Approximations to an undisciplined body or Dancing Disorientation
Where am I? What day is it? What did I come here to do?
Disorientation can be many things - forgetting, failing, not knowing, undoing, shaking things up. Many forms, modes, and types of disorientation come to shape our daily lived experiences in the world. Spatial, discursive, perceptual, vestibular, geographic, and relational disorientations are all part of how we continue to find our way. Beyond the felt experience of disorientation, being open and curious about one’s environmental and social surroundings is the first step in disorienting the norm towards the possibility of a new future. This class brings together dance practice and theory by drawing on movement techniques as well as theoretical interventions that attend to social and historical approaches to embodiment. Our goal is to explore what a praxis of disorientation feels like, and what types of attention, relationality, perception, and politics are possible from a being posited in a place of disorientation. Class discussions are based on ongoing and cumulative conversations around our explorations and class readings to support both theoretical and experiential research. This course aims to resensitize our body-mind connection by gently and intentionally testing its limits. Part of this practice has been developed in collaboration with Ileanna Cheladyn.
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This workshop proposes a decolonial perspective of the body, perception, and epistemologies. Based on this idea, I want to share imaginary views of a decolonial body, observing it as a holder of knowledge, understanding it as a mobile and multiple structure of fluids and masses, weights and forces, muscles and fat, habits and stories. We work with movement as a tool to find ways to organize and de-organize anatomical relationships, aiming to unravel our own naturalized ways of moving, trying to distort and deceive our regular logics, shaking the assumptions that lie in our space-place-body.
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Through shaking, spinning, breaking horizontality, and slowness, we recognize our capacity to live in disorientation, to enter and exit from such a state. This is a practical course, body based and physically demanding.
Creation and composition through Physical action
Aimed at creating performance pieces, these sessions will engage participants through their own selected material. To ground the work, we will ask: to whom, for what, to what end, why, why in the world would I, or do I perform? What has the potential to engage my resources? What is the thing that can be brought forth which I didn’t know I had in me today? We want to engage the actor in a creative work treated as personal research and an inter-personal, and social reflection through the acting craft.
From Grotowski’s take into the last period of Stanislavski’s research, we understand physical actions as the source to create acting scores. From the experience of the body I propose a space of creation with our own materials based on understanding and playing with our physicality, our inner actions, intentions, orientations, curiosities, destabilizations.
By working on short pieces, we will help each other to bring out the most joyfully creative work of this moment. With the aim to find materials that relate deeply with yourselves, your needs, your concerns and politics, we will dedicate time to build scores that reflect those. Working in groups, partners, duos and trios, we will wreck your scores and investigate what’s beneath, under, around so to sculpt your piece and distillate your artistic voice into a finer version inside a process that does not look for final results but an unraveling of a creative process. We will bring into scores the idea to deconstruct, disorganize, dissociate, decolonize, and ways to question our own work with generosity and kindness.
Singing in somatic attentiveness
This is an engaging and immersive time to spend with ourselves, to give space and recognize our sounds, to be with our breath, to rest from an accelerated sense of time, to be with one another through the action of singing together. In a chorus, as a call and response breathing organism. Working on awareness and listening qualities, we search for subtle listening, to dwell in the presence of a common sound, to hear the vibration, we ask how to make a song live in a space, through our bodies and spirits. In that sense we will be attending to our body and breath as the core work for singing. Sensing our voice, opening sound, working on rhythm and tune in a way that propels joy and simplicity of effort, focusing on the ease and the togetherness of that action.
We will be working on Afro-Caribbean and Latin American songs, most of them will be structured as a call and response form, that will allow us to access them by repetition and simple melodies that build into the complexity of these songs, as well as honoring their origin, land and people who sing them within traditions that are still living. This is a singing practice and a call for a decolonial gesture.