Questions: a response to Tanja Woloshen and Deanna Peters’ Research
By Callie Lugosi
“I need more arms.”
In Tanja Woloshen’s research, she raises questions such as: What is the body? How could
investigating limb consciousness inform ecology and freedom? What do our limbs carry? How do I explore our relationship to the future through the body?
These questions are big and esoteric in nature. When asked to clarify what she’s exploring and finding in asking these questions, Tanja said this:
“These questions, honestly, are very intuitive. I’m just beginning my foray into what I’m researching. If I start to investigate these questions of limbs, does that open potential for connecting to the earth? If I’m just thinking about stuff or thinking about myself, if I start to question or investigate what’s happening there, does it change the relationship? It’s philosophical, but I don’t really have answers to these questions yet, they’re very open ended questions.”
On “What do our limbs carry”:
“That is an ongoing, essential question that continues to orbit and don’t have any answers to it.
You know when you’re going about your day and you’ve got all these bags? Like, you’ve got your computer bag and textbook bag, and you’ve been to the library and you’ve also gone to Sobeys, and I’m always like, ‘I need more arms.’”
“It began with considering what our limbs are physically carrying, but also what do we need to let go of, what are we holding on to spiritually or practically, psychosomatically, what are we carrying and what we are holding onto … This was kind of the impetus for the question.”
“These questions are still clarifying as I’m working. They’re these big, overarching things that need an immense amount of clarification as I dig into the process. When I say “our”, I’m thinking “our” in terms of human, but of course I’m coming from only my perspective, my portal … It’s part hypothesis and part science fiction, how we as humans, potentially relate to the world and to the earth through the human body, and what potentially might morph and take shape over time.”
“I want you to hold the angry part.”
In Deanna Peters research, they question the form of the duet. What happens when we turn our gaze to one another? What sorts of impulses arise from this intimate state of seeing and being seen? What kinds of spaces do we create together? How does this focus on each other invite others to see us?
On ‘What part of your body do you want someone to hold’:
“We’re talking about how to take it from something that’s very literal and physical that has mass in space and thinking about releasing part of your body that’s causing tension, this sort of thing,” Deanna says. “Yesterday I said to Less, ‘I want you to hold the moody part of my body’, which leads it into a more abstract exploration.”
“In terms of the audience, I’m interested in our shared experience. Although, not everyone’s body is the same, there are things that we share. If I say ‘I want you hold my jaw’, I feel like it connects energetically through the parasympathetic nervous system, or mirror neurons. It asks the audience to consider their own jaw or their own body.”
“There’s a transmission that happens though the audience witnessing our experience, and invites our questions into their own minds, because they are seeing us problem-solve them in the moment. When I say to Less, ‘I want you to hold the angry part’, he’s literally looking at my body and deciding in that moment what to do, and they’re seeing that happen live. It’s like we’re all thinking together in a way, and maybe our thinking will diverge, but there’s also the satisfaction in seeing what we come up with live in the moment. It doesn’t come across as hyper sentimental or organized in a way that’s supposed to pull people’s heartstrings.”
On ‘What kind of spaces do we create together’:
“(Less and I) do this thing called mirror touch where we are creating a symmetrical center. The shapes that come and go are kind of psychedelic, in a way. Through an effort to be symmetrical, we reveal an asymmetry as well. There’s energetic space too, and for lack of a better term, aura. Where does our body end and where does it begin?”
“With intention, (we’re) considering how we can hold that connection energetically. In one part we’re quite entwined for a period of time, and then we really slowly move apart from each other. What we’re trying to do is try to stay connected even though there’s distance between us is becoming greater. That also triangulates with the audience because each one of them have a perspective on the shapes between us or the shapes around us.”
“I gutted the living room.”
I pushed myself to personally explore a few of Tanja and Deanna’s research questions, in particular ‘How do we experience the future through our bodies’, ‘What do our limbs carry’, ‘What part of your body do you want someone to hold’ and ‘What kind of spaces do we create together?’
