dances for those who can’t.
Focusing on the energy of the water
the process became an act of women healing women
the power of touch
of breath
of connectedness
by healing the water through osmosis
the women were doing the same with each other.
healing through dance
healing memories through movement.
by accessing the healing
power of support
and the hands of a strong community of women
togetherness
and peace
were articulated
found
and fostered.
Jaime Black
through work with natural props and improvisation
asked the question of
why we must heal
and how we could possibly
brave on
continue
succeed.
Working with Lise McMillan
using sculptural images
the two women
inquired about our connection to natural objects
the weight
and the energy that these items hold
sticks gathered in the woods
a scratchy wool
Bay blanket
stones from lake huron.
How can we alter the energy of an item?
How can we use it to heal ourselves?
Each other?
Images of the natural body
the female body
rose to the surface of the practice
a ball of red yarn
when pulled
bundled
and manipulated by the two sets of hands
evoked intestines
blood clots
veins
umbilical cord
a heart.
Similar to our own flesh
the items hold memory
carry the past.
It is our responsibility to release that
acknowledge the energy.
By using the props,
she is taking ownership of their use
taking ownership of the associations attached.
In one exercise
we took the broad
flat
stones
gathered from the large lake
that borders Ontario and Michigan
They had been sitting in Jaime’s car overnight
and they were icy
we held them in our hands
rubbed them in between our palms
attempting to warm them
we pressed the cool stones
against our warm bodies
onto sternums
thighs and bellies
creating calm
meditation
healing
Similar to the stones taking in cold
or heat
our bodies absorb what is around us
releasing it through gesture
through movement
and dancing
Jaime and Lise would often return to images of women working
wringing the blue blanket
scrubbing the studio floor
gathering wood
task-oriented jobs that contained pedestrian
or functional
gestures
By bringing nature indoors
uniting elements of organic beginnings
with the artificial
The two women allude to a melding of two worlds
two cultures
two backgrounds
two histories.
Swaddled in the blanket
a place of security
or confinement
or carrying one another on their back
images arose of women helping women
women healing
from places of strength and togetherness
ceremony.
The weight
inherent in women’s lives
in all our lives
the weight that can feel so crushing
is supported by our sisterhood
the works in discussion present a matriarchy
a community evoking compiled memory
physical wisdom
women healing women
and action
action for change.
we wail
we throw our bodies against the wall
someone must be listening
someone has to be listening
who do we even want to hear us
and if they do
will they understand our language.
we break
in search of healing
crumble like sand towards the water
cool rocks on warm bodies.
we heal each other
women healing women
connected by blood and intention
we rise, together
we huddle in ceremony
create our own rituals
turning fluorescent bulb to warm sun,
sucking the energy from the windows,
the dusty snow fall.
oscillate to form new patterns,
new ways of connecting
of restoring.
And so we move
boldly
hopping in home-made jingle dresses
creaking on hardwood floors
in front of the whirr of a heat lamp
we dance for those who cannot.
we do women’s work
women’s gestures
that is what we know.
we know these learned behaviours from lines of mothers
grandmothers
wrinkled hands wringing cloth
cleaning
scrubbing wet wool
sewing thread through leather
bearing the weight of a pregnant belly
female bodies are a shelter
bearing weight
containing responsibility
holding strength
energy.
This healing as performative practice
to be healed
and to see other people being healed
is vulnerable
restorative.
It suggests a tool to take into our everyday
a safeguard
a reminder
of who has your back
a reminder to be present.
Not only does your sisterhood
have their hands open
palms exposed
ready to catch you
but your body
holding history
holding memory
knows how to heal.
how to repair.
how to preserver.
We dance for those who cannot.
It’s a Big Mess: Non|Sense Making on a Damaged Planet
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>
In Flux – A Visual Essay
The Ritual ~ Climb ~ The Performance ~ Velvet War


















Still ~ In Flux ~ Mercury ~ Robot Empire ~ Heavenly Bodies ~ Ghost






Rehearsal/Research




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