Unsure of how I would approach personally answering such abstract questions, starting with a stream-of-consciousness style of writing seemed appropriate, if only to see what ended up on the page. I got comfortable and let go for a bit. Entering a weird calm, I held the aforementioned questions at the front of my mind, with the output coming from as far back as I could channel it.
The advice that Tanja gave me was to ‘just trust the work’. I took this to heart.
When I stepped back to look at what I’d done, I realized that I’d written a piece that, more than anything else, resembled a script. It was instructional in the way that script is, but it told a story.
This is the unedited draft of that writing:
“I gutted the living room.
Standing squarely in the middle of the space, I surveyed the room and decided what to do first. First I took the curated selection of coffee books off the table, the potted plant and the art deco cigarette holder and ashtray and put them on the floor, exposing the naked surface of the coffee table.
I wiped it down slowly and with intention, careful to not push the light dust of soil from the potted plant onto the white carpet. Lifting the table onto my shoulder, I portaged it out of the living room, down the hallway and into my bedroom.
Next I rolled up the carpet and did the same. Then the couch, bookshelves and hundreds of books, onward ad nauseum until the room was completely empty, except for me and dust.
Sitting squarely in the middle of the space, I waited. I asked my body questions. It started as a whisper and the more I listened, the louder it got and the more I learned.
Something it said:
“The only one that could ever really know me is you and if you don’t try, then there is a possibility I could die not knowing what it’s like to be loved,” it said. “I don’t want to die like that.”
We continued to talk. We renegotiated our relationship, established boundaries, forgave each other.
We talked about our future.”
Creating that piece of writing felt like the real and literal response. Given that it was the first output I’d produced so far, it felt inspiring and hopeful. There was something to this.
I felt compelled to pursue it in a literal way for the sake of what I’d been commissioned to write. I felt that if I could do this work, I could produce an authentic and deeply personal response to the artists in residence’ work. The thought of filming it and cutting it together would make for an interesting and convenient presentation at the endnote, given my distaste for public speaking.
I did the thing.
I filmed myself following the prompts this writing was guiding me to do. Over the course of several hours, I methodically took the living room apart and sat in the middle of the room and waited.
I felt nothing, and then completely disillusioned.
Why didn’t the right thing happen?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Upon reflecting on what I’d written and performed and the failed experiment therein, my interpretations and answers to Tanja and Deanna’s questions became clearer. It was apparent that two questions in particular resonated with me the most.
From Deanna, What part of my body do I want to be held?
My interpretation of this question concerned the conversation I wanted to have with my own body, and making and holding space for my body to communicate its needs or desires. The question led to another: what do I have to do in order for this to happen?
This was explored further, through my interpretation of Tanja’s question: ‘What do our limbs carry?’
We, and by extension our limbs, carry our possessions and rearrange them, to clean and curate the spaces we inhabit in order to feel in control and more comfortable. I took those means and used them toward a different end. I wanted to pick up my entire living room, not for the purpose of cleaning or rearranging, but to create a new space that existed solely as an arena for my internal dialogue to take place. What would I discover if I situated myself in a space removed of all worldly purpose?
My hope was that, by taking the ‘living’ out of my living room and temporarily freeing myself of that perpetual need for control, I could allow myself time and space to explore Deanna’s question: ‘what part of my body do I want to be held?’
I still have questions.
Why didn’t this work? Am I really so ignorant of my body and how it works, feels and interprets stimuli that I couldn’t produce the results I set out to achieve? Is introducing my body into my writing and visual arts practice in a very literal way simply not for me? What even is my relationship with my body? What is my body’s relationship with space? The space I live in? Where do I end and where does my body begin, and if there is a wedge between us, where did it come from? Are we the same?
When my experiment didn’t deliver the results I sought out to achieve, I realized that dance, and all art by extension is just asking a lot of questions that, more often than not, lead to other questions.
Allowing space for experimental methods of inquiry is at the heart of the Young Lungs Dance Exchange Research Series. It creates opportunities for artists to creatively question, but it also opens up conversations around bodies in movement to the greater community. Through workshops, presentations, and endnotes, people are given opportunities to explore their own movement theories, to challenge what dance is, and ask hard questions about the body.
The following questionnaire functions as a springboard for probing deeper into the significance of movement and our relationship with our bodies, and the place in time and space we occupy. It is also a meditation on the act of question-asking itself.
Questions beget more questions.
Introduce yourself.
Do you consider yourself to be a creative person?
How do you make space for yourself?
When was the last time you communicated with your body? What happened?
How do you experience your gender identity through movement?
Whose gaze do you appreciate most and why?
How does other people’s perceptions of your body inform the way you move?
How do you make space for other people?
What do you notice most about the way other people’s bodies move?
Can you be more specific?
How does history inform the way you move?
When was the last time you danced for or because of someone else?
How do you experience your relationship to the future through your body?
How aware are you of the physical space you occupy, everywhere you go?
Why do you think that is?
How much do you forget? Where do you think the forgotten stuff goes?
How much do bodies remember?
What is your body’s relationship with nature like?
What part of your body would you like someone to hold?
Are you your body or your mind?
What is a body for?
seeing and knowing
by hannah_g
Produced as part of Research Series September-November 2017
I was looking at some reproductions of Torey Thornton’s paintings the other day. Colourful, witty, the paintings contain forms which correlate to things in the world one may be familiar with – tiger stripes, fruit, a herd, furniture. Getting into their specifics, however, places one in the realm of conjecture. Is the tiger dead or alive or someone in a tiger suit? Is that blob a table or a rug? “His work oscillates between legibility and abstraction,” as the Almine Rech Gallery puts it. This oscillation – which occurs across many disciplines – provides the means for recognition, alienation, self discovery, enjoyment, connection, boredom, distraction, contemplation … that is, it provides a means of exchange.
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Alexandra Winters & Warren McLelland
*
Speed, strength, stamina, and repetition are common elements of sport and dance: Winters’ choreography on McLelland and herself sought the crossover between the two and thereby perhaps the epiphany of a common intention.
The cheers from a huge crowd was the work’s soundtrack and accompanied McLelland’s warm up jog which stopped abruptly at one of the studio’s pillars (amongst four of which the piece was placed to infer a sporting frame such as a baseball diamond, the corner of a soccer field, or a ring). Here his body opened into the star shape that often accompanies a sporting moment, such as when a soccer player strikes the ball for a long punt or baseball fielder is in the air straining to make a catch. For the duration of the first half of the piece, McLelland referenced a cluster of sporting gestures from soccer and football players, baseball shortstop and batter, ice hockey goalie, and referees, which the choreography stylised, decontexualising them so that aggression, efficiency, and the need to win made way for a physicality that elicited other references that included voguing and ballet as well as moments that fell entirely out of specific techniques. Winters, dressed in the black t-shirt and shorts most readily associated with referees, signified the second half. Offsetting the ref reference, she engaged McLelland combatively, emulating the intimate, non-sexual physicality of engaging an opponent that is premised on the ability and conditioning of bodies and the technique that has been worked into them over many years. Winters’ body interrupted the assumed masculinity of sport and aggression, emphasising interaction over competition. This allowed for a moment where both performers flowed out of their floor hold and into lying on their backs, fist pumping tiredly in rhythm with the cheering, which accompanied the whole performance. After a few seconds they reengaged and returned to their sparring and teaming.
Both performers maintained a ‘game face’, their expressions telling us that they were concentrating on something outside of themselves that wasn’t necessarily each other or what the audience could actually see. Their movement, which required much strength and created many forms that were almost micro tableaux, ranged around the performance area, filling it. The absence of prescribed emotion heightened the impression that they had stakes in what their physicality was going to achieve in the moment, which, I suspect, led to the audience having an investment in the piece that was not based only in emotional receptivity, but in an abstraction of sport’s movements, techniques, and consequences, and of players’ and spectators’ bodies and relationships.
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Kayla Jeanson, Brianna Ferguson, & Alexandra Winters
In Labyrinthinitis, Jeanson explores the effects of YouTube’s stabilisation tool on the bodies of the dancers she videoed. Learning the movements which would prompt the tool to act most noticeably, Jeanson created choreography that would elicit the greatest intervention by the tool. There is a resemblance between the successful gestures – swinging, swaying, eyes moving slowly from side to side, jumping, hands twisting and pirouetting – and it is tempting to think of them as a little primate-like or as the cause of the simultaneous movement of the background and floor line, but the piece cautions against such interpretation or categorisation, implying that this itself will change the way the work is seen.
Jeanson’s processed videos show bodies that we are watching via something else’s observation. The sensation of being behind some one’s or thing’s eyes is like playing a part in the movie Being John Malkovich but in this circumstance the observer, the Artificial Intelligence behind the stabilisation effect, changes in a real way that which is observed. Although popular consciousness is familiar with the principle that particles change according to whether they are or are not watched (the Zeno effect) and is parallel to research in the social sciences that posits perception can change how the perceived is interacted with, it is still shocking to see what those changes actually look like and how they effect us.
The jerks, the unnatural flow of the bodies whose natural timing has been disturbed, the odd panning in the shots, the slight zooms, and the shudders of the background, all make for an uncanny experience. These once freely moving human bodies, now processed, are assigned an A.I. interpretation of their movement and the bodies are corrected accordingly. Animation techniques are brought to mind, but this stabilisation effect is animating something that is already animated, that is living, in order to create what it calculates is conventional or ‘normal’. One could think of this as a kind of metaphor for the issues of body conventions much of the dance world struggles with. One is also reminded that defining and enforcing ‘the normal’ is a characteristic of tyranny. Thus digitising and editing bodies also raises questions of who or what does the defining and enforcing and what are the implications when we can no longer discern that an image or video is ‘off’ and therefore manipulated and hence what is real, what is not, what is true, what is a false, who is in control.
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Davis Plett & Rachelle Bourget
Rituals are a means of encoding specific sequences of actions that are designed to exert a form of power. They often mark or are attempts at transformation. Bourget performed an intense interiority, her movement communicating a concentration and purpose usually reserved for ceremonies. She slowly crossed the space holding a cardboard box in front of her face and then after setting it down she removed a plastic bag from which in turn she took the dividers common to wine boxes then proceeded to slot them together to make three shapes we knew must be pre-determined given her manner of construction. This was part one and was, among several other things, a witty flirtation with the tedium that accompanies rituals with which we are overly familiar or have no stakes in. But the central preoccupation of the piece seemed more about deconstructing the power structures within bodies that have acquired particular vocabularies from specific training. Such training includes making itself clearly evident in the actions performed by those bodies, thus the bodies are allied to a set of rules created by schools of movement and thought. Plett choreographed the performance to objectify Bourget’s training which led to the disassembling of the meaning of everything she interacted with. The wine bottle dividers stopped being wine bottle dividers and became abstract sculptures; they were separated from their intended purpose (which named them) via a ritual. We still see the divider, and the training, but accept and believe the transformations and the opportunity to become immersed in the spaces that form when meaning expands.
In the second part of the performance, Plett in plain sight, puppeteers a crumpled, thin plastic sheet from the ceiling, fidgeting it’s four sides to make it become a ghostly jellyfish that descends onto an almost full Fanta bottle placed on top of a red sheet of Mylar over an overhead projector. Aside from the phantom/Fanta pun, the performance seemed a reinterpretation of Bourget’s ritual: whereas the first observed transformation was that of the cardboard dividers, the plastic bags in which they had been packed and then carefully folded away were also changed by her performance and were then able to leave the confines of their prescribed purpose to potentially flap away into another. Thus we see Plett’s training, as well as the ripple between accepting one story for another.
Playing Ball – Research series story
The waves tumbled over the rocks and onto the beach, muscular and doubtless. A friend of Kenneth’s, a pitcher, had told him how he’d go to the beach when he had the blues and imagine the sea was a cheering crowd willing him to do well. When this pitcher won a chunk of cash on a scratch card, he blew the lot on a couple of crates of baseballs. He took them to the beach and spent a day pitching them into the sea: an offering to the waters.
Kenneth had come into a little money himself and decided to do what his friend had done. He brought his two crates to the beach and as the sun was beginning to set, he pushed his hand into its well worn mitt and limbered up, swinging his arms, rotating his shoulders, twisting his torso, getting the joints lubricated and muscles warm. He’d spent more of his life playing baseball than not and his body was shaped by its rhythms and repetitions. A centre fielder and star batter, he had moulded his body to swing, sprint, catch, and throw with the greatest power and efficiency. The form suited him but he worried his mind had become conditioned into a certain shape too and that he wasn’t thinking and moving in the world with full autonomy.
He threw the first ball far out into the waves. The sound of the sea heightened his awareness of his own movement. Kenneth felt his concentration transform his physicality from utilitarian to ritualistic, a set of repeated gestures that allowed him to experience everything as everything. He was used to concentrating on his body but now it was as if the sea was washing a film away. He experienced himself with a fresh intensity, feeling the ball, his mitt, the breeze, the rising moon and his body as profoundly related to one another.
The moon was at its zenith when he abruptly stopped pitching. He realised he wasn’t exercising oneness at all, he was simply polluting the sea. “Shit,” he groaned, his arms dropping to his sides. He stared at the waves rolling on and on, their cheering sounding more like anger. Even his staring felt like it changed the sea – was that polluting it too? The rhythm of the water now seemed off, too jerky but also too smooth. He switched between staring hard and pretending not to look, trying to discern just what effect, if any, he was having. It made him nauseous and he tightly closed his eyes. In his head a bunch of ball players appeared, each looped on a snippet of their game movement. When he contemplated them as a group their movement was regular, recognisable but when he focused on one, her gesture wobbled and his own perspective rippled in response making him very uneasy. A disturbance in the shallows snapped his eyes open and his mitted hand shot into the air in reflex to the blob flying towards him at speed. He made the catch- a wet baseball. He scanned the waters expecting to see a swimmer but there was none. Taking a few steps forward to scrutinise the surf more closely he saw a dull glowing – a group of jellyfish bobbing like phantoms. Another ball broke the surface above them and Kenneth made the catch. Quickly he pulled off his mitt, grabbed his bat, and ground his back foot into the sand. He waited, bat raised, eyes on the shallows. Another ball hurtled towards him – he made contact – a fly ball. Another came, he made contact again, and the crack told him it was a homer. He watched it land far out into the moonlit waters. ‘What am I doing?’ he thought, throwing down his bat and shoving his mitt back on. He waited. Eventually a ball came, he caught it, and threw it into a crate. Another ball came and he passed it onto the crate again and a pattern began.
Dawn broke, misty and grey. Kenneth’s two crates were full and piled up next to them were enough balls to fill another two. It had been a while since the last ball had appeared but he was still alert and limber for a good while before accepting it was done. He straightened up and took off his mitt, an ancient piece of battered, memoried leather. He walked with it to the water’s edge and drew back his arm in preparation for a final, awesome throw. The jellyfish, with their strange staccatic ballooning, had gone. If he threw his mitt it would not be returned and even if it was it would be changed and no longer be a part of his body as it was now. He turned and threw it onto the top of the pile of balls. Somethings are simply yours.
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hannah_g is a writer, contemporary storyteller, inter-disciplinary artist, mixtape DJ, and designer. She is interested in collectivity, place-making, and recollection.
She is also the Director of the Artist-Run Centre, aceartinc. and the editor of the gallery’s in-house annual publication, PaperWait. Here she co-founded Flux Gallery, the Cartae Open School, and the gallery’s first Indigenous Curatorial Residency.
She is available to write, perform, run workshops, mixtape DJ, and make things for you. hannah lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty One Territory, Canada.
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.
A Study in Migratory Bodies
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.
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.
In Flux – A Visual Essay
The Ritual ~ Climb ~ The Performance ~ Velvet War
Still ~ In Flux ~ Mercury ~ Robot Empire ~ Heavenly Bodies ~ Ghost
Rehearsal/Research
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>
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.